Literary Authority: An Eighteenth-Century Genealogy 9781503635272, 1503635279

Citation preview

Literary Authority

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L I T E R A RY AU T HOR I T Y An Eighteenth-Century Genealogy

Claude Willan

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2023 by Claude Willan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022025214 ISBN: 9781503630864 (cloth), 9781503635272 (ebook) Cover design: Zoe Norvell Cover art: Old Wisdom Blinking at the Stars, by James Gillray. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Contents

Acknowledgments vii I n t roduc t ion 1 Chapter 1 Whig Prose Cultures 25 Chapter 2 “I love with all my heart”: Jacobite Poetry in Manuscript 63 Chapter 3 Dipt in Ink: Pope without “Pope” in His Early Career 107 Chapter 4 Pope’s Moderate Ascendancy 147 Chapter 5 Samuel Johnson’s Struggle with Pope 193 Coda 233 Notes  241 Bibliography  281 Index  301

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Acknowledgments

Richard Owen Cambridge’s print Dr. Johnson’s Ghost shows the Doctor surprising Boswell at work on a tapestry of materials, piecing together The Life of Johnson. The Ghost addresses Boswell with a quotation from Congreve’s Way of the World: “Thou are a Retailer of Phrases, / And dost deal in Remnants of Remnants, / Like a Maker of Pincushions.” In its happiest instances, literary scholarship may aspire to the condition of a pincushion, and I have had the opportunity to count myself among those makers during the writing of this book. So many people have been so generous with their insights that my task has seemed much closer to the faithful assembly of found fragments than the manufacture of something out of whole cloth. If the reader feels that this pincushion is poorly stuffed, or the stitching awry, the fault lies only with the maker, not with the materials I have been gifted by mentors, teachers, colleagues, friends, and students. Likewise, whether the reader ultimately finds this study an ignominious victory or a glorious defeat, the responsibility is mine alone. This book’s first life was more than ably directed by John Bender and Blair Hoxby, both of whom gave copiously of their time and advocacy, marrying scholarship, encouragement, and circumspection with judicious splashes of ice water. Denise Gigante’s attentive work as a reader had an instrumental effect on the argument at many points. That work could not have been completed without a Stanford Modern British Histories and Cultures grant, an ASECS / Walter Jackson Bate fellowship to work at the Houghton Library, a fellowship from Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library, a fellowship from the Firestone Library at Princeton, and a fellowship from the Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies at UCLA to work in the Clark Library. The Special Collections librarians at those libraries deserve particular vii

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mention. The level of care, knowledge, and engagement shown by staff on every level at the Houghton, the Beinecke, the Lewis Walpole, the Clark, the Firestone, and the Bodleian was extraordinarily high, consistently, for many years. This book simply could not exist but for the depth of their expertise and their profoundly able assistance. At Stanford, I was lucky enough to benefit from seven years’ worth of provocations, insight, and good company of Allen Frost, Ryan Heuser, Long Le-Khac, and Talya Meyers. Dan Edelstein and Nicole Coleman were unfailingly welcoming, along with the rest of the Mapping the Republic of Letters cohort, particularly Melanie Conroy, Chloe Edmundson, and Maria Teodora Comsa. Judy Candell made the English department navigable; Mark Algee-Hewitt, Sami Amad, Erik Johnson, Steve Osadetz, Rebecca Richardson, Jenna Sutton, and James Wood made it livable. My final year as a graduate student, at Stanford’s Humanities Center on a Geballe fellowship, was perhaps the most intellectually nutritive I can remember, and allowed me to revise this work under ideal conditions. Lucy Alford, Joseph Boone, and Nate Sloan were fast friends found too late. In and around Princeton, Jean Bauer, Toni Bowers, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Paula McDowell, Meredith McGill, Marisa Nicosia, Stuart Sherman, Nigel Smith, and Kate Thorpe all freely offered their time, and warmth, and expertise. Pedro Dias and Jack and Laura Lynch provided me with role models and sustenance. At the University of Houston, I was lucky to work with Reid Boehm, Ann Christensen, Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Elizabeth Irvin Stravoski, Sebastian LeCourt, Santi Thompson, and Emily Vinson, all of whom improved life in the subtropics. Eighteenth-century studies has proven to be super-saturated with exceptional scholars of such warmth and solicitude that to call them mere colleagues demeans their value. This book is the richer, and I am the more fortunate, for the companionship, intellectual and otherwise, of Dave Alvarez, Rebecca Barr, Kevin Berland, Christoph Bode, Tita Chico, Al Coppola, Helen Deutsch, Chris Donaldson, Emily Friedman, Sören Hammerschmidt, Stephanie Insley Hershinow, Joe Hone, Collin Jennings, Sarah Kareem, Rachael Scarborough King, Crystal Lake, Kathleen Lubey, Jonathan Kramnick, Anton Matytsin, Laura Miller, James McLaverty, John McTague, Sandra MacPherson, Danny O’Quinn, Ben viii

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Pauley, Joe Roach, Rebecca Shapiro, Dustin Stewart, James Wooley, and Gena Zuroski. John Bender, Tasha Eccles, Morgan Frank, Christine Gerrard, Dave Mazella, John Richetti, and Elaine Treharne did too much to list here. Emma Smith, Hugh Gazzard, Helen Spencer, and especially Jeri Johnson, have it all to answer for. From conferences and deep into the texture of everyday life, Jacob Sider Jost, Andrew Bricker, and Seth Rudy have been sane, sanguine, kind, true friends. Rebecca Munson gave me many years of profound love and support, as did her parents, Ronald and Miriam. Mike Amherst, Mike Lesslie, Micha Lazarus, Sage Pearce-Higgins, Meredith Wallis, and Adam Weymouth endured. Erica Wetter at the Stanford University Press has proven an immensely wise and patient editor, whose interventions fundamentally reoriented this book for the better. I am very fortunate to work with her and with the team at SUP, particularly Caroline McKusick and Peter Dreyer. Two anonymous reviewers read this book with imagination and sharp eyes. Paul, Jeannie, Shelagh, and Roger offered unstinting material and emotional support. Dan, Elena, Otto, Patrick, and Terry were always kind, no matter how long my absence. Vanda Wilcox deserves special mention in these regards, and listened to more years of lectures about Pope and Jacobitism than ought be asked of a military historian. I thank her for lifting me up, and for tethering me to earth, as appropriate. In Houston I found for the first time, united in my family, both the means by which, and the reasons why. And so this book is dedicated to all my boys.

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Literary Authority

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Introduction

This book is the cultural history of the development of an idea so commonplace as barely to be worth stating: that through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic, cultural, and social power. When we read, we expect to be met with claims of veracity and urgency. But imaginative writing makes demands of a different order, pressing upon the reader a new way of seeing the world. Readers of imaginative writing then have a choice. Do they reject those demands, or do they give up sovereignty over their powers of judgment, and through that deference admit the text’s higher authority? That imaginative writing has this power seems almost backward. How did it come to be like this? And when? The idea that texts bring authority to their authors was invented at a particular time, and it had particular conditions of possibility. This book tells the story of that invention. The more authoritative I am, the easier it is for my desires to override yours. And an authoritative text acts on its reader in the same way. However I override your intentions—whether with reason or emotion— my disruption is underwritten, eventually, by the threat of force. On the other hand, the more naked the exercise of power, especially in politics, the greater the risk of its depletion. Before the power of the king submitted completely to the rule of law, literary authority served as a device to both exercise and retain the power of appeals to force, whether in the guise of appeals to reason or to emotion. Literary authority was in its origins designed for the use of potentates that wanted to exercise their authority without expending it. During the period covered in this book, and owing particularly to the advent of elective monarchy and an increasingly powerful Parliament, literary authority became obsolete. That political necessity just didn’t exist anymore. Parliaments have other, less erratic 1

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methods at their disposal. But at that moment of obsolescence, when the parliamentary rule of law was almost entirely in the ascendant, the social and metaphorical structures of literary authority were intact and vacant, unoccupied, as it were, and ready to be given a new lease. Literary authority had always offered a bit of slippage to authors, working as a social function of the textual exercise of power. That slippage became complete: literary authority now centered on the writers themselves, and allowed them to exercise social power through, and over, the written word. Classical literary authority was meted out according to access: playwrights had access to the theater, so central to Greek civic and political life; Virgil recited to the emperor Augustus and his family, and Horace addressed his patron, Maecenas. In later courtly and imperial states, literary authority was tightly and complexly enmeshed with patronage and political power. But as the modern era began to unfold in Europe in the seventeenth century, these kinds of authority increasingly became unmoored. Ideas like public opinion, and the notion of a public itself, emerged.1 How, then, might a transformed literary authority be anchored? And what would the point of it be? My answers to these questions cluster around three issues. First, a discourse emerged about the intellectual, cultural, and political significance of different traits of writing, which also specified whether those traits made writing good or bad. Second, literariness came to refer to capital-L “Literature”; a special domain of imaginative writing separated from political entanglement or other explicit functions, and specifically marked by the traits assigned to good writing. Third, a broad category of the aesthetic as a realm of literate thought removed from specific usefulness or purpose emerged, which gained in significance by this detachment. In 1688, at the beginning of the period covered by this book, the vast array of literary devices for speaking as, or about, or to, monarchical authority made possible a practically infinite number of shades of subtlety of address. But that subtlety also betokened the ineluctable extent to which that authority controlled the material conditions surrounding the text’s existence. By the time at which this book ends in 1781, those tools were antiquated, dead metaphors. Political authority certainly still directly circumscribed the existence of some texts, but the government, 2

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still less the monarch, had little or nothing to do with the success or failure of any given text and its author. The discursive realms of literature and politics were still contiguous, but now distinct. Texts retained the capacity to generate a field of authority the better to secure their success. The guarantor of this authority and its ultimate referent was no longer the monarch but the author. Between 1688 and 1715, England and then the United Kingdom of Great Britain were wracked by the cataclysms that made this transformation possible. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the changes effected in that twenty-seven-year span. And the period’s changes were wrought by forms of writing imbued with a new power of expressing consensus: in June 1688, the Dutch stadtholder, William of Orange, received a written invitation to ascend the English throne from a group of powerful English nobles, and the succession of George I after Queen Anne in 1714 had been predetermined by an act of Parliament fourteen years earlier. Eventually, the appeals to reason and emotion that had characterized imaginative writing under the rule of dynastic monarchs lost their underlying guarantee of force. Consensual, elective forms of authority were negotiated, and then codified, in genres of writing imbued with constative force. This is one way of recasting the hoary narrative about the Enlightenment drive to disillusionment: that literary devices like allusion, allegory, and symbolism no longer had a stranglehold on discussions of the polis. They were unnecessary, they had lost their usefulness. “Useless” nonpurposive writing, on the other hand, turned out to be a necessary, and therefore profitable, venture. Of course, no writer could claim to have wholly given up political objectives. But those metamorphoses in turn started an ongoing process by which imaginative writing was reinvented in its own discursive territory. When it came to deciding how that territory ought to be run, and according to what principles, writers and readers of imaginative literature found themselves thrown right back into the very sea out of which they had just crawled. The genres of imaginative writing were to be thought of as a loose federation of kingdoms, alive with courts as active and febrile with connivance and innuendo as any monarchical court. Politics became a metaphor for literature. 3

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The writer who pioneered this transformation was Alexander Pope, the most successful poet of the eighteenth century. He did it, in part, by hybridizing the literary responses of the two opposing sides of the culture war sparked by the deposition of James II. But Pope is far from the only subject of this book, and accounting for the nature and specifics of his success is not its only ambition. To begin, I recover and reconstitute those two literary cultures, advocating for and against the deposition of James II. These now largely forgotten cultures were each acutely attuned to the threats and promises of the revolution of 1688–89. The first was the field of Whig prose writers, each of whom found in the revolution a prompt for the reform of their respective fields appropriate to the frankly cosmological change that was the advent of William’s rule. These men brought the discussion of private, or personal, pursuits into the public realm. They devised the best way to conduct those pursuits by working backwards from the kingdom they hoped to help build: Whig prose writers used public imperatives to shape private behaviors. The second literary culture I reassemble is that produced by the political opponents of the first. These writers opposed the reign of William, refused to recognize his legitimacy, and stayed loyal instead to the ousted James II (now plain James Stuart, if you were a Williamite). Instead of molding their private passions on some future politics, these writers, Jacobites, felt that their now-private and officially treasonous passions should instead mold the future public space. The mechanics of Pope’s achievement in his own time owes deeply to these cultures, and I show how and why this is the case. My larger ambition, however, is to suggest that the nature and mechanics of Pope’s achievements, and those of Samuel Johnson after him, typify the ongoing structural relations among genres of literature. For these reasons among others, this book aspires to be a genealogy of the way in which the historiography of literary aesthetics determines what good and what bad writing are, of what literariness is and has been, and of what literary authority is, with the purpose of offering a case study of how that authority was made, and is still made today. One principal component of that making occurs through the social 4

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and material pathways that texts move through in their lives. I’m mostly concerned with understanding the ways in which systems of literature bear the shifting weights of readers’ expectations. They do so under the label of “genres.” But throughout this book I keep in mind that genres are themselves part of what I think of as genre systems. The value of this distinction is to attempt to bridge the formalism of genre with a capacious materialism: genres tend to have non-identical readerships, who in turn access those texts by different means and with different degrees of ease. Different genres (religious pamphlets, newspapers, play texts, letters, &c) each have systems adapted to their production, dissemination, consumption, and response.2 The genre system, as I deploy the concept, includes not just what a text does (or is called upon to do) but the conditions of existence for its passage through the world. The genre system of Jacobite poetry in manuscript is a covert, peer-to-peer exchange network of texts that mostly were never, and could never have been, printed. The system is supported by the financial resources of its upper echelons, but no money changes hands in the dissemination of the system’s texts. Elective affinities among a group are a necessary precondition for the inclusion of that group in a genre system. I press on this point because the textual cultures in this book have their own totalizing logics, which bind together local concerns (how to read this text) with claims about social organization (how the genre system of this text models a better world). I am hardly breaking new ground in taking literary authority as my subject.3 I obviously labor in the shadow of John Guillory’s work. But the literary authority I discuss is not his “poetic authority” (roughly, prior authority either conferred on or claimed by a writer to legitimate speech) nor is it quite “cultural capital.”4 Literary authority is authority “over.” To pursue the economic metaphor, literary authority in my sense is the mint; cultural capital is the process regulating the distribution of the mint’s products, and in our contemporary sense describes the personal bank accounts where those products are deposited and held. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates and Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning transformed literary studies in the early 1980s with their attention to the ways in which writers have assumed the locus standi to proclaim their own greatness.5 And my reader might fairly wonder, what 5

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makes this period special? How can I say that my chosen subjects differ in kind from the host of authors who had made similar attempts? Virgil, Horace, Spenser, to say nothing of Jonson, Donne and Milton, come to mind. Milton announced that in Paradise Lost he would do “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.” But this claim was taken straight from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and the irony of remediating someone else’s claim to originality was entirely the point. Colin Burrow has written eloquently about the long history of imitatio, its relationship with sister arts like translation, and its role in shaping conceptions and uses of literature. 6 Burrow locates Paradise Lost at the center of a variety of debates about the location of the “cross-over point between ‘ancient’ or ‘Classic’ authors . . . and modern authors, who might enjoy a proprietorial right over [the] products of their labour.”7 While “trespassing on texts composed in the same language by contemporaries might attract charges of theft,” the imitation of the ancients was seen by eighteenth-century scholars as a way to achieve a particular kind of individual greatness, by contributing to the literary commons. 8 Nor was Milton doing anything new with this ambivalent claim to contingent independence: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Envoi sends Troilus and Criseyde off to “kis the steppes” wherever Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius might be found. All this is to say nothing of the many ways that those poets of antiquity found to assert their literary authority. Poets have found less tributary methods, too, to suggest their own greatness: the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf inserted his name into his poems in a runic acrostic;9 the sepulchral title page to Ben Jonson’s 1616 Works remains unsurpassed as a piece of visual rhetoric linking literary artifacts to the life and body of their creator. The difference between these examples and this book is circumstantial in origin, but entire in effect. My argument is functionally deictic: though cases like mine have been made before, the contexts surrounding my argument make it qualitatively different. Pope had certain material and structural opportunities that no one had ever had before. Consider that: (1) pace Thomas Keymer’s skillful adumbration of the mechanisms of state, legal, and extra-legal prior restraint, no state regulator or authority controlled Pope’s access to an audience large enough to be plausibly referred to as a public; (2) that audience was literate, and 6

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physically concentrated, enough, infrastructure permitting, to all be able to read the same text on any given day; (3) through the developing postal system, infrastructure existed to permit that simultaneity; (4) that audience had the freedom to buy and read whatever was for sale; and that (5) the opinions of that public could have measurable political and economic consequences.10 Moreover, these conditions were well-sedimented, discursively and structurally, having been each in effect (in different forms) for up to seventy years by the time Pope began to print his work. Pope’s audience was thus accustomed to expecting that its participation in an economy of cultural production would be a proximate cause of the future of that economy. The public was used to having its literary tastes formed by, but also form, what was considered literature, and it expected to participate in, and sustain, genre systems. Lastly, Pope’s readers expected and sought out discursive heterogeneity, and they were also accustomed to the idea of individual authors (Caxton’s Chaucer, Jonson, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden) forming a corpus, with all the associations of that word. No generation of writers in history had ever had this confluence of ease of access, breadth of reach, freedom of speech, and expectation of authorial personhood. Nor had any come upon a readership so prepared for those affordances to be deployed in the propagation of a contrariety of discursive forms and objectives. These factors came together at a moment of profound political and social tumult, which rendered the relationship between the public and its chosen representatives—whether in speech, broadly understood, or in politics—highly fungible. My claim to offer a generalizable, systemic analysis is thus grounded in the coincidence of particular, granular historical circumstances. Pope came upon a prepared ground. So, while the nature of the endeavor in which I find Pope and Johnson exerting themselves is familiar, even storied, the very specific and particular forms those exertions took merit our particular attention, because the conditions under which they occurred have permitted them to perdure into our critical present. At the beginning of the period I cover, the matrix of writers’ and readers’ literary expertises is inextricable from the matrices of political affiliations in which those readers and writers lived. By the end of this period, the links binding expertise to political forces had been severed, 7

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and in their place links were forged between expertise and market forces. Instead of cultivating their political affiliations, readers showed connoisseurship and taste by purchasing newspapers, pamphlets, books, and prints—whether directly for themselves or as clients of coffee houses and library subscribers. Colin Burrow has charted the process by which writers adjusted a literary marketplace, not least by reconceiving their work, following the lapse in pre-publication licensing in 1695, as property to be owned.11 Some, however, cast about for sets of orienting, differentiating tools that would set them, their productions, and their readers, categorically apart. To seize and retain literary authority required the recalibration of both terms. Literariness was circumscribed so as to exclude expressly purposive writing. Authority gained a new sense; not temporal or spiritual, but aesthetic, the right to prescribe to a public lasting standards of apparently disinterested judgment. Finally, these attributes were made to depend upon, and to underwrite, one another. How was this done? Not least by finessing the category of judgment itself.

Inventing “Good” and “Bad” Writing Pope and Johnson pioneered distinctions between good and bad writing that still obtain today. But we must remember that the difference between good and bad writing is not innate. This book historicizes that relation. It does so by laying bare the complex and interlocking processes by which it was created, consolidated, and weaponized for the purpose of developing, achieving, and retaining literary authority. Any genealogy of literary authority must be seen in the context of contemporary political struggles. Tooth-and-nail fights for political power in Parliament, coffeehouses, and clubs, conducted through writers and printers, prefigured a corresponding fight for power over the nascent literary public sphere. Political cultures of writing were not necessarily intended to be literary in any contemporary sense, but those cultures offered the types on which literariness was later patterned. I said above that politics turned out to be the ideal metaphor for literature. Think of the gun-for-hire politician: a hack. As we shall see, literary writing was taught to foreswore (and condemn) purposiveness in imaginative writing, especially political purpose. One animating irony of this 8

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book is the fact that literariness came to be through the ostensibly nonpurposive reuse of purposive characteristics of political writing; another is that so-called literary writing explicitly opposed itself to the political writing from which those signature gestures were derived. I claim neither that before this period no writing was perceived as “good” nor that none was mocked as “bad.” I argue instead that purposive, explicitly political writing was either effective or ineffective in furthering external, concrete political causes. Conversely, the literary goodness or badness of texts became a markedly textual consideration; the goodness of a poem would rest not on whether it was politically effective, but on its self-constitution and its relations to other poems in the context of the whole field of textual production. The beneficiaries of this switch from “effective” literature to “good” literature were the authors themselves, who made literariness almost inseparable from the authority of its responsible agents. The new definition of literary value and the arrogation of the authority to ascribe it was not, however, quite so simple or so circular. The qualities of judgment that Pope praised in himself and in a select few others changed to fit Pope’s developing needs. Pope was quick to fashion the exercise of taste in writing as a kind of disinterested aesthetic judgment; but how that was best exercised turned out to be happily fungible. Laying claim to disinterested reading required first that Pope redefine his text itself as an aesthetic object, which is in part to say as a non-purposive object. The objective of Pope’s texts was their own contemplation. This led in turn to the selective but ruthless derogation of purposive literature. The purposes served by those texts varied, but the methods Pope used to render them absurd usually did not. This is why we cannot merely shrug with Colin Burrow that “Pope made his own luck.”12 The structural good fortune charted above was not of Pope’s making; otherwise Pope presented as facts his decisions, and the strenuously produced as naturally occurring. To say that Pope made his own luck is, ironically, to accede to his demands to be recognized as great—which Burrow proceeds to do immediately following the line I quote. A revealing counter-case to my suggestion, that Pope found a literary arena gutted of active political referents and turned it to his 9

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advantage, might be to examine the role of Kantian disinterest (avant la lettre) in this story. For instance, a literary aesthetics built on Whiggish prescriptions would have prompted readers to disinterested judgment, but disinterested judgment in pursuit of a larger political goal. Without the events I recount, Kant’s suggestion that critique be sundered from politics and sutured onto aesthetics (to paraphrase Foucault’s summary) would have been much less palatable to British audiences, because (one line of argument might run) critique might itself not have survived as a recognizable discursive mode: art and politics would still be the same thing. The people living in that culture might have had to invert Kant’s dictum in Was ist Aufklärung? from “Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!” to “do not argue, and obey.”13 The writers I consider in this book worked largely before Kant, but the puzzles surrounding the category of the aesthetic that Kant labored through in the third critique hover, incompletely formulated, throughout this work. A parallel question sits beside it: around whose judgment do these issues revolve? Often, for the writers I discuss, the answer rests in a paradoxical hybrid in which the expertise of the professional writer is central, but the readerly skills of an educated public form a court of final resort. Pope was interested in articulating proto-Kantian standards avant la lettre insofar as this innovation was exigent for his larger purposes. Pope’s use of concepts related to Kant’s work, like sublimity or the genius loci, was not consistent, especially when overlapping with claims to his own exceptionalism. However, Pope was mostly concerned to produce art fitting Kant’s definition of fine art: art that was “purposive for itself, and which, although devoid of [definite] purpose, yet furthers the culture of the mental powers.”14 For Pope, the purposelessness Kant stipulates and to which I refer above was a tool he could use to contrast his work with that of other cultures of writing. Pope’s work was “purposive for itself” not only in the sense that Kant means, in that the work of art possesses and proceeds according to its own logics, but in that the purpose of Pope’s art was to promulgate the notion of the genius of its artist. When Adorno writes that “artworks were purposeless because they [have] stepped out of the means-ends relation of empirical reality” he forgets that artworks are the agentive productions of their artists.15 It is not that “collectively 10

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fashioned aesthetic forms are once-purposive forms that have become purposeless” but that the appearance of purposelessness was wrought upon artworks for an express end (139, emphasis mine). These aesthetic forms are less vestigial than Adorno supposes, and the internal purposive logics native to them operate, not as dead metaphors, but in a lease of new life.16 I show Pope’s career as a series of maneuvers undertaken with the intention of transforming the way booksellers, printers, readers, and other writers thought about writing, the better to underscore the adroitness with which Pope compelled his readers to attempt to achieve the right reading, the correct (“authorized”) exegesis. One method he used was to make the achievement of the right reading grounds for membership in an elevated group. This group was distinguished in several ways—stronger claims to moral authority, cannier readers of history, truer patriotism— but, most of all, members of this group shared the belief that they alone knew what good, and what bad, writing were.

Notes on Genealogy Mine is incomplete, as all genealogies necessarily are, both in chronology and scope. Quentin Skinner writes that “When we trace the genealogy of a concept, we uncover the different ways in which it may have been used in earlier times. We thereby equip ourselves with a means of reflecting critically on how it is currently understood.”17 Genealogies impute a historical logic that histories can, but are not obliged to, offer. My genealogical approach to the construction of present literary-historical categories pulls together political, material, and literary histories.18 The earlier milieux used as fodder by later writers employed literary strategies homologous to their broader political objectives.19 This gambit is familiar to students and scholars of historical poetics; however, this project extends the insights of that approach to the etiology of the history of those poetic forms. I take as signal Foucault’s rejection in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” of “the meta-historical deployment of ideal significations.”20 Foucault emphasizes that the “history of reason” is not a teleological journey toward transcendent methods and values, but a history of “personal conflicts”; and that the genealogist must “cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning.”21 The details and accidents I detail do not just 11

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accompany this “beginning”; they make it possible. Pope and Johnson were able to transform the field of literary production and consumption because Pope in particular realized that Jacobite manuscript poetry and Whig nonfiction prose were fundamentally political fields with literary manifestations.22 These political fields were ripe for literary appropriation because, whereas they had dominant political actors, they did not have dominant literary actors. Although the structures of fields are homologous, Pope realized that a single text, or a body of texts, can exist in multiple fields at once, and exploited that multiplicity to create a kind of slippage, so that strategies that did work in one text in one field could do work in another text in a different field. Though these writers and the cultures they plundered are my immediate objects, this book is offered in the spirit of a case study of how literary authority has been constructed in historically and geographically various literary spheres. My subject in this sense is the way that forms are translated from one genre to the next in the service of the translator’s efforts in an ongoing struggle to determine what genres are for, and therefore to determine what work texts can and cannot do in the world. In this I am following Rachael Scarborough King’s concept of genre as what a text does, rather than “an a priori definition of what it is.”23 The constitution of literary authority in different spheres of literary activity varies, of course, in its particulars. However, just as the agon through which authority is wrought produces hierarchical structures, that struggle has a particular form, which I sketch here. Translated political literary forms can be definitive in the establishment of a new genre, in asserting the canonical centrality of the texts deploying them to that new genre, and the literary authority of the author who has supposedly innovated them. I offer two transhistorical, transgeneric examples here, though very many more could be adduced. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto begins with an enormous helmet crashing down, ex nihilo, into a courtyard. The rest of the text unfolds the consequences of this extraordinary occurrence, a breach of our “uniform experience of the course of nature,” and suggests that one breach or miraculous event might lead to others.24 The ramifications of the appearance of the helmet at the novel’s outset import into a literary frame a device 12

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from purposive literature, in this case the use of hypotheticals to explore the possibility and consequences of radical skepticism. From The Castle of Otranto onward, the inexplicable rupture of the uniform experience of the course of nature has become an increasingly dominant signifier of the genre of gothic fiction. So strongly does the posing of Humean hypothetical questions in this line—how to evaluate the constancy of the natural world, the value of testimony about it, and how to reason about observed changes to it—connote the gothic that such instances have become overdetermined signifiers used as shorthands for the genre as a whole. A second, rather different instance: Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) borrows extensively from the genre of the anthropologist’s field report.25 The field report turned out to be a formidably powerful vector for conveying kinds of estrangement germane to science fiction, whether as an emergent phenomenon of the medium of the report itself (in terms of substrate and language) or because the anthropologist’s field report affects by its nature to be estranged from its content. Moreover, the tension between anthropological estrangement and ethnographic participation offers a convenient analog to science fiction’s routine formal structure of the encounter with, and subsequent transformation by, otherness. Le Guin’s form of the field report has descendants in Star Trek’s “Captain’s Logs,” in Louise Banks’s embedded narrative to her daughter in Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life” (2002) and, more literally, in Cixin Liu’s hybridization of anthropological reserve with a deep ecological temporal perspective into a “cosmic sociology” designed to answer the Fermi Paradox in The Three-Body Problem trilogy.26 New literary forms are innovated through the transgeneric import of purposive, non-literary forms into the domain of imaginative writing. Pope was far from the only writer to undertake this appropriation of forms from other fields. Whig writers I study here deployed a combination of enumerative prose (as promoted by Thomas Sprat) and systemic, holistic imbrication along the lines of a Newtonian “system of the world.” Sprat’s form of “mathematical plainness” itself was a borrowing from Petrus Ramus—and so on. Each appropriation transformed the form appropriated; while a direct line of descent could be drawn from Ramus to Walter Derham or John Dennis, via Sprat and Isaac Newton, the form of logical 13

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inference and enumerative rhetoric deployed by each was distinct and tailored to its immediate contexts. By the same token, Jacobite poetry in manuscript drew on royalist practices of ciphering in manuscript poetry developed during the Civil Wars and the Protectorate. These practices were ripe for revival in 1688 by, in some cases, the same people who had circulated royalist verse during the Interregnum. And those practices in turn had drawn heavily on the long history of Catholic anti-Protestant satire, itself a tradition with Continental origins respondent to the disruptions that precipitated the Reformation. So Pope’s maneuver was not innovative in its structural characteristics so much as was the end to which his diverse appropriations were directed. This study joins recent scholarship in the period by seeing print and manuscript cultures as distinct but interpenetrating and concurrent. Among the recent crop of studies playing close attention to eighteenthcentury manuscript culture, Joseph Hone’s Alexander Pope in the Making is especially pertinent here.27 Hone unfurls in compelling detail how “Pope continued to circulate manuscripts in cases where scribal publication appeared more sensible than print”.28 This study builds on Hone’s analysis while connecting it to the wider community of Jacobite manuscript culture. That scribal culture both does and does not map onto the three types of scribal circulation described by Harold Love in The Culture and Commerce of Texts.29 Love’s study is indispensable but his definitions of scribal circulation don’t quite fit with the life that manuscripts lived following the revolution of 1688–89. I describe a culture of manuscript poetry, continuing deep into the eighteenth century, that shares traits with the culture Love describes, but which exists in different social, material, and political enframings. These phenomena of manuscript culture must be seen against a background of print culture such as that so ably documented in William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004) and since. St. Clair’s ambitions extend to the most pressing questions of intellectual genealogy: “How did it come about that we of the present generation think the way that we do?”30

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After Genealogy I emphasize the genealogical approach of this work in the hope of drawing attention to the ways in which literary studies has not been a discourse wholly of our own making. The utopian critical mode I hope to enable is a heuristic through which readers, alert to the genealogical import of the text they are reading, can regard with skepticism both their received impressions of a literary phenomenon, and canonical speculation about the agenda of the parties responsible for that phenomenon. In this case, since my subject is a mode of writing that is itself designed to dominate, I have a double unpicking to perform: one of Pope’s intentions seems to be that we not realize that he has an extensive and specific agenda about his coming literary historiographical afterlife. This book is emphatically not a biographical hypothesis. However, unpicking what Pope’s intentions might have been might itself run contrary to Pope’s intentions, which in turn requires a degree of speculation. For instance, terms still in contemporary use like “hack,” “scribbler,” and “dunce” are bound to a specific historical context. They were devised in the course of the contest to seize control of the terms of literary judgment that this book documents.31 In what follows I seek to explain why and how terms such as these are the products of a particular internecine conflict. Pope so entirely achieved the goal of refashioning the terms of literary judgment, or literariness, into a supposed disinterest (that was, in fact, ripe with interested claims masquerading as literary forms with only aesthetic import) that his work is still taught in this way, the very way that Pope gulled readers into being compelled to read it. For instance, when new readers encounter it, the supposedly precipitating incident behind The Rape of Lock is universally assumed by teachers or editors to be a piece of knowledge key to the new reader’s understanding of the poem. By the same token, albeit rather more complexly, knowing where and what Grub Street was, who lived there, and why those people were deserving of both penury and scorn, is taken to be key information for understanding The Dunciads. Then as now, it has been the job of editors, teachers, and readers, to justify the ways of Pope to men.

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My most utopian hope is that this book will free our conception of poems like The Rape of the Lock or The Dunciads—to say nothing of other referential works from or near my chosen period, like John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel—from the interpretive bind in which their authors have put them and their readers. Were these works allowed to be truly imaginative literature, of what kinds of meanings might they be possible? It is not that I object to a reader’s knowing about Arabella Fermor’s hair, or the duke of Monmouth, or the progress of Lord Mayors’ Shows through London. It is that I object to the epistemological privilege granted to those famous correlatives and to others like them. The charges Pope laid against Eliza Haywood, Richard Blackmore and Elkanah Settle have thrown shadows hundreds of years long, to say nothing of those laid against Edmund Curll, Aaron Hill, John Dennis, Lewis Theobald, Richard Bentley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord John Hervey, Stephen Duck, and others. Those charges, of intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and financial bankruptcy, of stupidity, and of divinely inspired incompetence, have tarred whole spheres of our history with a brush of at best wavering accuracy. The taint lingers even now: very recently, a prominent scholar referred to an author whom they considered aesthetically bankrupt as “a self-intoxicated dunce.” This is the extent to which the aesthetic categories through which we exercise our disinterested judgments are the residua of partisan conflicts of the period. To many, this book’s most striking omission will probably be Pope’s Dunciads. Those poems and their paratexts surely stake precisely the sorts of claims to authority whose genealogies I am so concerned to trace. And they use many of the same mechanisms to do so, most notably legible ciphering in the manner of Jacobite manuscript poets, along with a totalizing, all-consuming logic. The reason, however, why I do not treat the Dunciads here is simple. The naked partisanship of those poems, and the plainness with which they wage cultural warfare, serves only a few ends through subterfuge; namely, that the open biases of those poems have made much of the rest of Pope’s work seem only incidentally partisan. It is trivial to state that the Dunciads take aim at forms of writing that Pope either feels threatened by or feels are beneath him, and it is barely worth observing that since their publication readers have judged some of 16

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his targets to have been unfairly maligned. That malignancy, however, is of a piece with a more insidious bias threaded through the rest of Pope’s work. Poems we might think of as supposedly disengaged from these struggles in fact participate strenuously.

Methods and Synopsis Each chapter of this book differs methodologically from its fellows, but each is also intended to model the kind of enquiry I hope to foster. The first chapter details the efforts of Whig nonfiction prose writers to create a coherent argumentative field. Whereas later Whig poets like James Thomson were able to draw on causally rich, historically informed, typologically flexible and religiously and politically charged frameworks for knowledge and experience, it was their articulation that occupied Whig writers between the revolution of 1688–89 and George I’s succession. I show how Joseph Addison, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, John Dennis, and William Derham, four of the participants in this culture, each participated in this activity of discursive world-marking. This field of literary production ultimately articulated a way of thinking, applied that method to cultural activity and claimed the necessity of the entire procedure for continued political stability and public well-being.32 “Science is a literary trope,” Tita Chico observes, for instance, and that trope was developed in part by writers seeking to shape a discursive space configured to their political desires, understood in the broadest sense.33 In chapter 2, I turn to Jacobite poetry in manuscript, which found an opposite justification for marrying individual and national liberty. Whereas public motives dictated Whigs’ individual private actions, Jacobites’ private actions were undertaken with the goal of transforming the shape of the public. I address here an almost entirely unstudied manuscript culture because it leverages a different set of literary methods than the little Jacobite poetry that made it into print. Whereas printed Jacobite poetry hewed to certain norms so as to minimize the possibility of prosecution for seditious libel, manuscript poetry gestured to those imperatives while deploying an altogether different set of typological, formal, and material modes of subterfuge.34 These devices alluded to the necessity of secrecy more than they actually sought to create it. The topic of concealment is a 17

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dominant feature of this verse, as is the camaraderie of sedition and treason, the best ways to find and cultivate fellow Loyalists, and how best to preserve loyalty in usually dispiriting political contexts. I show the extent of this culture as I have found it, describe its chief characteristics, and close with a glance at Pope’s involvement. The Whig and Jacobite cultures I taxonomize espoused mutually exclusive cognitive structures and literary forms. For Whigs, the open dissemination of texts was an integral part of sustaining the moral probity of the burgeoning Whig Commonwealth; for Jacobites, secrecy was the best guarantor of the fidelity of your fellow Loyalists. For Whigs, plain expression followed naturally from the more participatory model of political economy they espoused; for Jacobites, typologies, functional ambiguities, and formal legerdemain were the necessary literary methods of building and sustaining an illegal community with an eye to transforming that covert activity into a revolutionary return to Stuart rule. I divide my discussion of Alexander Pope into two chapters. In the first, chapter 3, I examine his career up to 1717; in the second, I work in the second phase of his career in the 1730s, particularly the composite ethical “Opus Magnum,” which bracketed together the epistles and An Essay on Man. By 1717, Pope had laid the groundwork for how he was to be and is still perceived by students and scholars of early eighteenthcentury literature. Pope took only eight years to transform himself from an apprentice poet with a highly restricted manuscript circulation to presenting himself as the preeminent living poet. He achieved this by adopting the two apparently opposed literary-political ideologies and turning them on their heads, making them work for him. The total result is that readers are compelled through enlightened self-interest to agree with Pope and to endorse his deeply partisan literary cause as an objective account of events and values. I next turn to the second phase of Pope’s career insofar as original compositions are concerned. The first part of chapter 4 shows how in The Seasons James Thomson gave poetic form to physico-theology, establishes the Whig heritage of that framework, and explores how Pope responded to those forms, customizing them to suit his purposes in An Essay on Man. The second section, on “Pope’s Moderate Ascendency” demonstrates the 18

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apogee of Pope’s combination of Whig and Jacobite techniques in Epistle to Cobham, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and his First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated. I close by following Johnson’s conflict with Pope, begun in London and continued in The Vanity of Human Wishes, in which he respectively cast Pope as a departing forerunner poet, and revisited and rewrote a series of Pope’s major poetic landmarks in turn. These engagements with Pope’s legacy are significant but not fundamentally transformative of the modes their referents had bequeathed. Like Pope, Johnson seems forever to be answering our questions more quickly than we can pose them. This is because the couplet structure engineers oppositions and resolves them in the selfsame gesture. It was here that Johnson won perhaps his most important struggle with Pope, modulating into prose aims that had hitherto been the preserve of verse, the prestige mode. Jacob Sider Jost has written persuasively of the transition of postmortem remembrance from verse to prose—elegies to Lives—and I offer a complementary account of the transformation of poetic couplets into a more durable—or fungible—vessel.35 Johnson consolidated his literary authority with a sequence of monuments: the Dictionary, his edition of Shakespeare, and the Lives. This apparatus allowed him to occupy a position of extraordinary influence over the nation’s linguistic and literary history but was less explicitly directed toward attaining that authoritative position than Pope’s undertakings had been. Ironically, Pope’s innovation of purposelessness, finally, is turned against him, and confers the greater distinction on his successor. Lastly, Johnson is distinct in his enduring appeal to literary critics, and as an exemplum of how critics cathect onto those whom they might, rather, read. Johnson is perhaps the only author whom scholars of eighteenth-century literature can yet respectably profess to “love” under conditions of peer review. The extent of Johnson’s success at arrogating to himself unimpeachable, interdependent literariness and authority might be gauged by the continued social gatherings of scholars in nonscholarly groups bearing his name on both sides of the Atlantic. Lest it should seem so to the reader, nothing in this book should be taken to imply that I think that Johnson and Pope are not skilled writers, 19

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or that they are not worth reading, or even that they do not deserve canonical prominence. Most of my argument is agnostic about formal artifice qua writerly achievement, but I credit maneuvers that could scarcely be other than deliberate accordingly. One of the purposes of my argument is to enable a reinvigorated return to these authors on grounds of our own choosing. Need the ingenuity, creativity, insight, craft—the accomplishment, in short—of these writers be peerless, or even expressed in relative terms? If I did not believe in the merit of celebrating those values in these writers, albeit at my own rate, this book would not exist. There are some academic books—highly valuable, much cited, important books—that pursue a single heuristic through a group of texts, or a period of time. Those books have no trouble seeming unified, because even when their methods change their argumentative goals are constant, are the same, or on the same continuum on the local horizon and the global. Then there are biographies—again, immensely valuable ones— which have their bounds delimited by the life of the subject or their immediate family. Those books, too, have no difficulty hanging together as a coherent whole, however meaningless the allotted span of a life can be. This book is not like those. My quarry, literary authority, is a thing people agree exists, but on the nature, history, and use of which there is not much consensus. Moreover, literary authority turns out to be acutely granular and situational, so that what builds it in one text does not in another; how it looks in one place is not how it looks in another. So as we move across a span of decades, or between entire literary subcultures, our pursuit of the same single quarry will ask us to be adaptable and openminded in our approaches. Therefore, despite my argument’s consistent focus, since I cover decades and multiple literary subcultures, the reader will have noticed some methodological ecumenicism in the overviews I offered. Over the period I cover in this book, different genres from different fields of cultural activity were transformed into new genres and fields. Therefore different modes of analysis—various book histories, intellectual and political histories, close reading, network analysis, manuscript studies, political, material and philosophical histories—have different affordances suited to different types of texts. I have used whichever tools best suited the task at hand. 20

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The relationships among methods are not always straightforward. For instance, the formal qualities of these works are often acutely responsive to contextual minutiae; when translated to a new context by a later writer, those qualities bear the traces of their origins. Moreover, my analysis of literary and conceptual forms is often dialectical. The use of desacralized typologies, for example, is a device deployed to considerable effect by Jacobite poets and appropriated—and often inverted—by Pope. For Jacobite poets, the ambiguity a cipher permits is “functional,” in Annabel Patterson’s terms.36 Jacobite readers can decipher the type, but only because they possess the information needed to do so. In this way, Jacobite poets use contextual information to validate their interpretive communities while mostly managing to avoid prosecution. Pope, however, turns this device on its head. He often gives the crucial contextual information in advance of the cipher, or he otherwise sets the cipher in such a way that the reader cannot possibly not know the meaning Pope intends. Jacobite poets relied on pre-existing elective affinities to authenticate and activate the latent content of a poem. Pope, however, constructed affinities and used his poetry to leverage readers into them: instead of communities validating a poem, Pope’s poems were the authoritative sources for interpretive communities. This inversion is one example of a phenomenon that occurs repeatedly over the course of the narrative I unfold here: routine co-option of forms born of political exigence, which exerted political structural pressures on their readers within the course and context of imaginative literature. These forms were moved into contexts marked by an apparent apoliticality—in these contexts they serve literary ends and thereby exert pressures on their readers through structures connected to literariness. The methodological variety of this book is also longitudinal. In each chapter, I interrelate and bind together granular textual and historical detail with comparative or transhistorical arcs. I begin as a historicist the better to adumbrate the full range of forms (broadly understood) in which texts trafficked as a part of their participation in genre systems. On that basis I can then work as a formalist to try to understand texts in and of themselves. Then, when I have occasion to be more synoptic, I aggregate those forms in order to hypothesize sociologies of texts. These sociologies, in turn, frame historically subsequent genre systems. 21

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Anyone who aspires to genealogize makes a contention about their peers; in my case, that teachers and researchers of eighteenth-century literature are unknowingly beholden to the politics of its authors. Though genealogy has at first blush a Gallic cast, it proceeds by insisting on a meticulous historicism. Yes, genealogies ought to undermine the ontological singularity of the supposed “disciplinary” object. But when I assert that a causal chain of historical (rather than philosophical) logic joins the scholar’s heuristic to the text’s own, I mean to emphasize the contingency of the contemporary scholar and the historical poet alike. As Hone notes, hilariously, on “modern literary critics” taken in by Pope, that though “scholars in the tradition of Maynard Mack persist in thinking of young Pope as a meditative pastoral poet, warbling his native wood-notes wild, contemporaries associated his poems with sedition and recusancy.”37 One goal of the project is for scholars to be able to opt out of this contingency. To what might they opt in? There are many possibilities. One is that, instead of studying texts in an uncanny mimicry of Boyle’s laboratory (experiments performed; results disseminated for others to attest to their veracity) scholars of literature could opt to think with—or against—texts. Observer and object are mutually constitutive in a way that the analogy of Boylean empiricism is designed to obscure. Literary studies ought not to stake its longevity on an implicit claim of ontological difference between subject and object. To do so would be to insist on keeping a category error at the heart of our work.

Envoi Political, material, and social configurations—genre systems—degenerated during the time it took to write this book. Mutually constructive political and discursive norms have been knowingly, and violently, abrogated and destroyed. Neither has a passion for abrogation been limited to just one political group in any context. Under these conditions, why do we persist in doing what we do? Why do we squander our now monetized attention on the literary arts, let alone on literary historiography? What price l’art pour l’art? In my lifetime, the arc of history has bent unmistakably toward greater global environmental toxicity, suffering, unfreedom, and tiered personhood. Agnotology has 22

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seized, and seized up, the minds of tens of millions of people in the United States alone, having been transformed from a discursive mode into matériel. Knowledge derived from epistemic procedures dating back to at least the Royal Society’s early experiments is discredited; extinct diseases are returning; environmental regulation, let alone sustainability, is further away than ever. It would be naïve to remark that the political institutions of the Anglo-American world are rife with corruption, or that venality, bad faith, and cynicism have devoured the discursive norms that once protected, or promised to protect, citizens from the predations of bad actors. Most of the time spent writing this book was spent outside an academic position; the extirpation of such positions has never been more rapidly under way, nor has their stock in what passes for public discourse ever been lower. We must ask ourselves in this context, surely art that strives not to have a political agenda, which vaunts its supposed freedom from political exigency—is that not art that shirks what its obligations must, in some configuration, be? If this were not so, then why, for instance, should the CIA not have trumpeted its sponsorship of Encounter from the rooftops? There is no good faith calculus by which to argue that valuing art for professed apoliticality is not a contingent, political valuation. By definition we cannot choose against ideology. But by fetishizing the crux and the undecidable, we opt to fetishize our own mystification. When we celebrate richly polyvalent, suggestive, generative literary works, we celebrate nothing more than the capacity to create and contemplate those works. Are they not, at their best, also agnotological? It didn’t have to be this way. While I suggest that our reading practices are more tightly circumscribed than we might imagine, I also gesture to the expansive interpretative freedoms that lie beyond those bounds. I close with a coda that sketches out one version of the kinds of aesthetic value those freedoms might enable, of what prospects they might offer to the arts we prize. My final hope is not so much reparative as focused on what lies beyond the reparative impulse; the prospect that, in our reading, we might finally move past the merely literary. From that position we might usefully ourselves, what if? What 23

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if it were as absurd to put “great authors” at the heart of our thinking about literature as it would be to cast “great brick-makers” in the heart of the history of architecture, or “great violin-makers” at the heart of the history of music? What then might be the relationship between usefulness and beauty?

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Chapter 1

Whig Prose Cultures

Why the World Needs a System The story begins with a letter.1 On June 30th, 1688, seven men wrote to the stadtholder William of Orange to invite him to take the throne of England. Things were so bad, the signatories informed him, and “the people are so generally dissatisfied with the present conduct of the government in relation to their religion, liberties and properties (all which have been greatly invaded), and they are in such expectation of their prospects being daily worse, that your Highness may be assured there are nineteen parts of twenty of the people throughout the kingdom who are desirous of a change.”2 William set that change in motion when he invaded England on November 5th, 1688. The ruling king, James II of England and VII of Scotland, fled to France in December. On April 11th, 1689, William and his wife Mary, James’s daughter, were crowned in Westminster Abbey. This chapter and the next examine opposed responses to this extraordinary sequence of events. These responses coalesced into several highly coherent cultures, though I only focus on two here. These can be characterized roughly around the dynastic binary: a Whig culture that encouraged its members to prioritize the stability of the Williamite state when considering their private desires, and a Jacobite culture that sought to leverage necessarily private desires and thereby transform the Williamite state back into a Stuart state. The political transformations that continued until at least the crowning of George I in 1715 made transformations in the sphere of literary culture possible, and offered a model for them. Every culture wants the world to be remade in its own image. I start with the Whig case, because it is more propositional and gives us a bit more interpretative purchase. The writers I’ve brought together are 25

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rarely mentioned in the same breath, owing perhaps to the vestigial literary-historical myopia that, I argue, is Alexander Pope’s longest-lasting achievement. But the striking congruence of the texts I discuss below demonstrates the integrity, scope, and ambition of the culture for which they advocated on their own account. William’s accession was predicated—as we see in the Letter of Invitation—on the religious preferences of a group of subjects, rather than on primogeniture.3 This is to say that it was unconstitutional. To a country still scarred by civil wars, breaches of constitutional law, let alone disruptions of monarchical succession, were anathema. Disruptions promise instability; instability threatens conflict. This climate of fear and anxiety was the context in which Whig writers sought to introduce an overarching set political, religious, philosophical and cultural fields to make a case for the inherent stability promised by William’s accession. As Abigail Williams writes, “In what amounted to a manifesto for the revival of modern English literary culture, [Whig ideologues] claimed that the constitutional liberty offered by the Revolution of 1688 . . . presented the opportunity to forge a distinct and self-consciously modern cultural identity for Whiggism.”4 This chapter outlines how this total constellation of positions was bound together into a single field, one that aspires to be a political and monarchical theodicy. My subjects mostly appear in separate different philosophical or literary histories.5 Joseph Addison is an influential prose stylist, best known as the co-founder of The Spectator. John Locke’s student Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, is largely regarded as an early theorist of sociability and sympathy. William Derham is familiar to contemporary scholars as a key writer on physico-theology. John Dennis is a key theorist of the Longinian sublime and was one of the earliest and most successful professional literary critics. This chapter will show how Addison, Dennis, Derham, and Shaftesbury participated in an internally consistent field of politically motivated writing. The four articulate a common set of literary and argumentative strategies. These authors deployed form and content in support of the political objective they always held in mind: the necessity and the stability of the Protestant succession. As a group, these writers used moral, cultural, and philosophical prescriptions 26

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to leverage repeated arguments for the laissez-faire, mixed-government, and participatory state they wanted. This imagined state was the subject of the utopic Whig vision. Dennis, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Derham all worked to create an ever-more concordant state with didactic, systematic moral prescriptions bent toward the rule of law, public-spiritedness, virtue, and Protestant piety. This is, put simply, a political field. But the politics it articulates is holistic. I can survey only some of its textual manifestations here. These principles were encapsulated in poetry such as Sir Richard Blackmore’s Creation (1712) and James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730). But it was through speaking to readers in nonfiction prose that the writers I consider first established the practical and theoretical field of Whiggish philosophy and culture. Like any pair of antagonists squaring off in a piece of genre fiction, the fields I contrast pursued structurally identical goals driven by the same totalizing logic. The contents of those goals, however, were not only mutually exclusive but precisely opposed and mutually annihilating. Whig and Jacobite writers held exactly contrary beliefs about the revolution of 1688. But the strategies that both groups used to advance their beliefs were strikingly congruent. Jacobite manuscript poets inculcated reading practices that shaped readers’ private selves as prompts for possible future political action. Whig nonfiction prose writers wrote to fashion readers’ private selves as corollaries to the political settlement. 6

Thomas Sprat’s Mathematical Plainness In order to understand the field these writers constituted in its Whiggish context, it helps to frame their work as flourishing under the aegis of two pillars of the Royal Society (itself a figurehead for Whiggish progress since shortly after its formation). These pillars were Thomas Sprat and Sir Isaac Newton, whose History of the Royal Society of London (1667) and Principia (1687) respectively laid the stylistic and theoretical bases for prose Whiggism. In Sprat, Whig writers found an ideologically motivated plain style; in Newton, an ideologically motivated structure of argument. Whig nonfiction prose writers combined these to articulate their new vision of statehood. Tita Chico observes that Sprat’s History of the Royal Society is “both 27

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descriptive and prescriptive,” and that for Sprat “the practice of natural philosophy gives . . . a blueprint for well-regulated government, mobilizing in turn an analogy between epistemology and politics.”7 In fact I would suggest that for Sprat epistemology was not analogical for, but commensurate with politics. Sprat connected written style with moral substance. A simple style that anyone could understand corresponded to the postRestoration political consensus in which the monarch could no longer rule by fiat, but had to win the approval of Parliament. The legitimacy—and the usefulness—of a text depended on its being widely comprehensible. Whig nonfiction prose writers had to write clearly to manufacture consent as broadly as possible. In his History, Sprat recommends a style of maximum simplicity: “plain, undeceiving expressions.”8 In common with many of the innovated literary forms we shall encounter in this book, the choices Sprat made in History were intended to ally his work with a foregoing political or cultural agenda. In this sense, Sprat did not happen across, and promote, “plain” speech by accident. His promotion of plainness owed much to Petrus Ramus, a logician who proposed controversial curricular reforms in seventeenth-century scholasticism to promote comprehension and enable wider access.9 Plain style “was not prescribed by Ramist rhetoric, although it was made inevitable by the whole mental setting which constitutes Ramism,” Walter J. Ong writes.10 Sprat argued that plain speaking sprang from moral integrity and contended that “the purity of speech and the greatness of empire have in all countries met together” (225). Since the Royal Society was intended to stand in opposition to, and compete with, the Académie française, Sprat’s dismissal of the French stress on “humour, and wit, and variety, and elegance of language” (225) was part of a larger statement of national values. His summary praise of the Fellows 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 things 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 prefer28

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ring the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits or scholars. (229)

“Mathematical plainness” was to be an especially important injunction for Whigs. While it is true that Whiggish arguments were often enumerated in lists, the Whiggish mode of argumentation is more “mathematical” than “numerative” or sequential in its additive, syllogistic logic. Sprat offered Whig prose writers a formal template, a style guide, and a rationalization drawing together nationalist motivations with claims to moral superiority.

Isaac Newton’s System of the World Whig writers had a second model, who offered a theoretical basis to bind the field of Whig literary culture into a cohesive whole. The internal logic of the new political status quo was the key argument Whigs had to make. This argument was based on the work of Isaac Newton. Newton was “closely associated with the cause of Junto whiggism,” and along with his immediate circle “not only prominently involved in the popularization of the new science, but also well known for . . . whig politics and low churchmanship.”11 Newton’s Principia offered a scientific corollary to those political motives; in it, Newton promised to explain the systemic logical basis of the physical constitution and operation of the world,12 which in book 3 of the Principia he called “The System of the World.”13 By proposing to uncover the “mathematical principles of philosophy” Newton promised to show the irrefutable logical foundation of the way things worked.14 More powerfully, Newton argued that mathematical laws were constants and governed larger and smaller systems equally. The proper functioning of a small system, Newton asserts, is indistinguishable from the proper functioning of larger systems: For by the propositions mathematically demonstrated in the first books, we there derive from the celestial phaenomena, the forces of Gravity with which bodies tend to the Sun and the several Planets. Then from these forces by other propositions, which are also mathematical, we deduce the motions of the Planets, the Comets, the Moon, and the Sea. I wish we could derive the rest of the phaenom29

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ena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles. For I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces . . . which forces being unknown, Philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of Nature in vain. (ix)

Newton’s deductive method links together systems and their component parts. The list of planets, comets, moon, and sea shows this principle in action: the laws of gravitational attraction govern the movement of very large bodies (planets) that exert force on much smaller bodies on long eccentric orbits (comets), just as the moon produces the tidal motions of the sea. This absolute correspondence between parts and wholes was a lynchpin of the way that Whiggish writers cantilevered global arguments with a multitude of local prescriptions. “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,” Newton wrote in the Principia, thus distinguishing between mathematical principles and philosophical reasoning (2:200). Describing how things work, on the one hand, and how they ought to work, on the other, gave Whig nonfiction prose writers a solid epistemological basis from which to argue the best way forward for post-Restoration England.15 As John Theophilius Desaguliers wrote, “Tho’ I have never made Politicks my Study, . . . yet, among my Philosophical Enquiries, I have consider’d Government as a Phaenomenon, and look’d upon that Form of it to be most perfect, which did most nearly resemble the Natural Government of our System, according to the Laws settled by the All-wise and Almighty Architect of the Universe.”16 Complicating arguments about “a straw-man ‘Newtonianism’ . . . as an ur-figure for a rationalized world and a rationalized God, for a rationalizing, reifying, and quantifying approach to the world,” Courtney Weiss Smith argues that “Newton’s science encouraged not a sharpened sense of stable cosmic law and order but a capacious set of moral and political truths based on constant divine activity and a new and robust feeling for God’s immanence.”17 Smith shows that rather than an empty mechanism, Newton described a mechanism actively inhabited, maintained, and in every sense moved by God. This reading of the political corollaries of 30

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Newton’s work allows us to appreciate the metaphorical seam Newton’s work offered contemporary Whigs. Rather than a divinely ordained and self-maintaining system, Newton analogically described a set of mechanisms that needed constant tending and maintenance by a set of political actors who could in their caretaking of the system stand in for God. The analogy of Newton’s work was, however, only metaphorical. However compelling its metaphorical formulations might be, government – especially Williamite government – was clearly an artificial construct, not a naturally occurring phenomenon. This fact had two literary corollaries. First, Whig writers had to assert the principles operating the systems that they were to examine, and then build from those asserted principles to larger normative statements. Writers like Dennis thus expended considerable effort in making their arguments appear not as arguments but as explanations of already-existing facts. Second, Whig writers of nonfiction prose relied on the syllogism. In a syllogism, multiple propositions lead deductively to a conclusion. The syllogism modeled the interrelation between parts and wholes that was crucial to the Whig literary mission. In this regard, too, the Whigs drew on the Ramist logical legacy. Ramus’s aim was not to use logic to create new knowledge, but “instead to systemize and organize arguments.”18 However, Ramus and Whig writers differ in the extent to which they advocate the use of the syllogism.19 Whigs found in syllogism a mode of argument sympathetic with their driving motivation. If for Ramus “method became the most important part of logic,” for Whigs the syllogistic method showed the essential logical interconnectedness of apparently discrete elements.20 The syllogism was a tool that Whigs could use to argue for a systematic and all-inclusive British state. It was an ideal tool for Whig writers, offering an argumentative mode isomorphic with the conclusions that they hoped to advance. I shall begin with John Dennis and move in turn to Addison and Mr. Spectator, Shaftesbury, and Derham to show the breadth of applications to which these strategies were fitted.

John Dennis’s Preceptual Whiggism In 1689, the playwright John Dennis (1658–1734) might have been more terrified of a second Civil War than anyone else in England. Dennis 31

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believed, perhaps more fervently than any other Whig, that a stable mixedstate government had to be preserved at all costs, regarding it as the system best able to save the Whig Commonwealth. Dennis grasped implicitly that a totalizing logic cuts both ways. A single wrong policy choice, he thought, might lead to the unravelling of everything that followed the overthrow of James II. I referred above to a perspective that allows us to look beyond the merely literary element of writing and consider its possible usefulness, its success or failure. What would it mean for a text to succeed or fail? The ties that bound literary authority to the parliamentary state after the fall of monarchical patronage originated in this question: how could a text, a writer, succeed in preserving a government? Dennis’s work aimed to derive its literary authority from the imperturbable political authority it brought, didactically, to the Whig regime. Of the figures whom Pope, in particular, maligned, Dennis is one of the last to be recuperated.21 The best reason to begin with Dennis is that his Whiggism is of a kind I term preceptual. Dennis states his most tendentious and political claims as though they were matters of fact. From these precepts he derives whole systems of pre- and proscriptions. Dennis’s preceptual Whiggism can be distinguished from the more indirectly didactic Whiggisms of Addison and Shaftesbury, each of whom described in their ways how it was that the natural interactions of men in social settings should produce states that coincidentally resembled and propagated the Whig settlement. For later Whigs—and Whigs whom we may in candor call subtler—didacticism proceeded under the aegis of aesthetic theory, or of the philosophy of virtue. Dennis started writing nonfiction prose twenty years before The Spectator or Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, at a time when the political waters were rather choppier. “Dennis’s defence of poetic enthusiasm as an instrument of godly reformation further embodied a specifically Williamite and low church agenda,” Philip Connell observes.22 Dennis is perhaps not what we now deem “literary” in his writing because being literary in that sense was not useful to him. The eventual discursive, cultural, and political dominance of first Williamite and then Hanoverian policies—Anne’s reign notwithstanding—was the fruit of the 32

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labors of foot soldiers of the revolution of 1688 like John Dennis. The indirection and literariness of later Whig writers were likewise privileges wrested for them from the jaws of naked exigency by the preceding generation of cultural warriors.

Untangling Dennis from Pope Dennis writes at the meeting point of Newtonian systemization and Sprat’s injunction to “mathematical plainness.” His texts are strongly enumerative and characterized by his overwhelming urge to systematize. Since the system with the strongest prescriptive power was that discovered in situ, rather than that invented by the author, Dennis devoted considerable effort to making his arguments appear not to be arguments at all but rather explanations of already-existing facts. Dennis marshaled all the rhetorical and ordinal resources at his command in order to present his texts as the most systematic possible investigations of their subjects. Dennis’s writing responds especially clearly to the political imperatives facing Whigs in the 1690s and the first decade of the 1700s. His priority, at all times, is to support the Protestant, Williamite settlement, and to guard against the moral, cultural, and philosophical incursions of Catholics, Jacobites, and foreigners. Moreover, of all the writers I discuss here, Dennis is probably the most Ramist. Ramus had argued that logic was an essentially didactic art; rather than philosophy, which could address ontology, Ramus suggested that the proper purview of logic was epistemology. He considered the proper work of logic to be the demonstration of the order of things. Indeed, according to Ramus, a purely logical argument would necessarily show the perfect interrelation of the general and the particular. So Ramist enumeration was an extremely appropriate method for Whigs, like Dennis, who wanted to expound didactically. As Walter Ong remarks, “The Ramist arts of discourse are monologue arts.”23 However, Dennis is best-known now for his long-running spat with Pope. This contretemps is worth investigating briefly because it reveals so much about the two men’s competing cosmologies, and their respective beliefs about the proper place of art in the state. The argument originated in Pope’s reference to Dennis as “some fierce Tyrant” in An Essay on Criticism, and Dennis’s response in Reflections Critical and Satirical 33

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on . . . An Essay on Criticism. 24 Dennis does not believe that the arts can contribute to the stability of the state in any way other than by compelling public-spiritedness and regularity among its citizens. Dennis’s response proceeds on the grounds of controlling the rhetorical position of effectively reforming the reader. The Reflections is part of the most notorious encounter of Dennis’s career. It marked a radical departure in tone for Dennis, because Pope’s work threatened to undermine Dennis’s cosmology of art, nature, and the state. Dennis is particularly sensitive to Pope’s attack on preceptual criticism based on normative rules of art. These regularized stipulations are the bedrock of Dennis’s empirical, quasi-Newtonian, systematic critical edifice. The Reflections reveals the remarkable strength of Dennis’s Whiggish convictions about the proper place of art in the post-1689 state. The existential nature of the threat that Dennis felt Pope posed explains the extraordinary change in tone that occurs in Dennis’s writing in the Reflections. Dennis lampoons Pope’s physical lameness; referring to Pope in terms as “that little Gentleman,” “this little Author,” “a young, squab, short Gentleman,” and says of Pope’s “outward Shape” that it is “of downright Monkey” (29).25 Dennis closes with this sally: 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)

In Dennis’s formulation, the book’s folly and ignorance depend entirely upon “Impudence;” which leads, supports, and “bully-back”s (piggybacks) them. This bully-backing attributes Pope’s physical deformation, the lateral curvature of his spine, to the weight of his impudence.26 Dennis opens the Reflections with the apparently incongruous claim that with the evidence of Pope’s Essay on Criticism before him, “All that I foretold, and more than all hath happen’d” (ii). The predicate for Dennis’s writing about art had always been that art should be instructive, utile over dulce. Pope’s combined work as a writer and a critic upset that 34

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hierarchy.27 The explanation that Dennis himself offers is that Pope publicly humiliated him: I not only found myself attack’d without any manner of Provocation on my side, and attack’d in Person, instead of my Writings, by one who is wholly a Stranger to me, and at a time when all the World knew that I was persecuted by Fortune, I not only saw that this was attempted in a clandestine manner with the utmost Falshood and Calumny, but found that all this was done by a little affected Hypocrite, who had nothing in his mouth at the same time but Truth, Candor, Friendship, good Nature, Humanity, and Magnanimity. (iii)

Further, Dennis felt that by laughing at him and dishonoring him, Pope had impoverished literary criticism. Honor is concerned with the strength of social bonds; it is a public-spirited emotion born of amour propre. If the honorableness of criticism becomes a target for satire, then, Dennis worried, the honorableness of writing would cease to be a key consideration for writers. If writers started writing to please, rather than to teach, then national decline would inevitably follow as public spirit was diminished and as citizens’ energies were taken up with the pursuit of sensory pleasure. Pope’s poem undermines Dennis’s entire critical oeuvre. Furthermore, Dennis shows that Pope fails to offer an iterable method because, although Pope offers precepts, they are often conflicting or even mutually exclusive. Dennis defends himself and attacks Pope on a number of other grounds, including the proper practice of criticism (21–25). But the final set of charges that Dennis brings raise a much more controversial question. He accuses Pope of being a Jacobite:28 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 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 these threescore Years, and who justifies the Dispensing Pow’r so long af35

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ter we are free’d from it . . . is, I suppose, politckly setting up for Poet-Laureat against the coming-over of the Pretender. (27)

As Joseph Hone observes, “this is not an unreasonable inference.”29 Given the strong association between the Dispensing Power, which permitted a monarch to exempt any subject from the rule of law, and James II’s use of it, Dennis reads Pope’s support of the power as nostalgically harking back to Catholic kingship. Dennis’s claim that Pope is positioning himself to be James III’s poet laureate is quite plausible and explains Dennis’s epithet for Pope, “Mr. Bays,” alluding to the Bay laurel (Laurus nobilis).30 However, this passage shows that the barbs that Pope and Dennis throw at each other are, at root, the same. Pope writes that Dennis’s belief in binding rules of art makes him servile and dispositionally French in a way that is unpatriotic; 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. Although this conflict appears to be artistic, it is a political conflict in masquerade.

The Politics of “System” Dennis’s commitment to political goals most often manifested in his efforts to be systematic in his writing. In fact, Dennis’s drive toward systematization almost always outstrips his ability to impose it on his texts, prompting him to give promises of systematic accounts that he is unable to fulfill. For example, in his most ambitious work, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), he proposes to offer a full six-part taxonomy of poetry (with three branches each of Greater and Lesser), but never finished an endlessly subdivided first part on Milton. Among Dennis’s texts that attempt the most elaborate systems—and fail entirely to fulfill them—are his proposals for naval reform. An Essay on the Navy (1702) lists sailors’ seven major grievances and promises to expand on each. This task is hopelessly beyond him, however, and the first part of Essay on the Navy contains nineteen separate lists.31 Lists of these sort have no investment in the reader’s pleasure: they are instead attempts to derive a system by which a problem can be apprehended, and solved.32 Some of Dennis’s efforts to delimit the scope of his imposed systems 36

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were more successful. In the Preface to Remarks Concerning Prince Arthur (1696), on Richard Blackmore’s poem, Prince Arthur, Dennis writes that “Three Objections have been made against Criticism in General: The First, That it is an invidious ill-natur’d thing. The Second, That it is a vain and successless Attempt, And the Third, That it tends to the certain diminution of the happiness of the Reader” (xvi). Much of the power of this gesture lies in the illusion it creates of completeness and systematization. The rhetorical payoff of this maneuver is that when he concludes this section “Thus we have endeavour’d to Answer the Objections which are Made against criticism in General” (xxxi), he implies that all possible opposition has met with a response. This disguises the fact that Dennis has chosen and phrased the specific criticisms that he wants to answer. Having established the systems he will discuss, Dennis relies on syllogistic argument. Dennis uses syllogisms to advance what Newton would call “philosophical enquiries” in the guise of “principles.” For example: I cannot think there can be any ill nature in Detecting the faults of an ill or indifferent, tho’ a successful Writer. For if it be just and reasonable in every Man to contribute what he can to the publick happiness, because upon that depends his own, and if the advancing of Arts and Sciences conduces to the good of the State, and lastly if Men of Merit are more capable of advancing Science than those who want it; I cannot but think it is the most reasonable thing in the World to distinguish good Writers by discouraging bad. (Remarks, xvii–xviii)

This passage contains three propositions and a conclusion. The argumentative work of the passage, however, happens at least as much in the advancement of the propositions as in the drawing of the conclusion. The first proposition (from “if it be just” to “own”) is an argument: happiness is desirable and achievable by men; and private goods are made possible by public goods. Therefore, men strive for public goods out of self-interest.33 This argument assumes that the stability of the post-1688–89 settlement is essential to the well-being of private citizens. This was hardly an uncontroversial argument; much of both the established and the nonjuring, Church would have disagreed, along with Jacobites and contractarian 37

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constitutionalists.34 The second proposition is a classical argument that good arts and sciences make for a good state. This argument is consonant with the Whig vision of history: that “advancement” in art and science improves the state. In the same way that public and private goods are inextricable in the first premise, individual innovations in art and science are necessarily public business in the second. In this way, private actions in art and science are interpellated as public avowals of loyalty in conformity with the doctrine of passive obedience. In summary, the arguments advanced using these three propositions are: first, that men justly pursue private welfare by advancing the public goods to which their welfare subtends; second, that private artistic and scientific effort are linked to national well-being, and third, that the arts and sciences are based on merit and are vulnerable to criticism only on the terms by which they already operate. These three propositions together create a space in which the arts and sciences exist for the betterment of the state and in which it is simply “just” that private citizens devote effort to improving the state by working within its already existing channels. Compared to these buried arguments, the ostensible claim that the three propositions support—that the best way to encourage skilled writers is by dispraising the unskilled—turns out to be rather mild. This is because Dennis has brilliantly inverted the usual structure of a syllogism. Dennis uses three sophisticated claims about the proper functioning of the social contract to advance a relatively simple argument about literary criticism. Accordingly, what Dennis considers “the most reasonable thing in the World” is not that bad writers should get their comeuppance. It is that the social contract between public and private is reciprocal and always-already in operation; that the changes wrought by individuals contribute to general betterment, and that fostering these changes benefits the fosterer and the nation as a whole. Embedded in this innocuous syllogism is the Lockean philosophy of Williamite, Protestant Britain. The final reason for Dennis’s dispraise of Blackmore’s poem is that in praising Prince Arthur unfairly, “the Friends of Mr. Blackmore by the fondness of a mistaken zeal derogate from the greatness of [William’s] Glory” (xlv).35 This is the extent to which, for Dennis, criticism is intimately connected to the promotion of the national interest. Since “the design of every 38

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Man who writes an Epick Poem, is to give Moral Instruction to Mankind, and particularly to his own Countrymen” (4) and since the poet who would praise William “should tremble, unless he can place [him] in so true, so glorious a light that the consenting World may admire [him]” (xlv), Dennis’s responsibility as a reasonable man, as a critic, and as a Briton, is to establish the most effective and reliable way for poets to shed that patriotic light in the future by dispraising the portrait of Arthur that Blackmore gives. Dennis’s Epistle Dedicatory to John, earl of Mulgrave, which prefaces his Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701), shows how his thinking developed after the Remarks. Dennis ties his belief in systems into party and national loyalty in another way; 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 either 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. (xv–xvi)

If regularity and order are godly, and if proper religion promotes the good of the Commonwealth, then the implementation of systems is both a godly act and one for the good of the Commonwealth. It behooves poets to write regularly, not only for the sake of better art, but for the sake of a happier state. (Moreover, Pope’s bodily irregularity is prima facie evidence of his ungodliness, a charge to which his opponents returned throughout his life.) In The Grounds of Criticism, Dennis shifts his focus to demonstrate further the interdependence of religion and poetry; his larger claims about poetry improving the Commonwealth remain implicit.36 Nonetheless, the closing lines of The Grounds of Criticism show that Dennis’s chief goal remains the improvement of England. Since poetry is 39

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the fittest method for the inforcing Religion upon the Minds of Men, and since Religion is the only solid Foundation of all Civil Society, it follows, that whoever Endeavours to Re-establish Poetry, makes a generous attempt to restore an Art, that may be highly Advantageous to the Publick, and Beneficial to Mankind. (127)

The first “Design” of Dennis’s “Proposal” following his Preface is “To restore Poetry to all its Greatness, and to all its Innocence” (xi). Dennis’s ambition is such that the main goal of The Grounds of Criticism is to return poetry to a (figuratively) prelapsarian state.37 the work of every reasonable Creature must derive its Beauty from Regularity, for Reason is Rule and Order. . . . Man was created like the rest of the Creatures, regular, and as long as he remained so he continued happy; but as soon as he fell from his Primitive State, by transgressing Order, Weakness and Misery was the immediate Consequence of that Universal Disorder that immediately followed in his Conceptions, in his Passions and Actions. The great design of Arts is to restore the decays that happen’d to Humane Nature by the Fall, by restoring Order. (5–6)

I quote this passage at length because it shows the full cosmology of Dennis’s critical practice: deriving rules for poetry makes more ordered poetry. More ordered poetry, in turn, makes more ordered men, and more ordered men are closer to God. The utility of this devout, obedient system of reading is overtly political. Dennis might advocate godliness through poetry in The Grounds of Criticism, but his type of godliness is inextricable from the civil order that conceives of it.

Cato and Obsolescence His preoccupation with the preservation of British liberty brought Dennis to the last of his texts I discuss here, his Remarks upon Cato (1713).38 Dennis’s goal is to dispute the claims of national exemplarity that were heaped on Addison’s tragedy Cato from both sides of the political spectrum. Dennis argued that Cato was flawed because as an account of a historical event (Cato’s suicide), it could not be “exemplary.” Cato’s 40

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suicide, Dennis writes, “is not a general and Tragical Action, but a particular thing which Cato did and suffer’d” (11). Indeed, “The Action of this Play is so far from carrying a Moral that it carries a pernicious instruction with it . . . [since] the Invaders of Liberty are seen to Triumph, and the Defenders of it to Perish” (10). 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; he quotes the play’s approving critics and responds to them; and he impugns inconsistency in all its forms wherever he finds it. In short, he writes in a way familiar to any reader of his literary criticism from 1693 onward. Dennis finds Cato to be bad art; which is to say, morally irresponsible, and not conducive to the safety and prosperity of the state. The Remarks upon Cato ends, however, on a markedly odd note. Dennis criticizes the mise en scène of the fifth act: “Cato appears first upon the Scene, sitting in a thoughtful Posture, in his Hand Plato’s Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul, a drawn sword on the Table by him” (55). Focusing on the confusion between privacy and publicity that this setting evokes, Dennis writes: In short, that Cato should sit long enough in the aforesaid Posture in the midst of this large Hall, to read over Plato’s Treatise of the Immortality of the Soul. . . . That he should propose to himself to be private there upon that Occasion, that he should be angry with his Son for intruding there, then that he should leave this Hall upon the Pretence of Sleep, give himself the mortal Wound in his Bedchamber; and then be brought back into that Hall to expire, purely to shew his good Breeding, and save his Friends the trouble of coming up to his Bed-chamber; all this appears to me to be improbable, incredible, impossible. (56)

This is the last specific piece of criticism of Cato, and it seems an odd choice for Dennis’s peroration. But I believe Dennis closes with this because Cato does in public what ought to be done in private, and vice versa. Dennis’s own process of decision-making is precisely the opposite of Cato’s: Dennis reads Plato in private, and then comes into the public sphere to wield his sword. This is what Dennis believes to be the proper 41

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constitution of the state: rulers and teachers should deliberate in private and then act didactically in public, precisely in order to shape the actions of private citizens. Cato reads Plato and considers suicide: these should be private actions, but Cato performs them in public. Cato retires to his bed-chamber to kill himself in private. This evinces heavy irony from Dennis because giving “the mortal Wound” is the didactic, public part of the suicide of “a great Patriot, a great Philosopher, or a General.” Public actions must be exemplary to ensure the stability of the state. Dennis’s quarrel with Addison’s portrayal of Cato’s deliberation and action is that it makes the public sphere the setting for reflection and the private sphere the setting for action. Dennis wants the public sphere to be a didactic arena so that the state is founded upon a corporate moral integrity. If the public were an arena of debate instead of didacticism, then citizens could act privately for their own pleasure, rather than for public improvement. Then pleasure, not utility, would determine the shape of both bodies. Dennis’s preceptual Whiggism seeks to foster a better state through systematic public didacticism. By 1713, this treatment of the public had become outmoded. Other, more successful Whig writers had already surpassed Dennis by using an inverted version of his system to advocate fashioning a secure state out of a compliant citizenry. Moreover, these later Whig writers performed their moral and behavioral fashioning with recourse to a more complete and compelling set of metaphors and arguments. Addison, Derham, and Shaftesbury articulated a more belletristic Whiggism, characterized by a compulsion toward politeness and sociability and a subtler set of Newtonian systems. Dennis’s Remarks upon Cato is a defense of one vision of the relationship between the reading public and the state from the—ultimately successful—encroachments of another. Dennis hoped to preserve a model wherein the effect of reading was the direct instruction of citizens on their proper private behavior. Dennis’s opposition to Addison’s Cato highlights the division between Dennis’s older, more preceptual and didactic Whiggism and Addison’s newer, more discursive form. Addison used the existence of a reading, viewing public to inculcate a system of reading that would produce and instill the disciplinary structures and effects that Dennis sought to impose 42

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externally. Later Whig writers transformed the process of reading into a generative site of indirect, self-sustaining instruction and discipline. In effect, Dennis wrote as though before the invention of public discourse, and Addison wrote as though it were fully formed—or wrote it into existence.

Joseph Addison’s Perceptual Whiggism “United by Common Interest”: Mr. Spectator and the Development of Public Ties Joseph Addison’s prose, which I discuss here to the exclusion of Cato and his poetry, advances precepts more indirectly than Dennis’s.39 Where Dennis is directly didactic, Addison is reforming. He looks to inculcate, rather than prescribe, social practices and structures of thought. The overall disciplinary goal—to shape the way citizens behave in order to improve the well-being of the Commonwealth—remains unchanged. “The periodical essays of the Tatler and the Spectator are the intellectual fruits of Dennis’s theories about literary merit and literary criticism,” Abigail Williams argues.40 The purview of The Spectator is the regulation of the world within the reader, the incremental cultivation of refined sensibilities in art, dress, music, taste, and, above all, behavior. Whether from the pen of Addison or Richard Steele, The Spectator relied on “the subtler powers of participation and persuasion.”41 The fine discrimination and standards of taste that The Spectator modeled in action were designed to be imitated by its readers.42 The first number of The Spectator introduces the speaker by “observing” that “a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure ‘till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature.”43 The bodily existence of Mr. Spectator, however, is hard to pin down: he is mistaken in turn for a ghost, a Catholic priest, a Jew and a Jesuit; his physical presence evades description, which is precisely as Mr. Spectator likes it: There are so many Gratifications attend this publick sort of Obscurity, that some little Distastes I daily receive have lost their Anguish; and I did the other day, without the least Displeasure overhear one 43

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say of me, That strange Fellow, and another answer, I have known the Fellow’s Face for these twelve Years, and so must you; but I believe you are the first ever asked who he was. There are, I must confess, many to whom my Person is as well known as that of their nearest Relations, who give themselves no further Trouble about calling me by my Name or Quality, but speak of me very currently by Mr what-d-ye-call-him.44

Mr. Spectator is compensated for this peculiar bodily anonymity by “beholding all Nature with an unprejudiced Eye” (Spectator, no. 4). Mr. Spectator’s capacity to observe is unparalleled and seems to outstrip the human sensorium: “Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Child’s; and, while I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-Man, over-hear the Conversation of every Table in the Room” (Spectator, no. 1). Mr. Spectator, then, it not merely anonymous; in some peculiar way he is not recognizably human. As Joanna Picciotto puts it: “it is essential that Mr. Spectator compromise his ontological status as a man in order that he may be used as an instrument.”45 When Mr. Spectator writes that “I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species” (Spectator #4), we can observe that “Addison and Steele’s persona was identified with an ideal spectatorial body, modeled on the artificial organs of the microscope and the telescope: a walking instrument of truth.”46 Mr. Spectator is an instrument—a disembodied “Eye.”47 The objects of Mr. Spectator’s observation are the talk, manners, fashions, gossip, and habits of London. By using The Spectator to see the London around them, readers are interpellated as both scientists and subjects in the laboratory of society, first examining the city’s mores as though in a scientific context, and then applying that scientific circumspection to their own behaviors. If “the world as seen through [Mr. Spectator’s] eyes is at once alien and familiar, like a mundane object placed under a microscope,” then the mundane (be it a flea, or contemporary fashions) is similarly defamiliarized by its mediation through The Spectator.48 In the final number of The Spectator, Mr. Spectator contemplates the perceptual possibilities that will be open to him after his death, bemoaning that his “Organs, in their present Structure, are rather fitted to serve 44

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the Necessities of a vile Body, than to minister to his Understanding.”49 The future state of his soul, Mr. Spectator hopes, will enable him to achieve a pure and disembodied perception, in which the universe is transformed into his limitless laboratory: he will be able “to remove from Object to Object, and from World to World; and be accommodated with Senses, and other Helps, for making the quickest and most amazing Discoveries.” (Spectator, no. 635). Sir Isaac Newton, he writes, is one such “Genius,” capable of discerning the laws that govern the spaces he observes. Mr. Spectator aims to “observe the Dependance of the Parts of each System, and (if our Minds are big enough to grasp the Theory) of the several Systems upon one another, from whence results the Harmony of the Universe” (Spectator, no. 35). Mr. Spectator’s ultimate goal is to perceive, in a distinctly Newtonian way, this nesting interdependence of systems. In this way, The Spectator is a more subtle disciplinary tool than any of Dennis’s works; rather than employing Dennis’s top-down didacticism and moral instruction, it urges readers to regulate their own behavior by showing that the minutiae of daily life constitute the whole fabric of the state. As in Newton, the different social practices and behaviors that Mr. Spectator critiques are themselves parts that make up systems, and these systems, one upon the other, make up the Commonwealth. In an early passage of the Principia, gravity is remarked upon as “that force, whatever it is, by which the Planets are perpetually drawn aside from the rectilinear motions, which otherwise they wou’d pursue, and made to resolve in curvilinear orbits.”50 Newton believed (though he could not explain why, as we still cannot) that bodies generate attractive force proportionate to their mass. The work that gravity does to bodies in space—making them cohere relative to one another—is, in domestic government, the work of making a state stable and coherent. That attractive force that keeps bodies in similar positions relative to one another we can call “sociability.” As with gravity, citizens generate sociability, and their interactions with one another are enabled and regulated by it, just as planets move comets and the moon the tides. The Spectator is a paper devoted to observing this force and to theorizing its minutest operations and fluctuations, “the Folly, Extravagance, and Caprice of the Present 45

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Age” (Spectator, no. 435). Picciotto argues that during Mr. Spectator’s visit to the Royal Exchange, “While . . . bodies go about pursuing their private interests, sociability is, as it were, spontaneously generated.”51 Mr. Spectator is happy to see that men are “thriving in their own private Fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Publick Stock.”52 The mesh that these bodies generate, in which all are caught by the force generated by all others, is an ideal metaphor for a stable and universally participatory Commonwealth: “the several Parts of the Globe might have a kind of Dependance upon one another, and be united together by their common Interest” (Spectator, no. 69). Interaction creates stability and concord, and the laws of commerce and of social and commodity exchange create systems that describe citizens’ happy freedom as a spontaneously ordered emergent phenomenon of laissez-faire mixed-government.

The Pleasures of the Imagination: Making Beauty British Addison’s essays in The Spectator assembled under the rubric The Pleasures of the Imagination deviate from his usual observational style of incremental instruction, seeking rather to describe how visual perception (“observation”) brings pleasure to the “polite imagination.”53 Originally written as one long essay, they were subsequently printed in eleven parts (Spectator, nos. 411–21). The epigraphs to the eleven numbers show how they are designed to work together in a mutually reinforcing system. The epigraph to no. 414, from Horace’s Ars Poetica, reflects on the structure of the work as a whole: “Alterius sic / Altera poscit opem res & conjurat amicè” (“Each by itself is vain but together their force is strong and each proves the other’s friend”).54 Addison’s desire to emulate practitioners of the new science shows in his appending a table of contents to the final number of the series, although this could not have been relevant to any initial reading of the series, coming as it did a full twelve days after the first installment. However, the table of contents has much in common with Dennis’s efforts at taxonomy: it demonstrates the authoritative associative power of an organizing principle more than it does the actual applicability of that principle to the text it describes. An ordinal list confers political and cultural authority by dint of its scientific appearance. The aesthetic theory that Addison advances is strongly Whiggish and includes 46

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movements toward theodicy, rhetoric with nationalist associations, and evocations of the Royal Society. In no. 413, Addison constructs a theodicy that depends on pleasure. Addison writes that God has annexed a secret pleasure to the idea of anything that is new or uncommon, that he might encourage us in the pursuit after knowledge, and engage us to search into the wonders of his creation; for every new idea brings such a pleasure along with it, as rewards any pains we have taken in its acquisition, and consequently serves as a motive to put us upon fresh discoveries. He has made everything that is beautiful in our own species pleasant, that all creatures might be tempted to multiply their kind and fill the world with inhabitants; for . . . unless all animals were allured by the beauty of their own species, generation would be at an end, and the earth unpeopled.55

For Addison, virtue, the glorification of God and the betterment of the Commonwealth are by-products of the pursuit of pleasure, just as the public good of sociability in the Exchange is a by-product of the individual pursuit of commerce. Like Bernard Mandeville, Addison proceeds from the assumptions that social actors pursue their private interests (pleasure) and that public goods (virtue, religion, a thriving state) are secondary to that pursuit. (This is the opposite of Dennis’s understanding of that hierarchy.) The public that Addison inhabits is irrecoverably polyvocal. For Addison and later Whigs, any proposal or philosophy that ignored the fact that sociability dominated work as well as play in the 1710s would have been simply irrelevant.56 Rather than opting for explicit competition, Addison obliquely invokes British national sentiment by using other nations as comparative examples. The Spectator, no. 415, which contains Addison’s excursus on pleasure in architecture, includes these passages: In Egypt we still see their pyramids, which answer to the descriptions that have been made of them; . . . The wall of China is one of these Eastern pieces of magnificence, which makes a figure even in 47

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the map of the world, although an account of it would have been thought fabulous, were not the wall itself still extant. We are obliged to devotion for the noblest buildings that have adorned the several countries of the world. It is this which has set men at work on temples and public places of worship, not only that they might, by the magnificence of the building, invite the Deity to reside within it, but that such stupendous works might, at the same time, open the mind to vast conceptions, and fit it to converse with the divinity of the place. . . . Let any one reflect on the disposition of mind he finds in himself, at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his imagination is filled with something great and amazing, and at the same time consider how little, in proportion, he is affected with the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the other; which can arise from nothing else, but the greatness of the manner in the one, and the meanness in the other.57

In this passage, Addison is mindful of his own credentials as a veteran of the Grand Tour. He left England in August 1699, and returned in 1704 after more than a year in France and travels down to the southernmost tip of Italy and up through Switzerland, Austria, and Holland.58 Of the sights that Addison lists in this passage, however, he speaks from experience only about the Pantheon.59 The Pantheon is an important reference point for Addison, not only as a paradigm of neoclassical taste, but also as an artifact that represents Hadrian’s imperial prowess. “Hadrian’s building activity quite naturally strengthened the cohesion of the empire,” Thorsten Opper observes. “[W]e know that Hadrian held court [at the Pantheon]. The Pantheon therefore is not only one of the most famous buildings of the ancient world . . . but it also provides the most authentic glimpse of a purpose-built environment in which Hadrian acted on a public stage.”60 Hadrian faithfully reconstructed the Pantheon’s architrave to record Marcus Agrippa’s original inscription, in part to inoculate himself against the charges of vanity that had dogged Domitian, but also to associate himself with Agrippa’s father-in-law, Augustus. Even the materials used in the building of the Pantheon made it metonymic for the Roman empire’s size and efficiency. The gray granite columns of 48

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the portico were quarried in eastern Egypt, as was its porphyry. They were then transported to the Nile, shipped across the Mediterranean to Ostia and up the Tiber to Rome, and, finally, hauled from the riverbank to the building site. As a monument to Hadrian’s imperial nationalism, the Pantheon would have spoken strongly to Addison’s own ambitions for figurative representations of British nationalism. Addison’s goal in listing these architectural sights is thus not only to credit himself as an experienced traveller with neoclassical tastes, nor only to allude to Hadrian’s empire-building. The clear, though silent, object of this passage is St. Paul’s cathedral in London, the dome of which is modeled on the Pantheon. In a strong neoclassical style and with considerable “greatness of manner,” it was declared complete only a year before the composition of The Pleasures of the Imagination and was heavily reliant on the work of two strongly Whig artists: Sir Christopher Wren and Sir James Thornhill. 61 This early neoclassical masterpiece is dominated by the vast dome of Wren’s design, also the single most characteristic feature of the Pantheon. 62 The architectural style of St. Paul’s was a marked departure from the tradition of Gothic religious architecture in England. 63 Addison goes on to praise cupolas and domes as the most striking of all visual features. 64 In Addison’s list of architectural highlights, Egypt’s Pyramids and China’s Great Wall each correspond to the greatness of their respective civilizations. Addison’s inclusion of the Pantheon indicates that for him, it performs similar synecdochic work for Rome. Accordingly, a neoclassical “public place of worship” such as St. Paul’s, funding for which was finally achieved though a vast tax hike on the shipping of coal from Newcastle orchestrated by Whig politicians in 1708, was signal in its grandeur of the corresponding status of the whole of Britain. 65 Completed, St. Paul’s declared London to be the entrepôt of the modern world, as Rome had been to the ancient world. Addison’s peroration on architectural features leaves little room for doubt that he intends an implicit endorsement of St. Paul’s as the apotheosis of pleasurable architecture, and therefore of British state-sponsored architecture as a producer of national well-being. Addison closes by praising “these two perfections”—convex and concave domes—and reiterates his core criteria for finding a building admirable: he stipulates 49

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that it be new, “great, uncommon, or beautiful.”66 In the historical context of the freshly completed St. Paul’s, Addison’s desire to base his theory of architectural beauty on a British landmark is unmistakable. Moreover, the ramifications of this intention—that Addison founded a component of his aesthetic manifesto on the praise of a new British monument so as to imply comparisons with great empires of history such as Egypt and Rome—cannot be ignored. Addison’s praise of St. Paul’s, of Wren, and (implicitly) of the Royal Society’s goals to bring reason to the public is not limited to this number of The Pleasures of the Imagination. In no. 420, Addison discusses which “authors please the imagination who have nothing to do with fiction.”67 What follows is an extraordinary paean to the Royal Society: “among this set of writers there are none who more gratify and enlarge the imagination than the authors of the new philosophy whether we consider their theories of the earth or heavens, the discoveries they have made by glasses, or any other of their contemplations on nature.”68 This, and the praise for natural philosophy that follows, is foreshadowed by a reference in no. 411 to Francis Bacon, on whose authority Addison relies in arguing for the health-giving characteristics of the exercise of the imagination: “Sir Francis Bacon, in his Essay upon Health, has not thought it improper to prescribe to his reader a poem or a prospect, where he particularly dissuades him from knotty and subtile disquisitions, and advises him to pursue studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature.”69 Addison’s praise for the new philosophy in no. 420 is detailed enough that the work of individual scientists can be discerned: Nothing is more pleasant to the fancy, than to enlarge itself, by degrees, in its contemplation of the various proportions which its several objects bear to each other, when it compares the body of man to the bulk of the whole earth, the earth to the circle it describes round the sun, that circle to the sphere of the fixed stars, the sphere of the fixed stars to the circuit of the whole creation, the whole creation itself to the infinite space that is everywhere diffused about it; or when the imagination works downward, and considers the bulk of 50

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a human body, in respect of an animal a hundred times less than a mite, the particular limbs of such an animal, the different springs which actuate the limbs, the spirits which set these springs a-going, and the proportionable minuteness of these several parts, before they have arrived at their full growth and perfection.70

Addison imagines a fancy first enlarging itself by degrees through the concentric layers of systems by which the body of man is both dwarfed and contained; before shrinking itself into progressively smaller forms of life to find the very springs of life. In contemplating Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) and Newton’s Principia (1687), he says, “our imagination finds its capacity filled with so immense a prospect, and puts itself upon the stretch to comprehend it” (Spectator, no. 420). The concentric rings of earth, sun, stars are based on Newton’s work. The miniature limbs, springs, and spirits are recognizably Hooke’s, whose engraving of a flea and labelled illustration of a compound eye won him such admiration. As we saw above, the heuristic device called Mr. Spectator was himself modeled on these imaginative movements and the truth they revealed about successful political concord. Addison’s esteem for the new philosophy and the possibilities that it opens for the imagination are nothing short of a realization of the sublime: “But if, after all this, we take the least particle of these animal spirits, and consider its capacity of being wrought into a world, that shall contain within those narrow dimensions a heaven and earth, stars and planets. . . . Nay, we might yet carry it farther, and discover in the smallest particle of this little world, a new inexhausted fund of matter, capable of being spun out into another universe.”71 The importance of the limitless scope of imaginative delight and inexhaustible enquiry is that the politically troped work of disclosing the concordant, law-bound systems of the world might have, theoretically, no end. Addison projects a future in which the rule of the laws that the Royal Society has begun to discover expands unceasingly, and in which the stability and rightness of those laws becomes ever more indisputable. The Pleasures of the Imagination is a work of aesthetic theory of considerable sophistication. But it is founded on the premise that the 51

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propagation of British laws—whether natural or judicial—is of paramount importance.

Shaftesbury’s Sociable Whiggism Shaftesbury addresses his arguments to precisely how it is that sociability does its work, what that work is, and why it is so. Shaftesbury’s intellectual project is, as Philip Connell notes, responsive “to his evolving whig identity,” and his Sensus Communis gives evidence of his “cautious hopes that the political and religious gains of 1688–9 might finally be secured.”72 The whole makes a comprehensive thesis about how Whigs ought to comport themselves with one another. Virtue and Whiggish integrity are imbricated, leading inevitably to a just and stable society. Shaftesbury’s The Moralists begins with Philocles remarking of the lady Philosophy, “She is no longer active in the world nor can hardly, with any advantage, be brought upon the public stage. We have immured her, poor lady, in colleges and cells and have set her servilely to such works as those in the mines. Empirics and pedantic sophists are her chief pupils.”73 Nonetheless, Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times is a different kind of writing from The Spectator; where The Spectator can be aphoristic, witty, and brief (with papers designed to be read aloud and discussed within an hour), Shaftesbury’s essays are philosophical works intended for private protracted consideration. Nonetheless, Shaftesbury’s political motivations are clearly discernible. “As Shaftesbury defines the positions he will subsequently take . . . he maps his philosophical argument onto the partisan landscape of late Stuart England,” Jacob Sider Jost notes.74 Not only committed to making the consultation of Lady Philosophy a more publicly acceptable act, Philocles goes on to conclude that “as low as philosophy is reduced, if morals be allowed belonging to her, politics must undeniably be hers” (The Moralists, 232). Shaftesbury worked to reverse the traditional cultural associations of Tory and Whig allegiances. The Tories were traditionally conceded intellectual and cultural precedence: “their sovereignty in arts and sciences, their presidentship in letters, their Alma Maters and academical values,” while the Whigs were dismissed as “poor rival presbyterians . . . unpolite, unformed, without literature or manners.” There seems to be more 52

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than a little of Shaftesbury’s tongue in his cheek in that self-description, but about the Tories he was entirely serious. The burden of the Characteristicks, Shaftesbury wrote, was to demonstrate how the Tories were not just “corrupters merely of morals and public principles,” but also “the very reverse or antipodes of good breeding, scholarship, behaviour, sense and manners.”75 Shaftesbury refers to the role of the deity as the “Government of the Universe” (38), explicitly linking the political with the religious. As Jost points out, Shaftesbury “imagines the deity not as a judge or ruler enthroned in celestial majesty, but as a celestial Junto, coordinator of ‘the interest of every one.’”76 Shaftesbury advocates for the necessity of sociability and explains its operation. His remark that “[w]e polish one another and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision” is in a sense misleading, because it suggests that that process of polishing is random.77 In fact, Shaftesbury demonstrates that the operation of sociability is profoundly systematic; he argues for a nation-state composed of multiple systems operated in harmony by a consistent set of laws and values. “As for us Britons . . . we have the notion of a public and a constitution, how a legislative and how an executive is modeled,” he writes in Sensus Communis. “We understand weight and measure in this kind and can reason justly on the balance of power and property. The maxims we draw from hence are as evident as those in mathematics” (50). It’s important that these mathematical maxims—the use of which so strongly recalls the introduction to the Principia—are themselves deduced from an apparently a priori knowledge of the rightness of the political settlement. Shaftesbury says that the British notions and understandings of the political status quo are so solid that we can reason from them about the rest of society. From politics, he writes, we can deduce “a like sense in morals” (50). Shaftesbury predicates the possibility of civil discussion on a laissezfaire state, free from real or allegorical tyranny: “All politeness is owing to liberty” (31). The rigidity of the virtuous society that Shaftesbury imagines (to which I return below) is reminiscent of Dennis’s inflexible prescriptivism. But, unlike Dennis, Shaftesbury “attacked politicized religion . . . and urged rational conversation,” stressing the role of liberty 53

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in maintaining a balanced constitutional government.78 Shaftesbury contended that this liberty, and an allowance of unravelling or refuting any argument without offence to the arguer, are the only terms which can render such speculative conversations any way agreeable. For to say truth, they have been rendered burdensome to mankind by the strictness of the laws prescribed to them and by the prevailing pedantry and bigotry of those who reign in them and assume to themselves to be dictators in these provinces. (33)

Speculation has been rendered burdensome by conversational dictators. Shaftesbury’s choice of a political metaphor is heavily loaded, and suggests that the liberty to argue is a real, political liberty. (He implies that in that the conduct of that argument we can find a comprehensive guide “from the moral deliberations of the individual to the organization of the universe itself.”)79 Shaftesbury makes it quite clear that “dictators” have seized power, rather than being given it, because they “assume [reign] to themselves” rather than being elected or appointed. His suggestion is that the liberty to read and disagree with his own essays is itself a function of living free of dictatorship (the kind of dictatorship that Whigs feared from a return of the Stuarts). Wit and raillery, Shaftesbury suggests, are civilizing tools that facilitate the necessary process of disinterested debate. The winter before his essay’s publication in 1709 there was a threatened Franco-Jacobite invasion. Admiral George Byng’s fleet had prevented James Stuart’s fleet from landing its troops in Scotland and forced the Jacobites to retreat. The strongly political associations of Sensus Communis are clinched by this paragraph, referring to the prevented invasion, which appears close to the end: For though, in reality, there could be nothing less a laughing matter than the provoked rage, ill-will and fury of certain zealous gentlemen, were they armed as lately they have been known, yet, as the magistrate has since taken care to pare their talons, there is nothing very terrible in their encounter. On the contrary, there is something comical in the case. 80 54

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The inclusion of the thwarted Jacobite threat at the close of the essay demonstrates the liberty that enables debate is not by any means a naturally occurring state of affairs; rather it is one to be actively preserved. Whereas Sensus Communis addresses the “how” of sociability, Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit argues for its “what” and “why,” treating ethics as a systemic discipline separate from religion and worth pursuing on internal grounds. 81 Shaftesbury believes that we are ineluctably social creatures, and that “our moral nature and capacity for virtue are rooted . . . in our affection for others and our ability to overcome egoistic impulses in order to promote the good of our fellow members of society.”82 The more polite and refined a society, the more virtuous it is and the higher its attainment. Shaftesbury argues that social interaction is an inescapable component of statehood and that readers are thus compelled to follow his prescriptions for virtue: Should there be anywhere in nature a system of which this living creature was to be considered a part, then could he nowise be allowed good while he plainly appeared to be such a part as made rather to the harm than good of that system or whole in which he was included. If therefore, in the structure of this or any other animal, there be anything which points beyond himself and by which he is plainly discovered to have relation to some other being or nature besides his own, then will this animal undoubtedly be esteemed a part of some other system. 83

According to the logic of this passage, the moral value of an agent is indistinguishable from its ethical value. That value is determined by the effect that that agent has on the encompassing system. Moreover, any agent possessing any propensity for interaction (as citizens, for example, manifestly do) is contained within a system. Shaftesbury later argues that all systems interrelate and that this same logic applies to the relations among systems: any subsystem that has a deleterious effect on its containing system is itself harmful. A side-effect of Shaftesbury’s logic is that the political theory it spawns is rigidly conformist. He writes that all beings are part of the same system, and that individual ill acts have ill effects on the entire system in its largest conception: 55

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if the whole system of animals, together with that of vegetables and all other things in this inferior world, be properly comprehended in one system of a globe or earth and if, again, this globe or earth itself appears to have a real dependence on something still beyond, as, for example either on its sun, the galaxy, or its fellow-planets, then is it in reality a part only of some other system. And if it be allowed that there is in like manner a system of all things and a universal nature, there can be no particular being or system which is not either good or ill in that general one of the universe, for, if it be insignificant and of no use, it is a fault or imperfection and consequently ill in the general system. Therefore, if any being be wholly and really ill, it must be ill with respect to the universal system, and then the system of the universe is ill or imperfect. (169)

This is an ethics in which every act has universal consequences. According to this logic, any individual act of political dissent inevitably harms the entire state and all its citizens: “It has been shown that in this constitution the impairing of any one part must instantly tend to the disorder and ruin of other parts and of the whole itself” (230). The interrelation of parts and wholes that Shaftesbury imagines making up “the system of the universe” is less playful and flexible than Mr. Spectator’s imagination of his post-mortem perception moving from celestial object to object. Shaftesbury’s logic compels the reader to virtue in this lifetime, so as to bring about a harmoniously ordered universe, as though the heavens moved in lockstep with the hearts of British subjects. Shaftesbury’s theory of universal ethics and post-mortem ethics would have the same objective: the obligation to work to bring the universe into harmony and to keep it there. For Shaftesbury, postmortem perception would thus be the same as living perception, rather than the liberated and enhanced sensorium for which Mr. Spectator rather poignantly hopes. Shaftesbury’s ethics put virtue at the heart of sociability and define virtue as “the love of order and beauty in society” and “the prop and ornament of human affairs, which upholds communities, maintains union, friendship and correspondence amongst men, and by [it] countries, as well as private families, flourish and are happy” (191, 230). It seems that 56

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since citizens cannot but be sociable, the virtue of their conduct toward one another is of paramount importance. Shaftesbury makes sure to point out the ramifying effects of virtue on systems in which we are enmeshed without knowing it by putting “countries” before “families,” since the effect of virtue on family cohesion is assumed. Despite its authoritarian appearances, the moral law of virtue that Shaftesbury devises is designed to support the rule of law within a specifically constitutional monarchy, and so it is more properly “conformist” than authoritarian. After all, no monarch could be exempted from the systems that contain every “creature.” The political economy that this systems-based ethics necessitates is both mixed and equal: the legislature and the executive are all in accord, both as members of subsystems of the larger system of government and as private citizens, since “to have the natural, kindly or generous affections strong and powerful towards the good of the public is to have the chief means and power of self-enjoyment” (200). Of the three varieties of moral prescription that Dennis, Addison, and Shaftesbury practice on their readers, Shaftesbury’s is both the most oblique and the most forcefully argued. All three of them argue that the maintenance of the state requires citizens to behave in certain ways, and all three mobilize the intellectual machinery of Newton and the Royal Society to do so. It is striking, however, that though all three share suggestions in common, they each have their idiosyncrasies. This does not show that the Whiggish urge to systematize lacked coherence. To the contrary: each of these men was moved to the attempt, no matter how impossible a universal system might have seemed. This shows that the mode of systematization was itself the vector for party sentiment and the guiding principle of its philosophies. As a discursive mode, systematization took the form of the very ethic it described and to which it sought to contribute. In his adapted Boyle lectures, which aimed to reconcile Protestantism with natural philosophy, the final figure in this chapter, William Derham, offers perhaps the most heavily systematic overview of all.

William Derham’s Scientific Whiggism William Derham’s prefatory letter to Physico-Theology, addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Tenison, states that “having the 57

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Honour to be a Member of the Royal Society, as well as a Divine, I was minded to try what I could do towards the Improvement of Philosophical Matters to Theological Uses.”84 Physico-theology is a scientific theodicy whose genealogy came through Robert Boyle. 85 Derham’s aim is to demonstrate God’s existence and nature through an examination of the natural world, “in what I may call Mr. Boyle’s own, that is a PhysicoTheological Way” (vii). Derham’s erudition is much in evidence; in the first chapter alone he cites Cicero, Galen, Seneca, Robert Boyle, Hooke, Newton, Giovanni Borelli, John Lowthorp, and Bernhard Varen. Derham’s argument is the logical endpoint for our examination of Whig literary culture: it is a deeply systematic celebration and reconciliation of two cornerstones of the post-1688 state, the Protestant faith and the Royal Society, along with affirmations of a mercantile economy, virtue, and carefully governed sociability. The extent of Derham’s systematic approach to his argument shows even in his table of contents: using sets of parentheses to bracket off separate components and levels of the argument, Derham divides up the portions of his text that address the atmosphere, from those addressing physical laws of nature, the operation of the sensorium in different creations, the coats of animals, the sizes of fish, and so on. Most of Derham’s analyses take place on the fourth or fifth levels of this tree of knowledge. The first book of Physico-Theology describes the physical composition of the globe, and Derham spends about a third of it on gravity. Derham finds divine providence in the fact that gravitational force counterbalances the centrifugal force generated by the earth’s rotation. He evokes the metaphor of the unifying force of gravity: “as by this Power our Globe is defended against Dissipation, so all its parts are kept in their proper place and order. All material things do naturally gravitate thereto, and unite themselves therewith, and so preserve its Bulk intire” (34). Derham returns to gravity in his following work, Astro-Theology, which is a treatise on the nature of God as revealed through celestial mechanics. 86 In Astro-Theology Derham makes more explicit his debt to Newton, who “hath fully explain’d the Systeme of the World” (151), stating, for example, “that Gravity and Motion solve, in the most compleat manner, all the phaenomena of Planetary Motions both Primary 58

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and Secondary, is abundantly made out by the wonderful Sagacity of the great Sir Isaac Newton; as may be seen in his Principia” (148–49). Newton, and gravity in particular, exerted as powerful a draw on Derham as on other Whig writers. The continual appeal of the theory of gravity to Whig writers as a metaphor for free, law-governed sociability and therefore for the consequent naturalness of the post-1688 settlement partly lies in its other name, “the law of attraction,” or “the law of universal attraction.” That Whig writers like Derham were able to say, as a fact of nature, that gravity was “such a Property, as that every Particle thereof hath a Tendency towards every other Particle” (150) was a tremendous boon for a political literary culture dedicated to arguing for the necessity of lawful, virtuous, tolerant social bonds. Physico-Theology literalized that metaphor, arguing that “Of Man’s . . . Political, Sociable State . . . the Preservation and Security of which the Creator hath taken Care by the Variety of Mens Faces, Voices, Handwriting” (Contents, 11). Derham wrote that Our courts of Justice can abundantly testify the dire Effects of mistaking Men’s Faces, of counterfeiting their Hands, and forging Writings. But now as the infinitely wise Creator and ruler hath ordained the Matter, every Man’s Face can distinguish him in the Light, and his Voice in the Dark; his Hand-writing can speak for him though absent, and be his Witness, and secure his Contracts in future Generations. A manifest as well as admirable Indication of the divine Super-intendence and Management. (320)

This is an extraordinary passage. First of all, it is worth noting that Derham considers man’s sociable state and his methods of sociable interaction to be God-given, and therefore that they must be fully exercised. But the most puzzling aspect of this passage is the temporal modifier “But now,” which poses a problem of causal order. To make this passage coherent, we must imagine a set of circumstances under which even though the judiciary can testify to the past bearing of false witness, they no longer could. Now, writes Derham, in day or night, in the present or even in the future, justice will be served and commerce and law will be upheld. For 59

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all these conditions to be filled, there must have been a revolution in the management of the legislature such that commerce and courts now run smoothly and sustainably (“and secure his Contracts in future Generations”). Even though it is, strictly speaking, nonsensical to imagine that God only introduced differentiated faces, voices, and handwriting after the justice system had already suffered from deceit, the revolution in commerce and legality that Derham speaks of is recognizably the Williamite settlement of the rule of law, the foundation of the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, and Britain’s tolerant, mercantile prosperity. Derham’s own note on this passage supports this political interpretation of his providential recasting of the Revolution, observing that “To the foregoing Instances of Divine Management, with relation to the Political State of Man, I shall add another thing, that I confess hath always seemed to me somewhat odd, but very providential, and that is, the value that Mankind, or at least the civilized part of them have in all Ages put upon Gems, and the purer finer Metals, Gold and Silver” (320). Considering the use of gems and metals to buy “Food, Cloathing, and all other Necessaries and Conveniences of Life,” Derham notes that “those things themselves are of very little, if any use in Physick, Food, Building, or Cloathing” (320–21). Nevertheless, he argues, the development of currency and exchange value was providential, inasmuch as they find uses for otherwise useless items. But this affirmation of the use of precious metals and gems serves is also an endorsement of a mercantile economy such as that inaugurated under the rule of William and Mary; since God’s creation is designed to be used to its fullest extent, and since these materials have no other use except for satisfying vanity, it is a religious imperative to incorporate them into our social structures as mechanisms of exchange. Derham closes Physico-Theology with a justification of the whole endeavor: My Text commends God’s Works not only for being great, but also those curious and ingenious Enquirers that seek them out, or pry into them. And the more we pry into, and discover of them, the greater and more glorious we find them to be, to more worthy of, and the more expressly to proclaim their great Creator. (438) 60

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Derham—here echoing Addison—imagines future physico-theological work further explaining the works of God to men and discovering the greater glories of God through ever-deepening understandings of his creation. This accords precisely with Mr. Spectator’s desire to “Endeavour to improve my Faculties” so that he can “trace out the hidden Springs of Nature’s Operations, be able to keep pace with the heavenly Bodies in the Rapidity of their Career, be a Spectator of the long Chain of Events in the natural and Moral Worlds, visit the several Apartments of the Creation, know how they are furnished and how inhabited, comprehend the Order, and measure the Magnitudes, and Distances of those Orbs” after his death. 87 Derham’s closing aligns him with Mr. Spectator’s fantasy of universal vision and with Shaftesbury’s insistence on a fully ordered universe. The goals of each text are, at least avowedly, various. And yet the means by which that goal might be achieved are the same in each case. The allseeing, all-knowing, all-interacting Whig being that these texts imagine constitutes an important blueprint. Sociability, as it had begun to be practiced, depended on that being, and others like it. That public harmony— and its promotion— had prompted the Letter of Invitation to William of Orange itself. And that harmonious ongoing set of publicly conducted interactions was also an end goal sought by these writers. I suggested earlier in this chapter that public discourse came to be as a result of these writers’ work and the political philosophy they promulgated. Just as systematization took the form of the intellectual urge it documented, public discourse brought into being, sustained, and furthered the power of the people who gathered to make it. The authority that they established was self-sustaining and would provide a resource for the diffusion of authority throughout British society for hundreds of years to come. If my reader was enticed by the transhistorical promises of my Introduction, they might be forgiven a moue of dismay at this procession of close readings of historically proximate texts, as formally familiar as so many lukewarm pieties. But this is what it means for my argument to be deictic. Dennis, Addison and Mr. Spectator, Shaftesbury, and Derham together forged the variety of scientific, sociable, moral, religious and aesthetic bonds that secured and legitimated the Whig mixed-government 61

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state.These in turn constituted the conditions of possibility for the transformations I describe. These bonds manifest in the strong imperatives that the four issue for probity, devoutness, and logical rigor. And taken together their prescriptions constellate into a total system of personal morality, ethical sociability, and national integrity. These four writers are representatives of a broader discursive field, which contains countless writers, including philosophers like Locke and Hutcheson, proposers, propagandists, and poets from Blackmore to Charles Montagu, Stephen Duck, Aaron Hill, and James Thomson. 88 But Dennis, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Derham were among the first to articulate, the additive Whig political-cultural system for engineering the well-being of the Commonwealth, its present stability, and its future betterment in terms that were so deeply enduring.

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Chapter 2

“I love with all my heart” Jacobite Poetry in Manuscript

Following the Revolution of 1688–89, the newly exiled James Stuart set up court near Paris in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, accommodation provided to him by Louis XIV. His supporters in England, Scotland, Ireland and France immediately began to plan to restore the House of Stuart to the throne. And they would continue to plan for more than fifty years. But despite two major invasions (1715, 1745), two planned invasions (1708, 1723), and innumerable lesser plots (the assassination plot of 1696, the Atterbury plot of 1722, and the Cornbury plot of 1733), the Jacobites never achieved their goal. Immediately following the Revolution William’s supporters plundered literary forms from the recent past for the political potential they held. (This is a rare instance of political authority being first constructed from literary authority.) We’ve just seen how Ramist logic and the new science were convenient modes for Whigs looking to codify a set of literary practices that would autonomously generate legitimacy for the Whig regime. Jacobites too searched the literary past for tools they could turn to their advantage. But while Whigs needed to invent new communities of practice to authenticate new facts, namely, the fact of the legitimacy of the rule of William and Mary, Jacobites found what they needed in literature written on behalf of James II’s uncle, Charles II’s father, Charles I. Jacobites needed assert the priority of old facts: the legitimacy of the rule of the Stuarts. Cavalier verse from the Civil Wars and Interregnum offered Jacobite poets both a capacious and well-established array of tropes and myths and a well-understood genre system. This chapter shows how Jacobites used communities of practice to manufacture a wide-ranging field

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of appeals to reason and emotion, which validated, and were validated by, the communities who made them. Declared treasonous, Jacobites had to find ways to address these questions collectively, safely, and durably. “Loyalty,” for Jacobites, was more than a political tenet: it was a constellation of political, religious, and artistic attitudes expressed through a culture of coordinated practices. These practices were articulated and refined through poetry written and circulated in manuscript. To illustrate the full extent of the genre systems that made up Jacobite literary culture, it is necessary to establish the mechanics of that culture’s means of circulation. Accordingly, some of this chapter is devoted to unravelling how Jacobite poetry was circulated. I want to underscore the contrast between two respective motivations, Jacobite loyalty and Whiggish systematization. Systems totalize and subsume; loyalty characterizes the behavior of those facing the prospect of being totalized or subsumed. The difference between the two is evident in Jacobite literature. Whereas in the Whig case I have delineated a cultural impetus in broad brushstrokes, here I shall focus on the granular and particular ways in which that impetus was resisted. Whig writing used a set of heuristics to generate a set of practices, and I have often spoken above of Whig texts as indicating, or participating in, larger cultural and intellectual patterns. But the Jacobite literary case is the reverse of this. Jacobites used a set of practices to sustain a set of heuristics. Specific textual evidence for Jacobite resistance, motivations and desires is therefore needed. A coherent worldview undergirded that resistance, but it was articulated piecemeal, through indirection, irony, and allusion. This chapter brings together those pieces as well as the worldview. Chronologically, much of this poetry falls squarely into the gap in literary history that J. Paul Hunter calls “the missing years,” 1690–1720.1 But really, the scholarly neglect of Jacobite poetry owes to its politically engaged aesthetics—its purposiveness, its transparent instrumentality. In Jacobite literature, political and literary authority are coterminous. Discussion of Jacobite poetry in literary studies is almost always in the limited context of its moment in political history and as an artifact of an irrecoverably alien political culture.2 Literary studies is concerned, mostly, with writing not designed explicitly to endorse an external political authority. 64

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It favors texts that advance claims indirectly or through indirection. It is an animating irony of this book that in order to invest himself with literariness, Pope disavowed the instrumentality from which he derived so much of that literariness. We don’t, moreover, read Jacobite poetry because of how successful Pope and of Samuel Johnson were in constructing a field of literary and literary-historical values. Pope’s disavowal stuck. This is how literary history gets forgotten: we allow ourselves to listen only when one set of our subjects denigrates another. Jacobite manuscripts are almost never marked in library catalogs as “Jacobite,” but rather as “Miscellaneous Poems” “Songs,” or simply “Poems.” Only in those rare cases in which a donor specifically pursues Jacobite literature—as in the case of J. M. Osborn at Yale’s Beinecke Library—are Jacobite manuscripts cataloged as such. This isn’t about advancing a claim for the superiority of one literary culture or another. The whole point is to expose the histories of forgotten texts, forgotten because partisan, that were co-opted to make what we now consider a non-partisan literary history. Among Pope’s greatest achievements is that his debt to Jacobite poetics is forgotten.3 Paul Monod, for instance, writes that “Jacobite verse contributed little to the ‘great tradition’; most of it would have made Pope cringe.”4 I am interested in showing the historical contingency and derivation of these judgments.5 Pope certainly was the consummate print professional that we imagine him to be, but he was also obsessive about the presentation of his manuscripts, about who had access to them and who kept them, and about how they circulated. 6 He cared about the print side of his literary life, but also taught himself to write like a professional scribe.7 As Hone notes, “the more ambitious poems often have separate manuscript title pages,” and Pope’s penmanship “precisely imitates the swashes, serifs and ligatures of printed type.”8 Pope is famous as an imitator of Horace, and Jacobite poetry was the most recent prior participant in the history of Horatian imitations. Jacobite poetry mixed delicate ironies and a sense of belatedness with vicious, scurrilous, and obscene ad hominem attacks. It was radically topical. But the best pieces also transcend that topicality and are satires with enduring force. The culture of Jacobite manuscript poetry was primarily dedicated 65

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to sustaining the harmony and cohesion of a small group of disenfranchised citizens who felt that their interests were not represented by the government. Jacobite poetry described, and thus created, an in-crowd out of a group that felt itself to be generally excluded. James II converted to Catholicism in 1672, and the birth of James’s son in 1688, whose succession would have meant the institution of a Catholic Stuart line, was a catalyst for the invitation to William.9 The instability and fragility of the post-Revolution settlement meant that the Williamite regime was especially vigilant for signs of subversive literature. Written invitations to James to return from exile were treasonable acts, and were prosecuted as such. The pillorying of Joseph Browne for his authorship of The Country Parson’s Advice is an example of how severely seditious libel was treated, let alone high treason.10 Poetry that avowed what Jacobite poets wanted to avow therefore had to be circulated surreptitiously. Printers caught in possession of printed Jacobite documents had their presses broken up and were fined or imprisoned. The only sustainable option for the continued circulation of Jacobite verse was scribal publication. Until quite recently there were few full-length studies of eighteenthcentury poetry in manuscript aside from Harold Love’s work on scribal publication and his thorough study of manuscript and clandestine satire through 1702. The difficulty of knowing that the materials exist, let alone of accessing them, has hindered such work. And with neglect, too, has come disdain. Monod’s pronouncement that “[t]he Jacobite Muse was clothed in doggerel, and her music was crude” is not unusual.11 Nor is his dismissal of Jacobite poetry as “the scribblings of lesser versifiers . . . an embarrassment rather than a national treasure.”12 Murray Pittock’s Poetry and Jacobite Politics gives a broad overview of the culture of Jacobite poetry that existed in print from 1688 to the 1820s, but Pittock’s reliance on printed sources limits the literary texts available to him.13 Using archives in England, Scotland, and the United States, this chapter illuminates the culture of Jacobite poetry in manuscript between 1688 and 1730 and shows how it mediated first political and then literary authority.

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Seeing “that Heavenly Face” Close to the beginning of an ornate quarto volume in the Beinecke Library at Yale, the curious reader will find a poem titled, “Upon Seeing King James’s Picture, By a Lady.” Manuscript poetry comprises the whole volume, all of it in support of the Jacobite cause. The poem runs as follows: What Briton can survey that Heavenly Face And doubt it being of ye Martyr’s race? Ev’ry fine feature does his birth declare The Monarch and the Saint are shining there. His face the boldest Whigg would sure convince It speaks at once the Stuart and the Prince. O! Glorious Gentle, ‘tis evidently plain By thy Majestick Eyes thou’rt born to Reign. My heart bleeds when I view thy noble Shade, And grieves it cannot bring thee better aid. I on no other terms a man wou’d be, But to defend thy Glorious Cause and thee. For both I should be proud my Life to loose, But now can only Serve thee with my Muse. O were my Pen a Sword, that I might fight Instead of verse, I’d vindicate thy Right.14

This poem illustrates striking characteristics of much Jacobite poetry. Despite its ardent devotion to the would-be Stuart king, its call to action is couched in the conditional and subjunctive moods. Jacobite poetry is many things: witty, ribald, hackneyed, silly, satirical, and memorable. But it is also frequently awash in belatedness. The whole scene is one of detachment and ineffectuality: the poet is a woman, can only wield a pen not a sword, writes verse rather than righting wrongs, and looks not on James but on a picture of him. The impossibility of transmuting a pen to a sword, or of changing the author’s sex, bespeaks the corresponding impossibility of converting a Whig into a Jacobite. The point being that a Whig wouldn’t see this picture of James and be suddenly convinced of James’s divine right to rule; nor would a Whig viewer give intrinsic value

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to aristocratic features. A Whig might see a disgraced ruler reduced to ineffectual plotting. This poem, like so much Jacobite poetry, contains within itself the conviction that the cause for which it advocates will never succeed.15 When Pittock suggests that Jacobite poetry is written in “a tongue which . . . betokened the exclusion it lamented,” he pinpoints the way that it enacts the disenfranchisement and alienation it was written to counteract.16 In chapter 1, we saw that in the immediate aftermath of the revolution of 1688, Williamites moved to create a conceptual and discursive undergirding for the Whig ascendancy. The arguments by which the rule of William and Mary was to be braced were themselves contained in a holist structuring structure: the ambition of Whiggish Williamites to bind together discursive practices pertaining to every facet of national culture and society. All those arguments were discovered not only to be incidentally Williamite in their proper rehearsal, but to conform to the necessity of an elective monarchy, as opposed to a dynastic one, on a structural, even procedural, level. Even the relation of these arguments to one another and their overall distribution were governed by the totalizing logic of Whig strategy. The genre system encompassing Jacobite manuscript poetry had even more work to do for its users. And in ways that we shall explore, it was a system that began to work against itself: Restoration, its ultimate goal, implied the extinction of the system advocating for it. A poetic culture agitating for its own disestablishment must have some significant ambivalences, and discussion of Jacobite manuscript poetry here concludes by considering this perverse ontology. The story of Jacobite manuscript poetry is hard to uncover. Poets and readers alike tried to hide their identities. As Howard Erskine-Hill writes: Traditionally considered from a one-eyed British perspective, [Jacobitism] has seemed no more than a series of disconnected, smallscale and unsuccessful rebellions which historians retrospectively supporting the Whig project for Britain have had little difficulty in representing as doomed, atavistic enterprises. Since the Whig leadership managed to stay more or less in the saddle during the dangerous 68

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period between 1689 and 1760, Jacobite records remaining within the British kingdoms are relatively sparse. Preserving them, after all, could easily cost you your life.17

Lawrence Lipking reminds us that Jacobites lived under conditions of surveillance that carried real consequences: “the danger of punishment, the iron hand of censorship, the watchfulness of the authorities . . . drove the party of the Stuarts underground.”18 These conditions had both material and poetic consequences. The sheets on which manuscript poetry circulated were routinely scoured of identifying marks in order to make them anonymous. Letters had their addresses encoded, obscured, or written in Latin. Some avoided sending these poems by post entirely, preferring to send “separates,” individual leaves of paper, privately via servants or messengers. The secrecy required by this poetry changes the way meaning is communicated and alters the fabric of the verse itself. Like Cavalier poetry before it, Jacobite poetry relied heavily on typologies, usually drawn from classical history and literature. It employed anagrams, acrostics, puzzles, codes, and literary games. It always rhymed and was usually metrically regular. Because the literary culture was secret, and its object was always known, Jacobite manuscript poetry developed modes of reference—sometimes typological, sometimes not—whose referents were plausibly deniable to an outside reader but unmistakable to a member of the Jacobite community.19 Hone summarizes the general referential manner of Jacobite poetry thus: Innuendo and ambiguity were key aspects of Jacobite texts. Careful interpretation is therefore crucial. Literary texts do not function in the same ways as other sorts of document; their meanings are often latent rather than inherent and require a certain amount of decoding. Contemporary readers were expected to draw unorthodox political meanings from seemingly innocuous texts by applying their messages to current affairs. . . . Particular readers would discover local meanings in seemingly ambiguous texts—could reliably be expected to do so by authors, who wrote with those specific readerships in mind, especially when manuscript circulation was involved.20 69

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Moreover, knowing the referent of a text created in readers a literary corollary of the political imperative that united Jacobite culture. A text’s allusions and ironies were formal literary embodiments of political actuality; their indirections conditions of political necessity. Being a member of the community of practice that circulated these texts carried with it the very strong implication of membership in an aesthetic, interpretative community. Despite the conditions of existence of that community implying profound exclusion, the self-selecting and self-reinforcing aesthetic authority that sustained the community lent it a patina of exclusiveness. In this way, Jacobite manuscript culture manufactured its own politicalliterary authority, not only as a counter-public, but as a counter-public peopled entirely by citizens of rarefied, aristocratic taste.

What Was the Community of Jacobite Poetry? In 1691, the exiled James II was presented with what is now labeled a “Collection of Loyal Poems, Satyrs and Lampoons.” The volume is vast, with over 600 pages of satire and professions of Jacobite loyalty, and 217 individual poems. In fact, this manuscript, Osborn b. 111, is our only known source for about 100 poems. Given its sheer size and the expense of its production, it seems to resemble what Love, in Restoration English Satire, 1660–1702, calls “the dinosaurs of scribal circulation”: a vast, maximalist volume that seemed impossible to exceed and, far from announcing the vibrancy of the scribal culture that produced it, heralded its death. Osborn b. 111 was part of a new, cohesive manuscript culture that thrived from about 1688 to 1745, when it lapsed from a political into an antiquarian culture. Having examined over 300 manuscripts whose contents I judged to be predominantly Jacobite, I selected the seven volumes that held the most poems, and used them to build an indexical record of the culture’s poems. I then created a network visualization showing the connections between those manuscripts. The graph suggests that Jacobite poetry in manuscript existed in at least two separate communities that were only loosely connected. One clearly discernible hub is Osborn b. 111; another is Bodley Rawlinson Poet. 155.21 There is more than one isolated cluster of manuscripts which are connected to one another, and 70

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nowhere else: these are manuscripts which share a single poem found in another volume. The graph is notably multipolar, with strong coalescences around Osborn b. 111, a cluster comprised of Osborn fc. 58, British Library Add. 29981, Osborn c. 570/1, and Bod. Rawl. Poet 155, and other poles like BL Landsdowne 852. This striking multipolarity is borne out by the fact that of the 328 manuscripts, the most connected manuscript (Osborn b. 111) only shares poems with 170 other manuscripts. This is a markedly diffuse culture. Another way to register this fact is that of the 604 poems found in the seven “seed” volumes, 243 (40%) only appear in one manuscript. Two of the major hub manuscripts, Bodley Rawlinson Poet. 155, and Osborn b. 111, were indisputably produced by professional scribes. Owing to the demands on the time of scribes to make their activities profitable, it is profoundly unlikely that the scribes producing these manuscripts composed these poems themselves. The corollary is that the surviving unique instances of poems found in large volumes are likely copies whose originals were destroyed. Since the volumes that contain uniques tend to contain many poems, and to be scribal productions full of copies, we can also assume that these volumes are to some extent repositories of material originally transmitted as separates. In fact, the high number of uniques, poems appearing in only one manuscript, serves to show us how much of the material of this culture has actually been lost or destroyed. Love casts light on why this might be: “Once related materials had been gathered as bundles of separates, it was often convenient for their owners to copy them into a bound ‘paper book’, after which the originals might well be abandoned to the kitchen or the privy. The indexed, fair-written volume . . . [was] in every way easier to use than what [it] replaced.”22 Simply, it was far easier to read a volume in a fair hand and (as we shall see later) less incriminating to possess one. So we must be careful with the impression I gave earlier of “two cultures” of Jacobite poetry, separated in time and in poetic corpus, linked only by The Ambodexter. The two most “central” nodes in the network of poems, as they share interrelations through manuscripts, are the Ambodexter and a second, less successful Ambodexter—a poem that only appears in two manuscripts, but which in so doing behaves as a hinge 71

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between the two communities.23 Network graphs allow us, by measuring the facts emerging from the relations among manuscripts, to narrow our focus sharply and with confidence in the social and historical accuracy of our decisions. This is not so much as distant reading as distant archival analysis performed to enable close reading.24 The truth of their relationship is far more distributed than a polar opposition around which two subcultures cluster. Whether this archive is understood as a set of material or of literary relations, isolated hubs are a persistent feature of our attempts to visualize it. Another way to put this is that few poems are held in common by the main subgroups of Jacobite manuscript circulation. The only poem present in almost every major manuscript is The Ambodexter, appearing in thirty-one separate manuscripts. This is one way of locating the material heart of Jacobite literary manuscript culture. The center of the material record may well not align with historical centers of political importance, but The Ambodexter appears in most of the largest manuscripts in the network visualizations I built.25 This poem in effect binds together the culture of Jacobite poetry in manuscript. Through the detailed analysis of its changing forms over time to which we now turn, and with the backing of the network graph of the manuscript culture, we can see that The Ambodexter is broadly representative of the culture at large.

What Was Jacobite Poetry in Manuscript? The Ambodexter is the most frequently occurring poem in the canon of Jacobite poetry, and the only poem to unite every subcommunity of Jacobite manuscript poetry.26 Considering the danger of keeping copies and the ease of disposing of them, in addition to the more usual attritional forces of history, we must imagine that many more copies existed and that the poem was extremely widely read. There are four versions of the poem. The first predates James II. The second dates from the reign of William III, the third from that of George I, and the last from that of his son, George II. Appropriately, considering the cyclicality of time central to many Jacobite poems, The Ambodexter has its origins in the civil wars.27 A terminus a quo for the date of the poem can be deduced from Osborn b. 52, 72

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volume two; the collector of that manuscript, Sir John Pye, died in 1684. The poem reads as follows: I love with all my heart

The loyal Cavaleere

The Independent part

So hatefull doth appeare

My Conscience gives consent

To be on Charles his side

To obey the Parliament

I ever have deny’d

The Roundheads now you see

They shall be put to flight

They shall true Justc see

Wch for King Charles do fight

For righteous is the Cause

To fight for such a King

The fight for Roundheads lawes

Will Englands ruine bring

This is my mind & heart -

In this opinion I

Though none will take my part

Resolve to live & dye28

This is the basic form of all versions of The Ambodexter. When read as two poems in trimeter, the meaning is politically orthodox; when read as one poem in Alexandrines with internal rhyming as well as end-rhyming, it is politically subversive.29 The content of the poem, particularly “The Roundheads now you see They shall be put to flight” implies that the poem is spoken during the Civil War, but the fact that royalists referred to Charles I’s son as Charles II immediately upon his father’s death means that the poem could apply at any point from 1642 to 1660. The second version of The Ambodexter is found in Yale Osborn b. 111. The volume is usually dated from 1689–93, though internal evidence suggests 1692–93 as the most likely specific date. I Love with all my heart

The Loyall Party here

The Prince of Orange part

Most hatefull does appear,

And for the Parliament

I ever have deny’d

My Conscience gives consent

To be of JAMES’s Side,

For Righteous is the Cause

To fight for such a King

To Fight for Orange’s Laws

Will England’s ruin bring

This is my mind and heart

In this opinion I

Tho’ none do take my part

Resolve to Live and Dye.30

The “heart”/”part” rhyme stays constant, but the obsolescence of “Cavalier” means that a new rhyme needs to be found for “appear.” That 73

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F i g u r e 1 . Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborn b. 111, p. 527, showing the second major form in which The Ambodexter circulated.

“loyal” perseveres as a principal descriptor—especially in opposition to “the Parliament”—serves as an index of the extent to which early Jacobites perceived themselves as the inheritors of Civil War Royalism. This version of the poem is shorter, omitting lines 4–5 from the earlier version. While this alteration seems to entail the loss of no significant semantic content, by dropping the key word “obedient,” the poem neatly sidesteps the bugbear of the early Jacobite cause: the 1688 Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy to William and Mary. The phrase “To obey the Parliament” had a come into a specific meaning in 1692 that it had not possessed fifty years earlier. For a speaker to claim that “To obey the Parliament I ever 74

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have denied” was to make a pointed claim to be nonjuring, which not all who felt Jacobite sympathies were. The change between the earliest version and this second iteration additionally shows the extent of Jacobites’ alienation from the apparatus of state. Whereas royalists felt loyalty to one institution of government over another, Jacobites felt disenfranchised by both the executive and parliamentary branches. The excision of “justice” from the Jacobite verse makes it less equivocal and more pessimistic; without the declarative “They shall true Justc see Wch for King Charles do fight” the assertion of righteousness that follows rings hollow. The third version of The Ambodexter dates from after the Act of Settlement of 1701, and most likely from after George had acceded to the throne in 1715: I love with all my heart

———-The Tory party here

The Hannoverian Part

———-Most hateful do appear

And for the Settlement

———-I ever have denied

My conscience gives consent

———-To be of James’s side

Most righteous is the cause

———-To fight for such a King

To fight for George’s Laws

———-Will England’s ruin bring

It is my mind and heart

———-In this opinion I

Though none will take my part ———-Will always live and dye.31

One key substitution is of “Tory” for “loyal.” Claiming that all Toryism was “of James’s side” was certainly false, but this poetic appropriation aggrandizes the Jacobite cause. The substitution of “Settlement” for “Parliament” names the new cause of Jacobite resentment, the 1701 Act of Settlement. In a way this substitution marks the victory of the Williamite administration: Tories were forced to participate in Parliament. The replacement of “Parliament” with ‘“Settlement” goes some way to explaining the wholesale radicalization of the Tory party in the first line. If Jacobites were to be forced to participate in the party politics that they felt had been initiated by the ousting of the rightful monarch in 1688, then playing up the magnitude of the Jacobite cause was a means of saving face. The existence of non-Jacobite Tories implied that some who self-identified as Tories also accepted the Hanoverian succession (while still differing with Whigs about matters of foreign or economic policy, for 75

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example). This act of re-centering the Tory party on the Jacobite cause is a tacit admission, in the context of the second version of this poem, of the fact that Jacobitism was beginning to become a fringe movement, rather than a mainstream cause. This third iteration is the most prevalent version of The Ambodexter.32 Of the manuscripts containing the version of the poem, only Osborn c. 160 differs in substituting “Stewart” for “Tory” in the first line. Other differences between the many copies of this poem are incidental: “To be for George’s laws” rather than “To fight for” (Osborn c. 570/1), “Britain’s ruin” rather than “England’s ruin” (Osborn c. 160) and “the Settlement” (Osborn c. 570/1, Bod Eng Misc c. 116, Osborn fc. 58), “that Settlement” (Osborn c. 160) and “their Settlement” (BL Add. 29981), each expressing a different shade of distaste or disenfranchisement. The final version of the poem dates to shortly after the accession of George II, as indicated by its title: OF GEORGE AND CAROLINE An Ænigma upon King Georg’s Coming to ye CrowI Love with all my heart

-

The DisLoyall Party Here

The Good King George’s Part- Most Hatefull doth appear And for the Parliament

-

I Always have deny’d

My conscience gives consent -

To be of James’s side

For righteous is the Cause

To fighte for such a King

-

To Fight for George’s Lawes -

Would England’s ruin bri-

This is my Mind & Heart

-

In this opinion I

Tho none doe take my Part

Resolve to Live and Dy33

The title’s reference to Queen Caroline dates this poem to the accession of George II, in either 1727 or 1728. That the Jacobites now refer to themselves as “the disloyal party” marks the drift of Jacobitism further out into the margins of political discourse. While the Jacobite party was truly “loyal” and the status quo in Britain an aberration, the return of James II or his son was implicitly a natural restoration of normality. With Jacobitism now (however ironically) “DisLoyall,” the hypothetical restoration of the Stuart line is troped as a deviation from the norm. “Parliament”

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returns in place of “Settlement,” likely because at this point the Act of Settlement was over a quarter of a century old and a thoroughly settled feature of the British political landscape. The speaker now denies “for the Parliament,” and his opposition of “James’s side” to the king and Parliament implies a further alienation, even suggesting that Restoration would be an act against all the executive and legislative bodies of the country— an act of war undertaken by an implicitly foreign body. Jacobites who shared this poem with one another were not just sharing a clever statement of fealty, nor were they only sharing a poem whose reading experience mirrored their own political experience. Reading and circulating The Ambodexter also reproduced elements of the secrecy of Jacobite literary culture. The poem’s transparent formal subterfuge declares the need for secrecy while making the “true” meaning very clear, inducing in each reader a feeling of seeing past the surface and into the substance of things. These readers of the poem were, however, selected in advance to perform this rather shallow form of deep reading.34 Manuscript poems passed between people who know, or know of, each other do not circulate in a public sphere. They are circulating within a closed community predicated on and sustained by that circulation of subversive poetry. To pass The Ambodexter around was both a sign of your political commitment and literary acumen and a sign of your faith in your fellow Jacobites’ commitment. It was a statement of one’s confidence in their abilities to “pass” in public, to see into the depths of things, and in their common connection—in direct defiance of the poem’s claim that “none do take my part”—to a group of fellow subversives and cognoscenti. In these four versions of The Ambodexter, we can see Jacobitism’s roots in Civil War Royalism, its later equation of William III with Cromwell, its slide into marginalization with the succession of George I, and ultimately its transfiguration into something akin to a foreign power. So why, among the six hundred Jacobite poems that were circulating in manuscript, was The Ambodexter the most successful and the longestlasting? A constant among all extant versions of the poem is its form: the two short poems when read vertically that form one long poem with the opposite meaning when read horizontally.35 The simple fact of this form,

77

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however, is not sufficient to explain what made this poem such a popular favorite. A second Ambodexter survives in only two copies: King William’s cause shall thrive

When the Sea burns

As sure as we’re alive

King James returns

Then happy are they

That are on his side

That King William obey

For Rogues shall be tryde

Our Good King shall Flourish

This year ninety two

And Rebels shall Perish

This Prophecy’s true.36

The reasons for this ambodexter’s relative failure to achieve popularity also explain part of its cousin’s success. A rhyme word of the final couplet (“ninety-two”) anchors the poem in a specific year, meaning that any later iteration of the poem would have to rewrite at least one of the last two rhymes. The sense of this ambodexter is also less intuitive; the pronouns “That” in lines three and four include an elided “They,” which is less obvious at a first reading. The present tense of the poem (“As sure as we’re alive King James returns”) also makes it less suitable for scribal publication. Since collectors of Jacobite poetry in manuscript would know the chronology of the construction of their personal aggregations of verse, a poem proclaiming success in the present tense would, practically immediately turn into a reminder of failure. A poem proclaiming success in the future is much more effectively proofed against time. By using the present tense this second ambodexter also proclaims its own forthcoming obsolescence. While the more popular ambodexter explicitly profits from being in the future tense, avoiding references to particular dates and keeping its proper nouns and time-specific details out of the poem, it shares with the less frequently occurring version a distinct pessimism or ruefulness about the Jacobite cause. The copy-text for the second iteration of “I love with all my heart” is Osborn b. 111, the volume presented to James II in exile. The cover is stamped with James II’s arms, and W. J. Cameron writes that “my own impression is that [the volume] was designed to reassure the exiled court that a strong body of Jacobite feeling still existed among Protestant Englishmen.”37 However, the closing couplet of the poem bespeaks a profound sense of alienation: “It is my mind and heart—In this 78

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opinion I / Though none will take my part—Will always live and dye.” Rather than giving the impression of a reassuringly strong body of feeling, this couplet sounds a gloomy note. The most compelling reasons for the poem’s success lie in the form of the poem itself and the way that reading and circulating the poem replicated in miniature the experience of being a Jacobite in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. The poem’s form, of two poems read one way and a longer poem of the opposite meaning when read the other way, enacts the difficulty that Jacobites faced every day of passing as docile and obedient citizens without compromising their internal ideological disobedience to the apparatus of the British state. The full-length lines, when read horizontally, make up Alexandrines, which have strong French—and therefore implicitly Jacobite—associations. Furthermore, this poem enacts a fantasy that Jacobites can pass entirely, even to the extent of seeming positively Williamite or Hanoverian, while their behaviors or utterances can be sublimated into or contained by an overarching Jacobitism. Even juring citizens who took the Oath of Allegiance, under the logic of this poetic structure, could feel that their core commitment to Jacobitism remained intact despite their declared loyalties to the reigning king. Finally, despite the opulent physical presentation of Osborn b. 111, the truth was that the day-to-day experience of Jacobitism offered a bleak prospect amid increasing persecution of Catholics and harsh penalties for those, like Francis Atterbury or Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, accused of working for the restoration of the Jacobite court. The grim closing lines of The Ambodexter quite accurately depict what will come of the movement: not enough Britons will take the speaker’s part and the cause will decay into sentimentality and chiefly antiquarian interest before the close of the eighteenth century. Many of the qualities that make The Ambodexter so typical of its culture are qualities that Pope capitalizes on at different points in his career. These include belatedness, heavy satire, and the deliberate cultivation of a community of readers for whom a poem would have specific meanings not necessarily obvious to the uninitiated. However, The Ambodexter and Jacobite manuscript culture more generally display another thematic aspect common to Pope. Both produce poetry that 79

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repositions at its center a largely forgotten function of verse: communication. Rather than being aloof or self-contained lyric verses, Jacobite poems communicate moral and political judgments with urgency and clarity. Although they can be polyvalent, Jacobite poems do not have the luxury of being truly ambiguous. Preserving the loyalty of readers to a particular way of seeing world—and to a particular way, therefore, of reading poems—was paramount.

Typologies and Doublings Another of the most popular poems in the culture of Jacobite poetry in manuscript was usually titled “Verses found on the Queen’s Toilet”: O Anna see the prelude is begun,

}

Again they play the game of forty one } And he’s the Traytor yt defends thy Throne

}

Thus Laud, & thus thy Royal Grand-Sire dy’d, Impeach’d by Clamour & by Faction try’d; Hoadely is cry’d up, yt does thy Right oppose, Because he crowns ye Mobb, & arms thy Foes; Stop ye Portentous Omen e’re too late, And view thy own in poor Sacheverells Fate: Fatal Experience bids thee now be wise,

}

Let one blest Martyr of thy Race suffice,

}

At him they Stricke, but want yr Sacrifice. } 38

This poem refers to the trial of Henry Sacheverell, which galvanized Tories and Jacobites between 1708 and 1710. The scandal boiled down to the fact that in a sermon at St. Paul’s some years earlier, Sacheverell had preached that William III’s accession to the throne ran contrary to the natural order, and that William had contested—and won—the monarchy. This sermon was so controversial because it challenged the orthodoxy on which the Whig notion of statehood was founded: that William’s kingship was both natural and naturally obtained, and uncontestedly so. Matters were exacerbated by the Whig mayor of London’s decision to print the sermon in order to publicize and incriminate Sacheverell. The trial became a cause célèbre and flash-point for Tory and Whig antipathies. 80

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This poem sets that contest in a historical context that compares Sacheverell with Archbishop William Laud, a royalist executed in 1645. The corollary comparisons of Queen Anne to Charles I, and of 1709 to 1641, cement the implication that the Sacheverell trial seemed a watershed for the future of the Stuart dynasty. The key rhetorical mechanism of this poem is typological analogy. By the logic of this poem, as Henry Sacheverell corresponds to Archbishop Laud, Queen Anne likewise corresponds to King Charles I. The poem’s argument relies on a typological imagination that expects history to repeat itself, which makes this a distinctly Jacobite poem. The return of historical events in new guises spoke to the Jacobites’ dearest wish: the return of a historical monarch in the new guise of James Francis Edward Stuart. One of the most provocative Jacobite components of the poem is its title, which alludes to a key scene of covert manuscript circulation. Different manuscripts, of course, offer different titles for the same poem and among them sketch out an idea of how covert circulation might have worked. One manuscript titles the poem “A copy of verses laid under the Queen’s Toilet”39 and others “The advice” “Left in” or “Left upon” “the Queen’s” or “Royall” toilet.”40 Other manuscripts title the poem “Found in” or “Found on” the “Queen’s toilet.” The titles that imagine this poem being left upon, or on, the queen’s toilet refer to the sense of toilet as the dressing-table before which a woman would sit to perform her toilette, the cloth cover for that table, or to the collective set of items used to perform the toilette (OED, “toilet,” 3, 2, 4).41 The titles that place the poem “in” the toilet could refer to the room in which that ceremony took place (OED, “toilet,” 6), or “in” could be durational: that is, it could mean that these poems were discovered during that ceremony. Laying the verses under the toilet would require “toilet” to refer either to the table, the cloth covering of the table, or Anne’s own clothes. In every sense, the transmission that this title imagines is transgressive and intimate. The fantasy of the title is that Jacobites are physically close to Anne, passing her loyal advice (and poems) in secret and guiding her on Stuart interest and security. Throughout the corpus, poets continually return to doublings, crossings, the image of the world turned upside down, parallels and types; The Ambodexter displays this confusion in its very form. Matthew Prior’s 81

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poem, also on the Sacheverell scandal and dating from between August 1708 and 1710, takes these doublings as its subject:42 Amongst ye high Churchmen I find there are several Do sware to ye merits of Harry Sacheverell; Amongst ye low Church too I see yt as Oddly, Some pin all their faith upon one Ben: Hoadly: But we moderate Men who our Judgment Suspend, for God only knows ^how when these matter will end: For Salisbury Burnet, & White Kennet shew, That Doctrine may change as preferments do goe: And twenty years hence for ought you & I know, It may be Hoadly ye high, & Sacheverell ye Low.43

The copyist who substituted “how” for “when” in the sixth line is aiming for a more revolutionary or apocalyptic resolution to the unpredictability of affairs of church and state than the poem usually asserts. This signals a pun in the last line. Though Sacheverell and Hoadly are respectively “High” and “Low” Church, it is possible that Sacheverell will be brought low and that Hoadly will be elevated. Gilbert Burnet and White Kennet were both prominent Whig bishops, so the poem’s true allegiance isn’t hard to tease out. Sacheverell condemned Burnet’s latitudinarianism, and Burnet voted against Sacheverell at Sacheverell’s trial. The quadruple rhyme that ends the poem, which marks a break from the couplets that precede it, emphasizes the poem’s marked certainty that disloyalty is rewarded (which belies the claim of moderation in line five). The accusation of disloyalty (“doctrine may change as preferments do go”) is made in a referential setting in which “Loyalty” has a very specific connotation of Jacobitism. The point of the closing claim is its very implausibility: Sacheverell would only ever be considered Low Church under a woeful misunderstanding—precisely what Sacheverell’s supporters contended was happening. This poem plays cleverly with the reader’s expectations: to a disinterested reader, it appears to throw up its hands at political instability in general, lamenting the vicissitudes of politics (“for all you and I know”). To a Jacobite (or Tory) reader, however, the proper elevation of Henry 82

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Sacheverell and the opportunism and apostasy of Burnet and Kennett are unmistakable. Despite the speaker’s claimed moderation and the balance of the opening four lines, the poem’s loyalties are silent but legible to the cognoscenti. Like other Jacobite poems, this poem relies heavily on the doubling and inversions familiar to us from The Ambodexter. Like that poem, this one also contains presentiments of the futility of its own cause against a backdrop of anger, ironic bitterness, and disappointment. The most important immediate precedent for Jacobite typologies was John Dryden. Steven Zwicker writes that, using typologies, “Dryden—like Virgil and Horace, Marvell and Pope—rendered universal the transient issues and partisan stances of the political poet.”44 Dryden’s key typological parallel was that of England and Israel, and of the monarch, to David. This typology was intended to “show the nation and the national leader participating in the sanctity of God’s providence” (21). The difference between typology and simple analogy is that while analogy points to correspondences between sets of events, typology refigures events in the terms of an everlasting, and divinely ordained, pattern. Typology, then, was more powerful for Dryden than analogy because it carried with it a normative political logic. Neither was Dryden the first to make this connection. John Milton had imagined the historical arc of human perfectibility as a motion “From shadowy types to truth.”45 Both Milton and Dryden relied predominantly on scriptural types for their political verse. Zwicker shows how scriptural typologies were more powerful than classical types because they underscored the divine right of kings to rule and modeled a just rule based on indissoluble bonds of kinship (as between David and Israel).46 However, Dryden stopped using scriptural typology in political verse after the succession of James II to the throne.47 Zwicker describes the normative work of scriptural typology in political contexts as a “coincidence of language, belief, and political realities” and reflects that “the ability of the metaphor to bridge the widening gap between political realities and political hopes diminished steadily, as did the political viability of the Stuart monarchy.” When William and Mary took the throne, they broke the metaphorical bond between Israel and England. Jacobite poets faced a crux: prior typological parallels connecting James’s blood to the rightness of his rule 83

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were less effective with his Dutch brother-in-law on the throne. How, then, could Jacobite poets use typological logic, which would speak to the future as well as the past, without bringing up the now-defunct types of Israel and David, since “willing nations” no longer “knew their lawful lord”?48 Jacobite poets found two main ways to circumvent these problems, and in so doing changed the shape of typologies in the political poetry of the future. They still used Christ as a type for the Stuart monarch, but overwhelmingly in the context of Christ’s martyrdom, which also gave poets access to the type of Judas.49 With the exception of Judas and Satan, other Jacobite typologies tended to be classical. The return to classical types had two motivations: first, classical typologies offered a comparably deep, versatile and rich set of tools to the political poet as did scriptural typologies, and, second, the historical arc of classical typologies lent itself conveniently to Jacobite poets lamenting the loss of liberty and the triumph of tyranny.50 Moreover, Jacobites not only took to classical typology but began to rely more heavily on the organizing structure of typological logic. This was sometimes as simple as offering a Latin pseudonym for a figure, and thereby making that figure into a type for future villainy. One such stock villain was Gilbert Burnet, who began his career as a Tory prelate before switching allegiance to the Whig party. After William III and George I, Burnet is the most satirized figure in the corpus: at least eleven separate satires target him specifically. He was lavishly hated, so much so that even his funeral procession was ambushed and stoned by Tories and Jacobites.51 The most frequently occurring poem on Burnet is An Epitaph on the Bishop of Addlebury.52 It begins, “Here Sarum lies,” and the final stanza reads: If such a Saint to Heaven has stole, And scap’d Old Satans clutches, We’ll then presume, there may be room For Marlebourgh, & his Dutchesse.

The poem, having condemned the Bishop “Sarum” links him by association with the duke of Marlborough and his wife, Sarah Churchill, Whig figures whom the Jacobites reviled. “Sarum” is the Latin name for Salisbury, which scans identically to “Addlebury”: the inescapable deduction 84

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is that the dedicatee of the poem is the recently deceased Whig and bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet. Typology here offers Sarum as a type for future bishops, and also offers the verse a kind of tissue-thin pseudonymity. There is a referential slipperiness to Jacobite typologies: they flicker back and forth between descriptive and predictive. For example, if Sacheverell is “a Laud,” and Anne “a Charles I,” then what happened to Laud and Charles I will happen to Sacheverell and Anne. When Burnet is represented as Sarum, it creates the type of a Sarum, into which type other people will later be fitted. The Jacobite use of typologies created precedents for future verse. For example, Nero the Second leaves no doubt as to its intended target: As Nero laughing saw fierce fires consume The World’s metropolis, imperial Rome So G—unpitying grinned & senseless sneer’d, When England’s capital in Flames appeared.53

The occasion for this poem was a small fire in London that occurred when George I was on the way to the opera. This cue offering a descriptive typology for George I in Nero: “Nero in Maskes, & Revels spent ye Night, | G—for ye business of ye Throne unfit, | In Plays, & Balls. and Junkits does delight.” London being implicitly the world’s metropolis, as Rome was in its day, and London’s ruler as frivolous as Rome’s was, the poem uses the logic of typology to switch into a predictive, or prescriptive, mood: Oh! Free born B—-ns since a T—-t Raigns Assert your Liberties shake off your Chains; Let us in Justice Rival ancient Rome, Let Nero’s vices meet with Nero’s doom. ——And speed’ly call K.——James from exile home.

In this manuscript, the last line is a later addition, making a triplet out of the original couplet, and showing a reader completing the logic of the poem, as well as the outcome desired. The logic of typology prescribes the rightness of George’s violent murder and the return of the Stuarts as 85

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surely as George and Nero both negligently let their cities burn. The easy legibility of the apparently encoded poem to its intended community of readers was an essential quality to readers of Jacobite verse—as it would be in Pope’s Horatian imitations. Other Jacobite poems, like “A Parallel between two noses” (comparing Cromwell and William’s noses, which may or may not be more than noses) or “The Parallel” use the same logic. The latter compares John Churchill, duke of Marlborough to Judas: Actions alike, alike shou’d bear the blame Judas & Churchill both deserve the same Both Sold their Masters, both alike endew’d With Love of Money, and ingratitude The difference between them is not great Hang but the Last, the parralells compleat.54

Churchill had been a gentleman of James II’s bedchamber and had defended him from the Monmouth rebellion. But he defected to William shortly after his landing in England, owing to “the inviolable dictates of my conscience, and a necessary concern for my religion.”55 According to the poem, Churchill is like Judas, and therefore as a Judas he ought to be hanged. These typologies depend on a kind of reasoning among alternates or correlatives; a poetic operation that mirrors the monarchical reasoning underpinning the Jacobite cause. Let’s return, then, to the poem with which we began, “Upon Seeing King James’s Picture, By a Lady”: What Briton can survey that Heavenly Face And doubt it being of ye Martyr’s race? Ev’ry fine feature does his birth declare The Monarch and the Saint are shining there.56

The vacillation of Jacobite typological rhetoric is here heavily ironized. While Whigs and Hanoverians are both vulnerable to satire couched in classical typology, James Stuart is not. James’s “martyrdom” is his metaphorical execution by an ungrateful people who have rejected his divine right to rule. Though the identity of this king is unmistakable in the first quatrain, 86

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he is never explicitly named. His face, indeed, is itself a proof of worth, both the symbol of and argument for his proper place at the head of the kingdom. This poem in praise of a face encapsulates a key device of Jacobite poetry: the face is alluded to, evoked, but not named because simply evoking a face names it. In fact, the lack of explicit identification (before “Stuart”) is itself an active indicator; James is always the unspoken referent. Moreover, to refer to James is symbolically to make the self-evident case for the rightness of his reign. This poem also, however, bespeaks the futility of typologies to persuade: if James’s actual face alone could convince a Whig, his representation in pictures or in poems will not suffice. Figuration, then, was a double-edged sword for Jacobites. It offered them a code whose legibility bonds loyalists together and preserves that bond by strengthening their modes of reading, consolidating the analogical connection between true referents and true kingship. It is, however, insufficient to persuade others to perform converting work in the world. Just as the picture on which the poet gazes would have no effect on a Whig, so too the poet’s “pen” is manifestly insufficient. And yet the poem praises the picture, a representation of James that remains a “Shade” and leaves James in William’s (or George’s) wake, a shadow king. Perhaps the extreme legibility to the cognoscenti that Jacobite art cultivated had also become an impediment to its ability to persuade the uninitiated of the validity of its arguments. The transparency of Jacobite typology, however, aligns it with contemporary Whig writing in one central way. We now perceive texts that limit our possibility for free interpretative play as less valuable than those with the capacity to hold multiple readings. William Empson asks rhetorically in his preface to the second edition of The Seven Types of Ambiguity if “all good poetry is supposed to be ambiguous?” To which he answers, “I think that it is.”57 If, as Empson writes, “the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” then by this metric neither Jacobite poetry nor Whig nonfiction prose have much to offer scholars of literature (3). Empson concludes that “most of the ambiguities I have considered here seem to me beautiful” (235). The beauty found in ambiguity, however, belongs to quite a different political context than that being negotiated by Jacobite and Whig writers. These writers did not turn to 87

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poetry to create beauty; the real political work done by their writing took priority over, and even precluded, a stance of supposedly disinterested aesthetic consideration. Empson’s terms—and many of ours—are not suited to describe literary cultures primarily engaged in political argument. However, poems that show members of a group speaking clearly to one another offer us unparalleled insight into the historical circumstances of their composition. One of the many toasts in the canon of Jacobite poetry was “A Health to the King in dialogue.”58 The poem celebrates the king and his cause, closing with the line “And he’s a fop who asks which King I mean.” The unspecified referent is always already known and decoded by the reader in Jacobite poetics. This is not necessarily a beautiful ambiguity; it is merely functional.59 In order to preserve the strength of its readerly community, and to evade casual censorship, Jacobite manuscript poets also had recourse to Latin (and, less often, Greek). Literary Jacobitism was markedly Latinate. Many Jacobite poems were in Latin and Jacobite poems were often Latin imitations. 60 Some poems would circulate on their own as Latin translations and some in parallel Latin and English texts. 61 In his work on “The Political Significance of the Anglo-Latin Tradition,” J. C. D. Clark concludes that “the classics were one means by which a [dynastic, gentlemanly] social order . . . came to conceive of itself and to resist what it defined as its enemies.”62 Of the forms of Latin verse, Horatian poetry represented an ideal for Jacobite poets in its mannered, urbane excoriation of corruption. Clark contends that imitations Roman satire in particular were Jacobite markers. 63 My observations of the manuscript culture support this claim: Lucretius, Martial, Cicero, Horace were frequently imitated by Jacobite poets. Almost every volume of Jacobite verse contained poetry in Latin, and Latin tags were especially popular for Jacobites. As Neil Guthrie notes, these quotations performed a metonymic, denotative function: “Brief Latin quotations could also be used as a form of shorthand; it was not necessary to quote a well-known phrase in full, for a few words might bring to mind a longer passage or an entire episode.”64 Indeed, these evocations work like typologies. Imitations of Horace in particular were popular with Jacobites; my survey of Jacobite manuscript poetry 88

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found Horatian imitations of the sixth ode of the third book, the fourth ode of the fifth book, the fourth and eighth odes of the first book, and of the sixteenth epode. Quotations from Lucretius and Martial were used as epigraphs to poems that were misattributed to Horace. For example, “Exeat Aula qui vult esse pius” in Bodleian Rawlinson Poet 155 is taken from Lucretius but ascribed to Horace; the poem is titled “Hor: Imitated.” Guthrie notes that often “lines from Horace are not entirely appropriate, however, which suggests that Jacobite publicists may not always have gone back to the sources to check the context of remembered quotations” (94). Clark records that in the mid-eighteenth century, “William King was one of the most committed and active of the English Jacobite intelligentsia.”65 King mostly wrote “in Latin of great technical sophistication” (37). When he translated his own work into English, he would, for example, make “inevitable use of coded language” and thereby introduce “the figure of a lion as a symbol of James III and of liberty itself” (37) as in Milton’s Epistle to Pollio. King’s speeches in 1740 were “a high-water mark of Latin rhetoric and a central affirmation of the values of a whole culture, but the political cause it expressed was already lost” (38). King forbade the translation of some of his work into English from Latin because he had sheltered behind the grammatical ambiguity of Latin at the critical point: “REDEAT simul magnus ille Genius Britanniae” (give back immediately the great man of Britain) and subsequent uses of “REDEAT” could all refer back either to a person, “magnus ille Genius Britanniae” or to an abstract “Astrea nostra, aut quocunque nomine malit vocari ipsa Justitia” (Our hope, or if she prefers to be called by her name, Justice). His audience would have been in no doubt. 66 King’s reliance on the fertile grammatical ambiguities of the Latin language was absolutely in line with the history of Jacobites cultivating a form of speaking to one another with just enough plausible deniability to avoid legal risk.

How Was Jacobite Poetry Scribally Published? In Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, Harold Love writes that “there are three main modes of scribal publication, which I will call author publication, entrepreneurial publication, and user publication. The first of these is self-explanatory; the second encompasses 89

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all copying of manuscripts for sale by agents other than the author; the third covers the vast field of non-commercial replication whose most durable outcome was the personal miscellany or volume of ‘collections’. The textual tradition of any one work will probably include more than one of these modes.”67 However, Love considers scribal circulation as largely an apolitical matter of courtly connoisseurship: “With a relatively small number of exceptions, of which the most notable is Osborn b.111, a collection of ‘Loyal poems’ prepared for the exiled James II, the surviving miscellanies are unpartisan in their representation of competing points of view. [They are] far from factional collections” (271). In many regards, the political motivations of Jacobite manuscript culture make it a poor fit for Love’s models of scribal culture. For example, the mode of scribal publication that Love considers most important, the authorial mode of scribal publication, is almost nonexistent in the case of the Jacobites. Love’s case study, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, could reliably begin the dissemination of his work through authorial scribal publication, and from there to “the entire Kingdom” via user circulation.68 As the poems became better known and more in demand, they would have been circulated through entrepreneurial circulation. Jacobite poetry differs significantly from Rochester’s satires, however scurrilous they may have been. In some cases, the author may simply not be known, and the circulation of these pieces of forgotten authorship will have persisted as long as they continued to be accurate expressions of some readers’ forms of Jacobite consciousness. But other authors of Jacobite poetry will have wished to remain anonymous. In some cases, circulation that was in truth covertly authorial will have postured as one of the second or third modes of circulation. Entrepreneurial circulation of Jacobite satire took two forms. There are collections that were evidently scriptorium products sold to the relatively small market of customers who could afford them (e.g., Bodleian Rawlinson Poet 203). These collections varied tremendously in size, sumptuousness, contents, and the degree to which they attempt to disguise their seditious nature. Other collections, while possibly scriptorium products, were produced for political rather than financial gain. Of Love’s three modes, “user publication,” in which readers of a manuscript copied 90

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it for their own reference, is the most problematic to apply to Jacobite manuscript culture. The user publication of, for example, apolitical lyric verse would represent a conveniently hermetically sealed case of scribal publication, a solitary activity insofar as possible. The object of Jacobite poetry, however, was to prepare readers for political action rather than to incline them to personal reflection. In this sense, all user publication of Jacobite verse is entrepreneurial: the circulation of these poems is never only a matter of connoisseurship. User publication of Jacobite poetry was by definition a form of political “entrepreneurialism,” in Love’s terms. 69 The “what” of scribal publication was also varied. Jacobite poetry in manuscript circulated by and large in units smaller than an individual volume, most commonly in “separates,” single leaves of paper bearing writing on one side, folded over, addressed and sealed.70 These individual sheets of paper were folded up for ease of transport and storage. Separates could be sent by post, wagoners, or by personal carriers, servants, or messengers.71 Once they came to a collector, they could be labeled on the verso by those who collected them into their volumes (or by a later anthologist).72 Anthologists would either bind the separates into a volume or paste each separate onto a large sheet of paper to create a volume of a uniform size throughout. Politically and thematically similar poems on small separates would also be gathered together and mounted on larger formats over paper. Often the passage of a single separate through a network of readers would involve several different forms of transmission. A poem sent in a separate by post could be bound into a personal miscellany that would in turn itself be circulated. In such cases the address on the verso of the separate would be wholly obscured, and any marks on the separate expunged, so as to leave no traces in the volume to be passed around that might provide a clue as to its origin. Alternatively, the subscription might be written in code or in Latin. Only if such a separate were bound into a volume not intended for circulation might the subscriptions be left intact. These extensive and various processes of transmission inevitably gave rise to changes in the fabric of the texts themselves. But so too, as we saw with The Ambodexter, did changes in political circumstances. Those poems circulated in person are unmarked, simply folded and 91

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F i g u r e 2 . Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson Poet 181 fol. 8v, showing a separate folded and labeled in a collector’s hand, and endorsed “For | Dr. FitzWilliams” in another hand. The red wax seal shows that though this is not a letter, and was sent by messenger rather than by post, it was still treated as sensitive by the sender.

labeled on the verso. Those sent by messenger have an endorsement on the verso, usually obscured by the recipient to anonymize it. Those sent by post bear an address (obscured in almost all cases), and often a postal stamp marking the day it was sent, along with the remnant of a wax seal (see fig. 2). The social practice and material forms of literary Jacobitism resemble the culture’s literary texts. The half-seen, half-obscured faces to which the poems, out of legal necessity, allude have a correlative in the circulation 92

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of Jacobite poetry. Those separates that were bound into anthologies would almost invariably have the addresses on the verso of the separate obscured to preserve the anonymity of the recipient, enabling the anthology into which it was bound to circulate without personally incriminating its constructor, the recipient of many individual separates. These obscured epistolary addresses, if they can be deciphered by an outsider, are only legible with great effort. They are correlatives of the half-ambiguous apostrophes of Jacobite poetry. Literary Jacobitism evokes the presence of a face and at the same time obscures its identity. For the cognoscenti, the mere fact of that evocation and allusion would make explicit identification of the face (as in the poem in praise of a picture of James II) quite unnecessary. Manuscripts that passed from hand to hand traced a network of politically affiliated sympathizers. This means that even with obscured, crossed-out, written-over addresses, the addressees were, if not personally known to readers, connected to them through other readers whom they knew and who could have vouched for them. See figure 3 for a pointedly different example: the countess of Strafford didn’t obscure a single one of her addresses, from which we can infer a good deal about her participation in scribal circulation. Collectors of Jacobite poetry also used their homemade miscellanies as sourcebooks for later anthologies. Richard Rawlinson, donor of the Rawlinson collection in the Bodleian library, is an ideal test case. Bodleian Rawlinson Poet 181 consists of thirty-two separates, followed by a thirty-page satire, followed by twelve more separates, then twenty-seven pages in Rawlinson’s own hand, and finally a solitary separate at the back of the volume.73 The final separate in the volume carries on its verso the subscription “To | Mr Hannam at | the three angels | in Cheapside near | Foster Lane end.”74 The separate is not postmarked or sealed, so it must have gone by private messenger. Three Angels was a toy shop run by John Hannam from 1712 until 1737.75 Hannam, who was also Richard Rawlinson’s banker, must have given this separate to Rawlinson. Just as in the “Queen’s Toilet” poem, the circulation of Jacobite manuscript poetry was a private social interaction that helped to maintain, or perhaps even constituted, the community. Notwithstanding the kind of change occurring in The Ambodexter and other poems, the process of 93

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F i g u r e 3 . Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborn fb. 108 fol. 127v, showing a wholly obscured address, the postmark SL/4, and the remains of a broken wax seal. Postal endorsements were routinely obscured because they were effectively public, whereas separates sent by messenger moved through essentially private channels.

copying and circulation was not perfect.76 Participants in Jacobite manuscript culture were, however, intensely aware of the imperative need to preserve the explicitness and persuasiveness of the poems that circulated, even if total accuracy was an unreachable ideal. For example, in Osborn b. 382, a separate bearing a poem carries a note from its copyist querying the reliability of its source manuscript (see fig. 4). The poem is about a Jacobite who trains his cat to show Jacobite sympathies. When the Jacobite

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turns Whig for the sake of his own advancement, he is unable to convince his cat to turn traitor with him.77 He therefore makes a martyr of the cat: Enraged at her Firmness he fetches a Rope, And hangs her strait way, as he would do the Pope, So poor Tabby was martyr’d; & for the Reward Of his Zeal the King’s Preacher the Parson declar’d.78

Following this, there is a final stanza bearing a moralitas: And now, my good Friends, if to wealth ye aspire, You must stick at no matter how wicked so e’er; In dulness, & ignorance take your Degree, And a Dean or a Bishop you quickly shall be . . . 79

In the manuscript, however, this final stanza is bracketed off, and beneath it there is a note in the copyist’s hand: “NB| Stanza 11th is in my MSS, but I think it is | not equal to ye other 10.” This note is so valuable because it shows a participant in the manuscript culture exercising (probably) his critical faculties to judge whether the text that has come to him is corrupted or not. What’s more, in the context of the rest of poem, the eleventh stanza is actually weaker. Though it might have been added to make the poem more explicit, the redundancy of the moralitas has the paradoxical effect of suggesting irony or equivocation. The virtue of the ten stanzas alone is their concision and clarity. The collector of Jacobite verse who transcribed this poem from a separate into his own volume deemed the eleventh stanza to be unnecessary. He knew the risks and rewards of scribal publication and was alert to their influence on the fabric of his texts.

Relics and Reliquaries: The Dilemma of Jacobite Materialism The fate of the material record of Jacobite manuscript poetry bears out the paradoxes that riddle its literary content. The poem “Upon Seeing a Portrait of James” finds a locus of redemption in the portrait upon which it meditates. The peculiar thing about this portrait is that its existence is evidenced only by the poem’s title; without that title we would assume that the speaker looks on James himself. The only hint that the “Face” 95

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F i g u r e 4 . Beinecke Library, Yale University, Osborn b. 382 fol. 4br, showing a textual note doubting the fidelity of the copy of the poem to which it is appended.

is mediated through representation comes in the word “Shade,” which could also imply that the speaker looks poetically upon, or apostrophizes, the king’s spirit. The transparency of this portrait as a mediating device between the king and its viewers implies something key to the perverse ontology that Jacobite manuscript poets described, and by which their culture ultimately perished. The speaker wishes the object she addresses into nonexistence; the active agent in this poem is James, who acts with transformative and salvific power through the portrait. The portrait is a proxy for the exiled Stuart, but the poem’s speaker would far rather that there were no proxy at all, that the object did not exist, and that by extension there were no Whigs to persuade, no cause to defend, no right to vindicate. The difficulties the speaker finds herself in are compounded by the fact that, for some reason, the theoretical Whig apostate she refers to cannot see the portrait. This is perhaps the most perplexing of the problems besetting her: objects, after all, have permanence, are tangible and visible. We must consider the “Portrait” of the title as transparent in another 96

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way: as a figure for the poem itself. The condensed blazon of the royal body that the poem offers is itself the portrait that cannot be seen. The last corollary of the unseen object of the title is that its material substrate too has a dual referent. The canvas on which the “portrait” is painted is the illicit manuscript bearing this poem. The “verses” found on the Queen’s toilet are crucially found there. Other poems are “Found in the House of Commons,” “Found in the King’s Bench walk in the Temple just after the eclipse,” “Found among manuscripts in Oxford,” “Found in some Lodgings” “Found on the church door in Whitehall” or “Fixed on King James’s Statue in the Privy Council.” These are sites of social exchange or a place of social, rather than commodity, exchange. It’s important to note that nothing is exchanged for the manuscripts; they are simply found, passed on, or let drop. Sale or commercial exchange are inimical to Jacobite manuscript circulation. Commodity exchange is predicated on the general commensurability of objects, which is incompatible with a theory of objects that holds that some—royal bodies—are categorically different from others because they are supremely agential. The second is the consensual derivation of value; easily consonant with elective monarchy, but quite opposed to the doctrine of Divine Right. But the fact that poems are so frequently found is rather subversive. Like the verses left in Queen Anne’s toilet, this kind of testament is circulated both intimately and in a position of great public import. In this context, the ontology of the found object becomes conspicuous. 80 To highlight the counter-case: for Locke the whole point of objects was their capacity for exchange. In paragraph 48 of the Second Treatise on Government, he writes: “what would a man value ten thousand, or an hundred thousand acres of excellent land, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with cattle, in the middle of the inland parts of America, where he had no hopes of commerce with other parts of the world, to draw money to him by the sale of the product? It would not be worth the enclosing.”81 Enclosure—possession—of an object is predicated for Locke in this passage on the potential for its eventual exchange. Addison rehearses and presentizes this theme writing about the Royal Exchange in The Spectator, no. 69. The circulation of objects Addison describes 97

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both performs Lockean work and prefigures Pope’s lines on the global trade in commodities in Windsor-Forest and The Rape of the Lock. 82 The interactions fostered by the Exchange are open; the free exchange of objects who seek their complements in connubial bliss stability and concord. The laws of commerce, and of social and commodity exchange, create systems that treat citizens’ happy freedom as a spontaneously ordered emergent phenomenon of the laissez-faire mixed government Locke had helped to rationalize. The Jacobite object ontology, then, was opposed to a Williamite or Lockean ontology. Jacobites rejected both Hobbesian mechanism and vitalism. As John Rogers has shown, vitalism’s belief in “material self-definition” had a strong corollary in “an ontological justification of the philosophy of free will.”83 Locke too looked back on “the vitalist ontologies of midcentury radicals,” and the vitalist “discourse of self-motion” also justified “the economics of the decentralized distribution of commodities” that we have seen in both Locke and Addison.84 Williamite and Hanoverian rules were supported both by analogy by vitalist arguments to popular sovereignty and free will and by the Hobbesian mechanistic thinking that held that the overthrow of a ruling authority always caused more harm than good— even though these two strands of intellectual history were once opposed. Conversely, Jacobites hewed to older justifications of sovereignty, including that of the king’s two bodies. When James Stuart left the English throne, the body natural was sundered from the body politic, with dire results for the health of both. The Stuarts’ right to rule was constitutional in both senses. The strongest arm of the arguments advanced by Jacobites (and by rare constitutionalist, non-contractarian Whigs like Robert Ferguson) was that the constitutional tradition of monarchical succession was a priori, and that any breach of that succession was insupportable. 85 So, too, was Divine Right a priori and inarguable. James Stuart was thus God’s anointed king, his rule was sanctioned by precedent since the Magna Carta, and the health of his body and of the nation were inextricable. This trio of religious and political assertions together constituted a powerful and self-sufficient argument for the de jure necessity of the rule of the Stuarts without recourse to any external authorities. These rationales for Jacobite loyalty were complicated, however, by 98

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some of the key modes of their expression. First, in voicing their dissent to the Revolution of 1688–89 and proclaiming their opposition to unlawful rule, tyranny, and exploitation, Jacobites found themselves deploying rhetoric eerily similar, at least on the face of it, to that of seventeenth-century republicans (especially in their opposition to “tyranny”). Second, by sustaining, and perhaps even constituting, the loyal community through the circulation of material tokens, Jacobites found themselves behaving, perhaps queasily, according to the vitalist theories of matter that had, in part, fueled that revolutionary rhetoric. Murray Pittock and Neil Guthrie have documented the manufacture, iconography, use, and ends of the material paraphernalia of Jacobite culture.86 These objects had a power ranging from talismanic to homosocial and many points in between. They were designed as vectors of political sentiment, to be sure, but by their very domesticity were also vectors of social cohesion, enablers of loyal social exchange, and were vulnerable to being themselves exchanged and circulated among families and communities who were then bonded together by sharing these symbolic objects. Jacobite manuscripts presented the dilemma of Jacobite materialism in especially sharp terms. They bridged the categories of domestic objects and reverential, supposedly transparent, vectors of royal presence. The materiality of Jacobite manuscripts can be divided fairly neatly into three types: the elaborate volumes like Osborn b. 111, Bodleian Rawlinson Poet 155, British Library 7317, and British Library Additional MS.s 29981 and 31152; individual “separates,” whether loose or bound together into a volume; and middle-ground vernacular volumes composed by men like Richard Rawlinson for their own use. The highest-status volumes are themselves something like relics: they each contain representative corpora, are lavishly constructed, and are objects of veneration. High-status manuscripts, which approached the status of Stuart relics, were largely produced by professional scribes for their customers. They were made as much for display as for use and performed no function of social cohesion or exchange. Unlike a fragment of a Stuart body, like a lock of hair or a bloodied handkerchief, they possessed no necessarily unimpeachable authority. They were often legal liabilities, containing unobscured addresses (like the countess of Strafford’s volume, 99

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BL Add. 31152, which includes Jacobite acrostics using Strafford’s name. As such, they could not be circulated. The lowest-status manuscripts are such perishable objects that their ontology seems unproblematic. Since most Jacobite poetry circulated in the form of separates (shown by the network graphs cited), but most of the remaining manuscripts are codices, most separates must have perished. It is the middle-status manuscripts, which make up the majority of the archive, that pose the thorniest ontological problem. Not ornate and precious enough to approach the status of relics, nor perishable enough to be innocuous, these vernacular objects form the backbone of Jacobite manuscript literary culture and are its chief bugbear. If the circulation of manuscripts was designed to keep the cause alive in a manner analogous to the circulation of blood in the royal body, Jacobite manuscript culture was a toxic transfusion. The perversities typified by Jacobite poetic manuscripts are fivefold. They are material objects that argue compendiously for one particular cause, but whose poetry contains profound pessimism about its plausibility. The manuscripts’ most popular poems, on which the strongest claims for a functional community might be predicated, are poems that foreshadow isolation and the failure of that community. Moreover, the circulation of manuscripts to strengthen community in a collective manner through the evocation of fellow feeling is a rather Whiggish maneuver. As vital, or agential, objects, these manuscripts desire Stuart rule, but the very principle of agential objects that are not the Stuart body is inimical to the Jacobite cause, leading as it does to vitalist and hence republican conclusions. And finally, to return to the poem with which I began, Jacobite literary culture is ultimately about writing, not fighting. To participate in and continue to foster Jacobite manuscript culture was to engage, in a sense, in mystification; to aestheticize Jacobite insurrection into implausibility. Jacobite manuscript poetic culture’s material ontology undermined its own existence.

How Was Pope Involved? Over the years scholars have arrived at a nuanced, well-supported case for the nature and extent of Pope’s involvements with Jacobitism and Jacobites. Howard Erskine-Hill showed in 1966 that Pope was circulating 100

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his poetry among local Jacobites at the age of fifteen.87 Over the years, the academy has wavered back and forth on the question of Pope’s Jacobitism in a manner familiar to followers of any vexed historical question of fact. For some time, it seemed that we would have to be satisfied to vibrate in a state of uncertainty. However, Joseph Hone’s Alexander Pope in the Making (2021) traces the waxing and waning of Pope’s Jacobite commitments in intricate detail, with a wide range of reference and scrupulous attention to numerous manuscript sources on both sides of the Atlantic. It seems implausible, now, that there will ever again be a question mark over the fact of Pope’s occasional Jacobitism. Now we turn to the more absorbing task of trying to determine which elements of which works correspond to which fluctuations, between 1703 and 1723. Perhaps Hone’s most astonishing single piece of evidence for Pope’s affiliation is a note in a letter to James Francis Edward Stuart during the 1722 preparations for the scheduled invasion of 1723. Thomas Southcott the superior of the English Benedictines, a committed Jacobite, writes: “mr Popes late crown of Bayes has let him mightily into the secret of his own strength & has made people afraid of his pen since his feathers grow so fast, so that the lesser tribe of Poets are reduced to play their cards finely not knowing where his satyrs may lash.”88 As Hone notes, Southcott discusses Pope with James Stuart as though he were the Jacobite poet laureate (191). Pope’s beginnings as a writer show his circle’s “considerable overlap with known Jacobite networks” and he persisted in his friendships with more openly Jacobite authors like Anne Finch and the duke of Buckingham (7). By focusing on “what Pope was doing when he wrote . . . what acts he was performing when he circulated them in manuscript,” Hone argues for the significance of the full extent of the two social circles closest to Pope—George Granville and John Carryl. Moreover, Hone establishes Pope’s intimacy with those who “allied themselves with the exiled Stuarts. Those men are not quietist or ‘emotional Jacobites’ . . . They were active conspirators and agents.”89 Thirty-seven of the three hundred and fourteen Jacobite manuscripts I examined also contained poems either by or about Pope. While that proportion, just over one in ten (11.7%), might not seem all that significant, some of those 314 manuscripts have only one poem in them, which 101

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precludes having both Pope and Jacobite verse, if we stipulate that Pope extremely infrequently, if ever, wrote poems of pure Jacobite exigency. So that one in ten is perhaps one in six. Meanwhile many manuscripts significantly predate Pope’s career. I would estimate that a third of all multi-poem Jacobite manuscripts that could have contained a poem by Pope do so. This proportion is higher than for any other poet named in the material record. Summarizing Pope’s career as a poet committed to print while still pursuing publication by manuscript circulation, Hone suggests that “While his public writings purveyed a dynastically equivocal ‘two-fold vision’, his restricted manuscript writings were more clear-cut.”90 Pope’s commitment to Jacobitism flew in the face of the best efforts of the Protestant Parliament to extirpate Catholicism from the country. His participation in the very vernacular poetic culture I describe here (rather than the much more intimate coterie-style relations with Granville and Buckingham and the Carryls) would have been founded on Pope’s appreciation of Jacobite poetics. A key aspect of Jacobite poetry and ideology that Tory writers like Pope found palatable was the belief that typologies, whether scriptural, classical, or historical, had a certain predictive force. “The circularity of human history was illustrated in Jacobite poetry by the association of the Revolution [of 1688] with the Civil War,” Monod writes.91 Poems with titles like “An encomium on the happy revolution by the coherence of the years 1648 1688 and 1715” suggest that the execution of Charles I, the ousting of James II and the succession of the house of Hanover were considered all of a kind. The poem “Verses found on the Queen’s Toilet” equates the unrest surrounding the Sacheverell trial with that associated with Archbishop Laud in the 1640s. The Three Olivers suggests that, compared to the foregoing “Olivers,” Cromwell and William III, George I is the worst “Oliver” of all. “The Jacobite enterprise did not build its ideology around a response to 1688 alone: before the Glorious Revolution came the Great Rebellion, and the issues of regicide (and restoration) had been at the center of monarchical thinking long before the exile of James II raised issues of allegiance in the form still dominant in the 1740s,” J. C. D. Clark remarks.92 As we have seen, Jacobite poetry found in history fit analogs for current events. A second poem on the same topic as “Nero 102

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the Second,” “On the King’s going to the play the night the great fire was in the city 13 Jan 1714/5” again cast George I as a second Nero, callous and uncaring as his city burns. In a similarly Latinate vein, Addison’s Cato afforded Jacobite poets rich opportunities for satire. It is with Cato that Pope makes a clear entry into the world of Jacobite manuscript poetry. Cato’s Ghost appears in ten different manuscripts, but is unusual among Jacobite poems of the period in that it also appeared in print.93 The poem, printed in 1715, in Dublin, is attributed to William Meston. Its publication outside of Great Britain is explained by the fact that, without naming names, it actively encourages Jacobites to assassinate George I: God and St. George; can Britons be afraid? In such a Cause break through the thick Array, Of the Usurping Guard, and Force your way; Some lucky hand, more Favour’d than the rest May Charge him home, and reach th’Usurper’s breast, Restore your King, and make your Country blest.94

The poem responds to Addison’s Cato by claiming that Addison’s appropriation of Cato’s story is one that Cato himself “could not but oppose” (4). The poem argues that Cato’s profound attachment to the law above all would have made him a Jacobite: “had he / been subject to a King’s Authority, / Even Cato’s self had been for Monarchy” (23–25). Meston opposes monarchy to “Tyranny” (31). Like other Jacobite poems, Cato’s Ghost ransacks classical history for parallels, associating Caesar with both Cromwell and “Proud Nassau” (38) (William III), and the poem’s peroration implies that restoring James Stuart to the throne would be a fitting revenge for Cato’s (i.e., George’s) own death and for his typological misuse at Addison’s hands. Rather than entering the fraught debate of the political significance of Cato, the poem concedes that the Whiggish interpreters are correct. Its point is larger: it alleges that the play is only as it is because Addison was dishonest to his material and adulterated the type.95 Had Addison been more faithful, the logic runs, the lawabiding Cato would have favored a more patrilineal, constitutional, and Jacobite outcome. Cato’s Ghost is one of two poems on Cato in the corpus of Jacobite 103

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manuscript poetry. The interpretation of the play offered by Meston is the doctrinaire Jacobite interpretation. The second poem on Cato in the corpus is by Pope; it is his On a Lady who Pisst at the Tragedy of Cato.96 In Bod. Rawlinson Poet 203, Pope’s poem directly follows Cato’s Ghost; there is no doubt that in Rawlinson’s mind the two poems shared a common purpose.97 How did this poem by Pope get here, into a volume of Jacobite poetry, fourteen years before its first authorized publication by Pope? The poem’s first printing was years earlier at the hands of Edmund Curll. Rawlinson was a lifelong friend of Curll’s and its presence in this volume suggests that Rawlinson passed it on to Curll.98 Da Silva contends that this poem shows Pope disdaining the figure of Cato himself, but it is notable that the “Tory Delia” reacts instead to the “Tragedy” of Cato, not to Cato as a figure. Indeed, Pope’s prologue to the play evinces his endorsement of the example of the man himself. Delia, however, is disgusted either by the play or by the Whigs’ reaction to it. The fact that this poem is placed directly following Cato’s Ghost, with its unambiguous condemnation of the Whig appropriation of the type of Cato, strongly implies that Jacobites felt that Pope’s poem did the same thing: pour scorn on the Whigs’ self-indulgence. This interpretation makes even more sense given that Whigs generally eschewed historical models just as fervently as Jacobites sought them out. As Abigail Williams writes, both classical and earlier native literature were eschewed by Whig writers, who considered that the scale and accomplishment of contemporary Britain “render[ed] classical comparison redundant.”99 Its inclusion in the Rawlinson volume argues that Pope’s poem was read as evidence, not only that Addison’s Cato was a poor treatment of its source material, but as a solid counterblast to Whiggish rhetorical intrusion on profoundly Tory and Jacobite territory: the typological use of history.100 On a Lady Who Pisst at the Tragedy of Cato was not the only poem by Pope to circulate in Jacobite manuscript culture.101 But it is one of the few that circulated without Pope’s name attached to it. On a Lady Who Pisst was clearly included in Bod Eng Poet e. 87 because it supports a Jacobite poetic ideology, not because it is by Pope. There are two more connections to Pope to examine that characterize the casual and continual contact Pope had with Jacobite poetic culture. The first is the manuscript 104

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BL Lansdowne 852. This colossal anthology including poems dating from 1704 to 1726, was made to order for Lord High Treasurer Edward Harley, second earl of Oxford and son of Robert Harley, Queen Anne’s de facto chief minister between 1711 and 1714, who was both the subject and the deployer of many lampoons and satires. Edward Harley was an avid bibliophile, patron, and man of letters. Unlike his politically gifted and active father, he preferred a private life in lettered society and was close to Matthew Prior, Thomas Parnell, Swift, and Pope.102 Lansdowne 852 is an enormous professional scribal anthology with interleaved separates, containing 355 poems in total. Its focus is predominantly Jacobite verse; of the twenty most frequently occurring poems in the culture of Jacobite manuscript poetry, seventeen appear in Lansdowne 852. The latest poem in this collection, annotated by Harley with variant readings, marginal glosses and commentary, is dated 1726. Lansdowne 852 is significant in part because its owner and Alexander Pope exchanged over 157 letters between 1721 and 1740. The two were close friends and corresponded on a wide range of topics. Pope asked Harley for advice about his work, and the two men were frequent guests at each others’ houses.103 Given the intimacy of their relationship and the presence of manuscript copies of five of Pope’s poems in Harley’s personal miscellany, it is impossible that Pope himself was ignorant of the world of Jacobite manuscript verse. The sequencing of Pope’s poems in Harley’s manuscript—sprinkled apparently at random among virulent Jacobite verses—demonstrates that Harley at least judged these poems to be substantially similar to those by his friend Pope. I offer one more piece of evidence for Pope’s entanglement in Jacobite manuscript culture, though others follow in chapters specifically on Pope. British Library Add. 31152 is, like Bod. Rawlinson Poet 181, an assembly of separates collected by the volume’s owner and bound together into a single volume. The owner of the volume, Anne Wentworth, countess of Strafford and her husband Thomas were prominent, well-connected court Whigs who turned to the Jacobite cause in 1719.104 There are acrostics and laudatory poems addressed to the countess in the volume, as well as separates that have been posted to her.105 This volume, like Harley’s, contains poems by Pope (as well as by Swift and Gay), along with the poems 105

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to Countess Anne. The remainder of the volume comprises largely Jacobite verse of a fairly high circulation frequency, along with some poems on or by their former Whig colleagues. Among them, however, is a one of three known manuscript copies of a poem by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: To the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace. The inclusion of this poem, “among the most stylish, scabrous attacks on Pope,” elevates Pope to the level of the other targets of lampoons in the volume.106 This is a confusing and counterintuitive piece of evidence. This satire on Pope was co-authored with Lady Mary by the Whig court favorite Lord John Hervey, eldest son of the first earl of Bristol. Although the inclusion of a satire on Pope seems unexpected given the political loyalties of the rest of the volume, it nonetheless would have cemented the association of Pope and his work with Jacobite manuscript poetry in the minds of its community of collectors and readers. Jacobite poetry in manuscript was a vibrant literary culture but was unable to contribute straightforwardly to its avowed cause. Its material existence enabled a robust social constitution—and yet that mode of public discourse was an affront to the form of government it supposedly advocated. Its poetics evoked longing for the absent Stuart monarch with tremendous success—so much so that the longing itself became reified and displaced its object. The literary authority of Jacobite manuscript poetry was ultimately incompatible with the political authority to which it was bound and in whose service it was supposed to work. These paradoxes were unresolvable because the issue at their core— whether or not a Stuart dynasty would be reestablished—was so causally remote as to be almost unrelated. As we shall see in the following chapters, however, Pope was able to resolve them at a stroke by replacing the theme of the failed Stuart rule of England with that of his own dominance of the literary marketplace. By displacing the Stuarts and putting the image of himself at the center of Jacobite systems of signification, Pope brought together Jacobite poetics and their object. Those paradoxes resolved into a harmonious consonance, and the literary authority these forms generated transferred seamlessly to their creator and new ultimate referent.

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Chapter 3

Dipt in Ink Pope without “Pope” in His Early Career

Pope was born just a few weeks before the Letter of Invitation was sent to William of Orange, and his life would be more shaped by it than most. The events set in train by the Letter transformed England and brought a new political and religious settlement. But there was another dimension to its influence on Pope in particular. The Revolution of 1688 gave precedent for the Act of Settlement of 1701, and therefore for the momentous restructuring of political authority that took place under the Hanoverian dynasty. That restructuring offered Pope a model for his own efforts to assume a position of analogous literary authority in the republic of letters, culminating in his self-coronation in his 1717 Works. This chapter recounts Pope’s journey from apprentice poet—at sixteen, still a child— to untouchable primus inter pares of literary London, giving particular attention to the tools Pope used to effect his metamorphosis, and the deliberateness with which he wielded them. Reflecting on his beginnings as a writer in 1735’s Epistle to Arbuthnot, Pope compared himself to Achilles: dipped in the Styx and transfigured into both a living pen and a nearly invincible warrior of letters for whom verse—and combat—were birthrights. Warfare upon earth indeed. The most misleading part of this passage is Pope’s use of the passive voice, implying that Pope was dipped in ink. Instead, Pope dipped himself in ink, and fashioned himself into an exemplum of poetic combat. This chapter examines what he covered over in that process, exposing, to use his analogy, his Achilles’ heel. What were the literary cultures on which Pope drew to compose himself? Pope’s reference to Achilles points up his ultimate vulnerability as much as it trumpets his supposed invulnerability. So why should uncovering Pope’s origins in this way render him so vulnerable? 107

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This chapter and the next will read Pope without “Pope”—the armature of self-fashioning he made. They will uncover that Achilles’ heel and reveal the tools that Pope used at the start of his career that enabled him to construct himself as the most authoritative poet of his age. In our first two chapters we have followed cultures in which political and literary authority were inseparable. Each had particular objectives, and for the writing associated with each culture to be a success, it had to further the accomplishment of those political objectives. In this way, political authority and literary authority were inseparable. We turn now to how Pope drew together these two modes of writing into an almost impervious whole. So deep were the fissures of the culture war whose weapons Pope used that each culture had developed rubrics to address almost any topic or context. For instance, Pope combined the Whiggish emphasis on public goods such that they should dictate private conduct (as seen, e.g., in Dennis and Addison), with a Jacobite emphasis on private behaviors as prior to, and anticipatory of, public goods. He was able then to switch between mutually incompatible modes so as to make the adjudication of both literary authority in public and in private his exclusive domains. According to this logic, Pope was able to argue that he spoke uniquely to each opposed sphere. It is this perverse logic that has made the true depth and extent of Pope’s self-fashioning so resistant to analysis, resolutely defended as each of Pope’s positions are from opposite perspectives. My hope is to offer an anatomy of the evolving structures of literary praise and dispraise from which Pope cobbled together a literary authority which was as though magically supported from all sides by mutually exclusive, yet coexisting, rationales for authority. Pope’s success in uniting political forms with literary ambitions can be indexed by his abiding reputation as one of the most “literary” of eighteenth-century figures. Pope’s scorn for writers who explicitly advocated political causes is intense and well-documented. His epitaph “For One Who Would Not Be Buried in Westminster Abbey,” for example, reads: HEROES, and KINGS! your distance keep: In peace let one poor Poet sleep, 108

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Who never flatter’d Folks like you: Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.1

This is either the proudest poem Pope ever wrote, or a wry reflection on corruption, power, and literary history; most likely both. Pope’s excoriation of the poets laureate was particularly striking, and he considered the laureates as a lineage of tainted poetasters.2 As Pope wrote in “Peri Bathous, or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” “Who sees not that DeFoe was the Poetical Son of Withers, Tate of Ogilby, E[dward] Ward, of John Taylor, and E[usde]n of [Richard] Blackmore?”3 This genealogy vividly and deliberately recalls John Dryden’s remarks in Mac Flecknoe; or, A satyr upon the True-Blue-Protestant Poet, T.S., that “Tom the Second reigns like Tom the First,”4 and is implicitly opposed to a shadow dynasty of ornery poets supposedly immune to changes in the political winds— Dryden, William Congreve, and William Wycherley—with which Pope actively sought to associate himself. The whole notion that opposition to the political establishment made a writer in some way uncompromised, better, and purer, was one that Pope worked hard to promote. In 1717, when he was only twenty-eight, Pope published his Works: a capstone event in literary self-fashioning that both announced and cemented his supremacy. It is difficult to overstate the audacity of the gesture. Ben Jonson’s 1616 Workes was viewed in its time as a precipitous publication when the poet was only forty-four. A hundred years later, and a full generation younger, Pope usurped Jonson’s mantle with a thoroughness that eluded any of the Sons of Ben. James McLaverty notes of the scope of Pope’s ambition: The volume gave Pope the opportunity to fashion a large book that was to represent the author himself. It is a mode of self-expression, but it goes beyond that to present a reception of that self-expression. In this one volume, Pope was able to define a canon, publish an image of himself as man and writer, shape his relations with his reader, and guide the interpretation of individual poems through illustration and annotation.5

Pope confesses to what he wants out of the Works in his “Preface,” a 109

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cunning, equivocating text that both peddles simplicity and abstraction and manages to dissimulate and dissemble while it stakes Pope’s grand claims. The first paragraph of the “Preface” concludes: “Therefore I cannot but believe that writers and readers are under equal obligations, for as much fame, or pleasure, as each affords the other.”6 Pope demurs that “I could wish people would believe what I am pretty certain they will not, that I have been less concern’d about Fame than I durst declare till this occasion” (xxvii). But the exchange of pleasure for fame is confessedly at the heart of Pope’s publishing endeavor. This posture of mastery was the culmination of Pope’s career to date. Our question is: how did this happen? How, on the evidence of a relatively small body of work, was Pope able to position himself as the master of contemporary letters? Addressing this question returns us to the two histories that we have already traced so as to illustrate how adroitly Pope deployed them in support of his claim to literary authority.

Manuscript Circulation Pope, whose connections to the network of Jacobite manuscript verse we have already seen, adopted the techniques of Jacobite poetry both in his verse and in his material practice. Joseph Hone has documented the ways in which manuscript circulation was a vital mode of publication for Pope, far beyond his poetic adolescence. Pope’s relationships with George Granville and his circle in particular were such that their shared Jacobite sympathies were more or less out in the open. Whether in poems sent to or from the Caryll family, or The Rape of the Lock circulated in manuscript, Pope aired his political sympathies more openly in his manuscripts than he did in print. He routinely redacted those manuscript texts for public consumption. Pope’s more public-facing literary activities leaned on the genre systems of Jacobite manuscript verse more indirectly. One of Pope’s more visible such endeavors was his role as a founding member of the Scriblerus Club, formed during the winter of 1713, when Queen Anne was ailing and the issue of succession seemed far from settled. Around this time Jacobite manuscript culture was at its most febrile and productive. The club comprised five regular members, Dr. John Arbuthnot, Swift, Thomas Parnell, Gay, and Pope, and met in Arbuthnot’s 110

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rooms in St. James’s Palace. Another frequent visitor to the club was Robert Harley, earl of Oxford and Mortimer, formerly prominent in Queen Anne’s government. During his absences on parliamentary business, the Scriblerians often wrote him verse invitations to join them. The following was sent in April of 1714: A Pox of all Senders For any Pretenders Who tell us these troublesome Stories, In their dull hum-drum key Of Arma Virumque Hannoniae qui primus ab oris. A Fig too for H——r Who prates like his Grandmere And all his old Friends would rebuke In spite of the Carle Give us but our Earle, And the Devil may take their Duke Then come and take part in The Memoirs of Martin, Lay by your White Staff & gray Habit, For trust us, friend Mortimer Should you live years forty more Haec olim meminisse juvabit. by order of the Club A. Pope | J. Gay | J. Swift | J. Arbuthnot | T. Parnell7

This mock ballad was written just a month before Electress Sofia of Hanover’s death in May 1714. Sofia’s health was already failing and although George’s accession in Sofia’s place, and thus in Queen Anne’s, was not yet a surety, it was becoming an increasingly likely prospect. The poem asks Harley to set aside politics and join them in literary play, since it is ultimately a more lasting and worthwhile activity. The first and last stanzas of the poem end with quotations from Virgil, and it is this touchstone of ancient literary authority that the Scriblerians chose to contrast with the quotidian business of politics. 111

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The first stanza puns on “Pretenders” since the “Senders” who circulate poetry about the Pretender—the exiled James—are also “Pretenders” in a poetic sense to the Scriblerians, who judge their verse humdrum and not true poetry. The poem’s opening shows that Harley might expect a verse letter from a secret group to contain Jacobite verse in support of the Pretender. The stanza closes by also dismissing partisan verse of the opposite side: “Hannoniae” refers to Hainault, in France, the location of one of the duke of Marlborough’s chief military successes John Churchill (like his wife Sarah Churchill, an ardent Whig and powerful courtier). 8 Its lexical similarity to “Hannover” makes the reference to the opening words of the Aeneid do double work: just as the poets who praise Marlborough and George bear no comparison to Virgil, so too George and Marlborough fail to fit, or to deserve, the types of Augustus and Aeneas respectively. The reference to the Aeneid appears to assert the Scriblerians’ affiliation to the party of the Ancients and their disdain for political parties and party poets. But in fact the dismissal of party poetry applies much more strongly to Whiggish partisan verse than the Jacobite practices fleetingly evoked at the poem’s start. This stanza treads an extremely careful middle ground: though it decries the apparently common practice of circulating Jacobite poetry in manuscript, it only specifically lampoons Whiggish verse. The second stanza proposes Harley, “Earle” of Oxford, as a counterpoint to the “Duke” sought by the Hanoverian Tories, led by Sir Thomas Hanmer, referred to in the first line of the stanza as “H——r.” Making a binary pair out of that “Duke”—George, duke of Hannover—and the “Earle” implies that the Scriblerians viewed Harley as an equal and opposite force to the Hanoverians in Parliament.9 However accurate this evaluation is, it further suggests the Scriblerians’ awareness of their resemblance to a group of Jacobites. Or, not quite that. These men couldn’t be mistaken for Jacobites, but their sympathies, their social form, and their techniques—including writing verse epistles under an assumed Latin name with light enciphering—in other words, their genre systems—were. The final stanza, however, proposes a retreat from politics and invites Harley to join them at work on The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. The final line, “haec olim meminisse juvabit,” is also taken from the 112

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Aeneid, but its use here is either unironic or at most self-mocking.10 The comparison is between the Scriblerians’ convocation and that of Aeneas’s sailors, stranded on the shores of Carthage. If these men are shipwrecked by fortune, as Harley was shortly to be, the Scriblerians offer solace for the turn in his fortunes, declare themselves his companions, and suggest an alternative pastime for remembrance in old age. And perhaps it will come about that writing that mock memoir will analogically symbolize the foundation of a great power: not a British Rome, but the Scriblerian cultural empire. The Scriblerus Club formed an acceptable substitute for a far more dangerous and subversive association. As well as being safer than consorting with Jacobites, the company of literary men—men who could at least pretend to prefer studying the Ancients to worrying over contemporary power struggles—was simply more congenial. While the Club was not a Jacobite cabal, it performed a similar function, albeit translated to a literary context. It fostered its members’ aspirations, as the Kit-Kat Club did for some of its Whig members. The memoir that the Scriblerians invited Harley to come and work on with them was the Scriblerians’ grand project—a secret history akin to the Jacobite rewritings of recent events. But the Scriblerians took as their purview a far larger issue than the family on the throne: the entirety of contemporary lettered culture. The parallels between the two projects are evident from early on in The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus: One day, as this Gentleman was walking about dinner-time alone in the Mall, it happen’d that a Manuscript dropt from under his cloak, which my servant pick’d up, and brought to me. It was written in the Latin tongue, and contain’d many most profound Secrets, in an unusual turn of reasoning and style. The first leaf was inscribed with these words, Codicillus, seú Liber Memorialis, Martini Scribleri.11

What this passage describes is an archetypal scene of subversive manuscript publication exactly like those described in Jacobite poems.12 The gentleman, whom the author “clearly perceiv’d” was “in disguise” (5) happens to let fall a manuscript where it can be picked up by a third party.13 It’s worth a brief pause here to consider what it means for a disguise to 113

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be plainly that; it seems a precise description of the formal and materials sleights of Jacobite manuscript verse. This imagined moment takes place in the Mall, the busy promenade beside St. James’s Park. This vignette gives us very specific expectations; a manuscript let drop from beneath a cloak by St. James’s Park in “the Latin tongue” can only be one thing: a Jacobite text in covert circulation. So this scene is one of the circulation of a Jacobite text and a satirical instance of the reason for all the titles like “Lines found in the Mall.” The first few words of the first leaf do nothing to dispel these assumptions: “Codicillåus, seú Liber memorialis” means “Testament: the memorial book of . . . ,” leading us to expect a secret history of recent events, or perhaps a subversive valedictory speech like the commonly circulated execution speech of the earl of Derwentwater. The joke is only sprung by the last two words identifying the author of this underground text: rather than high Jacobitism—Martin of the Scribblers.14 Of course, the Scriblerians are actually offering a secret history of sorts. The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus exposes not the corruption of a single ruler and his court but the vacuity of a whole ideology. Martinus himself, however, is not a powerful man. This trick of treating everyday subjects in a grand manner—the core of the mock epic—was one already familiar to Pope. Its appearance here encapsulates the use of Jacobite tropes to address Whig topics. Unlike canonical secret histories, however, Scriblerus’s Memoirs communicates its urgency through satire and irony. Martinus himself doesn’t impugn anything, but the fact of him and his life does. This is what makes the Memoirs such an unusual text: it uses the conventions of secret writing and inverts them. The subterfuge needed to circulate most covert writing obviates the need for genuine irony in the text itself. It is a masterstroke to make the apparently secret history ironic. The irony suggests two things: first, in the mode of Whiggish cultural analysis, that it is the target of the Memoirs’ satire, which ought to be a marginal, underground, pernicious, and outlawed culture rather than the dominant mode of the moment. Second, according to the logics of Jacobite literary authority, that the reader who decodes the ironies of the Memoirs constructs his or her own “secret history” of the text, and 114

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joins his or her sympathies with the authority of the subversive group who produced it.

The Pastorals: Pope’s First Loyalists Pope’s earliest encounters with highly restricted circulation in manuscript were simpler. Readers curious about Pope’s pre-print literary apprenticeship should consult Hone’s Alexander Pope in the Making.15 Though as Margaret Ezell notes, “For literary historians, Pope has always been associated with the power of print,” Pope’s first work to appear in print, his Pastorals, has a storied pre-print existence.16 The 1706 letter from Jacob Tonson that represents the first notice that the world of print took of Pope reads as follows: Sir,—I have lately seen a pastoral of yours in mr. Walsh’s & mr Congreves hands, which is extreamly fine & is generally approv’d off by the best Judges in poetry. I Remember I have formerly seen you at my shop & am sorry I did not Improve my Accquaintance with you. If you design your Poem for the Press no person shall be more Carefull in the printing of it, nor no one can give a greater Incouragement to it.17

Maynard Mack’s facsimile edition of a fair copy of Pope’s Pastorals in The Last and Greatest Art tells a yet fuller story.18 An autograph note on the manuscript’s cover leaf (verso) offers the following biographical and bibliographical information: “Mem. This Copy is that wch past thro ye | hands of Mr Walsh, Mr Congreve, Mr Main- | waring, Dr Garth, Mr Granville, Mr | Southern, Sr. H. Sheers, Sr. W. Trumbull | Ld Halifax, Ld. Wharton, Marq. of Dorchestr., | D. of Bucks. &c. Only ye 3rd Eclog was written since some of these saw ye other 3. | wch were written as they stand wth. | ye Essay, anno 1704.—Aetat. meae, 16” (19). Mack is right to see “a flush of youthful self-congratulation” in these words (20). Most telling of all is the closing “&c”: for Pope to have listed eleven people before an et cetera implies that he has adumbrated a certain set of people, and that the reader can infer who else is likely also to have seen the manuscript. So what sort of set is it? This list of eleven participants in a community of manuscript circulation is telling in itself. The participants are a 115

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bipartisan elite: Arthur Mainwaring was a leading satirist of the Williamite regime, now member of the Kit-Kat Club, but his Jacobite Tarquin and Tullia had circulated extensively in Jacobite manuscript culture. George Granville was a loyal servant of the Stuarts of considerable standing. Thomas Southerne was a playwright and former confidant of Dryden. Henry Sheres was a former Jacobite soldier, a society raconteur, and a poet. Charles Montagu, earl of Halifax, a partisan Whig member of Parliament, would be a regent, after Queen Anne’s death, for George I. Thomas Wharton was even more piously Whiggish; upon his birth in 1648 his father had received a letter of congratulation from Oliver Cromwell. This inscription is a manuscript imprimatur of literary authority. Pope’s personal acquaintance with these men is, however, immaterial. Germane for our purposes is his readiness to number them among his manuscript circulators: Pope used them as signifiers of his own preeminence. Some of Pope’s works, like the two-canto The Rape of the Locke in 1712, were intended to be kept in manuscript. Pope’s reliance on manuscript circulation—which continued into the 1730s with his maneuvering of his letters into print and the scribal publication of An Essay on Man– also contextualizes the oft-noted fact that he “never wholly abandoned” the revision of his texts.19 The manuscript of the Pastorals bears evidence of extensive revision even to its fair copy. Mack writes that “some of these were possibly in the handwritings of his friends” (70). Pope himself attests that “The Alterations from this Copy were upon | ye Objections of some of these, or my own.”20 Those annotations would make the manuscript a more truly collaboratively produced artifact of scribal circulation, rather than simply a case of authorial scribal publication. Four pages in Pope’s and William Walsh’s hands, containing a question-and-answer dialogue between the two on poetic decorum, versification, and expression, are an unusual artifact among Pope’s manuscripts from this period. These pages are not a fair copy, though the contrast between the fairness of Pope’s hand and the casualness of Walsh’s evinces something of the power dynamic between the two. Pope’s reliance on a scribal community to help produce his poems points up his affiliation to that culture. The exclusivity of the poems’ circulation, moreover, marks them out as distinct from authorial scribal publication: this manuscript 116

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was meant only for the eyes of a small, select group of people, in turn expected to give Pope’s work their imprimatur. Pope was adroit at adapting politically derived literary forms to his wholly literary ends even before his first foray into print. Plenty of other groups circulated work in manuscript—it was after all the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to pass your work to people you knew—but we know that Pope had learned this genre system from his upbringing living near the Carylls, and that his sense of the communities manuscript circulation could produce was highly likely to be inflected by Jacobitism. This was a genre system designed to share affinities, not information.

An Essay on Criticism: A Whiggish Manifesto in Jacobite Song Pope’s Essay on Criticism took quite a different course. Pope’s combination of an ars poetica with an “advice to princes” text, it suggests the author himself as the text’s literary monarch. Along with the Dunciads, it is the poem of Pope’s that most nakedly seeks to confer upon its author exclusive monarchical power. Pope’s chosen territory is the Republic of Letters, however, not a political state. The Essay on Criticism alludes to Horace, but it is not fundamentally Horatian as are Pope’s imitations of the 1730s.21 Where the Pastorals had showcased Pope’s talents in lyric verse, the didactic Essay on Criticism was an effort to protect the Tory heritage of aesthetics he had received from Granville, Roscommon, and Buckingham, by offering precisely the sort of specifically preceptual aesthetic instruction that had been the domain of Whig writers like John Dennis. On May 15, 1711, the day that the Essay was published, the Tatler had published its last issue and the Spectator its 65th number. The principal texts of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks had appeared in print, as had John Dennis’s considerable output. With this poem, Pope offered a systematized and preceptual iteration of a Tory aesthetic model, joining in the civic debate that the Whigs had established in their confident, apophthegmatic style. However, Pope did not join the public debate on even relatively egalitarian terms. As chapter 1 illustrates, writers like Shaftesbury and Joseph Addison advanced their proposals incrementally through syllogisms, modeling a consensual form of argument. Pope, by contrast, worked more 117

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like Dennis, or even Milton. He did not reason through his positions, but made declarations, which he then retrenched with examples. Pope’s poem works in a way inimical to the metaphor of the court of public opinion. Shaftesbury’s model of sociability in which “We polish one another and rub off our corners by a sort of amicable collision” creates consensus from the ground up.22 Pope instead made literary appreciation a thoroughly patrician, even dictatorial, matter; he devised rules from the top down. If the Spectator wanted above all to take “Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee-houses,” then Pope wanted to take literary appreciation out of those public spaces and off to the secluded spaces of the well-to-do gentry.23 For instance. In praising the duke of Buckingham’s Essay on Poetry in a note to line 724, Pope refers approvingly to Buckingham’s nobility more than his writing. Similarly, Pope’s praise of Wentworth Dillon, Earl Roscommon, includes an acknowledgement of his “quality”: “Such was Roscomon—not more learn’d than good, / With Manners gen’rous as his Noble Blood.”24 Learning and goodness are formally opposed to one another in these lines: goodness springs from his generous manners, and so, implicitly, Roscommon’s learning from his nobility. These gestures undercut the possibility that in Pope’s imagination a member of the general public might “justly bear a Critick’s noble Name” (47). And yet elsewhere Pope questions whether even the aristocracy are fit to offer proper criticism. After extolling the necessary attributes of a critic, Pope asks: But where’s the Man, who Counsel can bestow, Still pleas’d to teach, and yet not proud to know? Unbiass’d, or by Favour or by Spite; Not dully prepossest, nor blindly right; Tho’ Learn’d well-bred; and tho’ well-bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and Humanly severe? (631–36)

The three-way incompatibility among learning, good breeding, and sincerity overturns the poem’s apparent belief in nobility as a guarantor of critical power. Learning, implicitly, is not usually found in aristocrats, whereas a propensity to flattery and disingenuousness is. 118

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This passage introduces the next stage in Pope’s narrowing down of the pool of candidates for critical excellence. Pope winnows the possibilities by employing a variety of contradictory standards that are impossible to meet. The poem seeks “To teach vain Wits a Science little known / T’admire Superior Sense, and doubt their own” (199–200), and yet extols the virtues of independent judgment. On the one hand, “The Vulgar . . . through Imitation err” and yet so do “the Learn’d by being Singular” (424–25). In line 636, one must be bold but modest, rigorous but gentle. In line 567, Pope instructs would-be critics to “speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence.” One must “let Truth and Candour shine” (563) and yet also “Tis not enough your Counsel still be True, / Blunt Truths more mischief than nice Falshoods do; / Men must be taught as if you taught them not” (572–74). How to be candid yet diffident, disingenuous yet severe, “human” and yet “Not so civil as to prove unjust” (581)? How to encourage all to “seek your Friendship” (565) while fearing “not the Anger of the Wise to raise” (582)? And if the anger of the wise isn’t a problem, then why “Leave dang’rous Truths to unsuccessful Satyrs” (592)? Pope enjoins aspirants, “Be though the first true Merit to befriend; / His Praise is lost, who stays till All commend” (474–75). And yet he cautions later against judging too quickly, because “Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread” (625). Throughout the Essay, Pope mandates an unmeetable set of rules of judgment, as though to exclude any reader from approaching his standards of criticism. I suggest, then, that the poem’s didacticism is thus for show, and actually forecloses entry into the critical space that Pope supposedly opens up. However, even if An Essay on Criticism only teaches the impossibility of emulating Pope as a giver of critical laws, it succeeds amply at displaying his mastery of prosody, aurality and rhythm. The traffic of literary authority, in other words, is one-way. Consider the well-known performative twists in these lines: But most by Numbers judge a Poet’s Song, And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong; ......................................... These Equal Syllables alone require, 119

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Tho’ oft the Ear the open Vowels tire, [345] ............................. And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line, [347] ......................................... A needless Alexandrine ends the Song, [355] That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along. Leave such to tune their own dull Rhimes, and know What’s roundly smooth, or languishingly slow; And praise the Easie Vigor of a Line, [360] .................................. Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows; But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore; The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar. [367–70]

This passage is designed to show Pope’s mastery of criticism and of poetic effects. Each vignette performs the phenomenon it describes. “Equal syllables” are enacted by the alternating weak and strong stresses of “alone require.” The tiring or tiresome effect of open vowels is produced by the repeated vowels between “tho” and “oft,” “the” and “Ear,” and “the” and “open.” The word “vowels” incorporates the aural effect of a superfluity of vowels since the “w” produces no hard distinction between the “o” and the “e.” Only the alveolar “t”s, formed by putting the tongue to the alveolar ridge, in “oft” and “tire” break up the flowing melisma of the line. The form of line 347 matches its content, omitting a caesura to maximize its monotony, and line 356 employs the same monosyllabic format to appear “needless,” with a clumsily placed caesura. The placement of iambs before the caesura followed by a dactyl necessitates a change in accentual rhythm mid-line that performs the awkward and moribund movements of a wounded snake. The two iambs of “What’s roundly smooth” create that effect by using the natural brevity of “ly” and the length (and onomatopoeia) of “smooth,” just as the iamb that ends on the “lang” of “languishingly” emphasizes the length of that syllable. The word “languishingly” sits in three of the five feet of the line, making it consume a disproportionate amount of time in speaking it. The largely 120

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unvoiced sibilant and fricative consonants of line 361, most especially the “wh” of “when” and “ws” of blows, both of which as continuants produce the blowing sound of the wind. The voiced sibilants of “Surges” and “lash” in 363 combine with the assonance of “loud” and “sounding” and the metrical contortions that place three consecutive stresses on “loud Surges lash” create the restless noise of the sea. In this passage in particular Pope is showing off his extraordinary technical dexterity; ironically this piece of poetical ostentation offers some of the poem’s most useful exempla of criticism. It is not especially controversial, then, to suggest that An Essay on Criticism is about displaying Pope’s poetical skill as much as his critical acumen. But Pope’s conspicuous display of poetical skill is itself a calculated and deliberate tactic. The experience of reading the passage above and of understanding Pope’s performative trickery is that of being initiated into the cognoscenti—a quasi-secret clique of readers who interpret signs to uncover an intentional but implicit message. In this Pope is using a strategy drawn from the heart of Jacobite poetics: cultivating a shadow readership, or a counter-public, who decode a poem’s hidden agenda while it maintains a (just) plausibly deniable front of decorum. An Essay on Criticism is the absolute antithesis of the accessible, universally legible style of Whig nonfiction prose. Rather than writing to foster greater sophistication in all readers, Pope writes to create a highly selective interpretative hierarchy around himself. His ambition and achievement, of course, is to transmute that counter-public into the dominant public. Pope admits a vanishingly small number of worthies into his critical pantheon: only ten men from Horace to Walsh are deemed to have met Pope’s criteria, of whom nine are dead.25 The encomium to Walsh (729–38) closes the line of critics. Pope’s alliance of himself with Walsh (on the basis of a friendship of at most three years) is designed to suggest Pope as the chosen inheritor of the line of critical greatness stretching back to Horace. Pope could hardly have made the Essay much more exclusive or more opposed to the principles of openness and free exchange upon which the nascent public sphere thrived. The only living people who make it out of An Essay on Criticism with a chance of writing or judging well are, 121

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respectively, Pope and the nobility. The preceptual Whiggishness of Pope’s entry into the territory of cultural criticism is in fact a hostile takeover, an effort to redraw the boundaries of that territory as a patrician and aristocratic space. Pope does not argue in the reasoned and syllogistic manner that is emblematic of the Revolution of 1688. The form of his argument is instead the form that Jacobite political arguments took: a direct and declarative appeal to the rule of law. Jacobite poetry does not exactly argue for the return of the Stuarts, because Divine Right and constitutional precedent are a priori, and Pope’s Essay on Criticism likewise operates in the declarative mode. The strongest indicator that Pope’s poem participates in Whig systems of argument in a Jacobite manner is his inclusion of a passage referring to the reign of Charles II. This is the passage that so incensed Dennis that he suggested that Pope was angling for the role of poet laureate should the and ascend the throne. Lines 534–53 imagine Charles II’s reign in terms that reveal an unusually wide gap between Pope and Dryden. Instead of celebrating a Charles who “His vigorous warmth did variously impart,” like Dryden, 26 Pope sneers at the period when “Love was all an easie Monarch’s Care; / Seldom at Council, never in a War” (536–37). Pope’s reference to the “War” alludes to Charles II’s poor management of the Second and Third Dutch wars (1665–67, 1672–74), 27 implying that Charles was in part to blame for the coronation of William of Orange in 1689. Pope lists the religious, social, theatrical, infrastructural, sexual, and literary vices of the period, and then urges: “These Monsters, Criticks! with your Darts engage, / Here point your Thunder, and exhaust your Rage!” (554–55). In conjunction with his anti-Whiggish declarative style, this condemnation of the moral failings of Charles II’s Protestant court leads Pope close to the brink of implicitly proposing the only remaining alternative: Catholicism, and therefore Jacobitism.28 Like Whig writers, Pope connects the state of a nation’s literary output with its overall cultural, economic, moral, and martial prowess. And, just like Whig writers, Pope suggests ways of writing and reading that will, presumably, lead to better writing, more perceptive reading, and ultimately to a better nation. But instead of reasoning for these prescriptions from first principles, Pope gives rules non-negotiably and without 122

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argumentative justification. The end result of Pope’s engagement with a Whig practice using Jacobite techniques is a poem in which only one man is approved of and emerges unscathed.

The Rape and the Key: A Public Secret History Claims Discursive Immunity The Rape of the Lock Pope continued to marry Jacobite and Whig literary strategies in The Rape of the Lock, which also contained his greatest early venture into portraiture. The Rape of the Lock was first published anonymously in 1712 as an end-piece to a volume of Miscellaneous Poems and Translations published by Bernard Lintot. According to legend, the poem was written to heal a rift between two families after Lord Petre cut off a lock of the society belle Arabella Fermor’s hair. In the poem, Fermor appears as Belinda. Just as Jacobite poetry pressed on the ambiguity between characters and types (how much “Hoadley” and how much “a Hoadley”?), Pope’s portrait manipulates the slippage between the character of Belinda and her referent: how much does Belinda represent Fermor? How much is Belinda a portrait of Fermor, and how much a type? In the letter to Fermor that prefaces the second, 1714 edition, Pope writes that “Belinda as she is now managed resembles you in nothing but beauty.” The phrase “as she is now managed” strongly implies that Pope’s revisions for the 1714 edition have changed the correspondence between portrait and referent, and that his now-scrupulous management of the poem has effaced any resemblance between the two. Like so many of Pope’s claims about his writing, however, this comes unstuck when we look at the evidence. Merely by prefacing the letter to the poem, Pope implies the resemblance that he apparently disclaims. On Pope’s own admission, the 1712 edition contained genuine depiction in the phrases it used to describe Belinda, whereas such identifying minutiae had supposedly been expunged from the 1714 edition. Following Pope’s letter, we can deduce what he considered genuine depiction to be by examining the changes to the description of Belinda between 1712 and 1714. There is only one major change to that description. According to the 1712 text, “If 123

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to her share some Female errors fall / Look on her face, and you’ll forgive ‘em all,” whereas in 1714 this was replaced by “Look on her face, and you’ll forget ’em all.” The switch between “forgive” and “forget” raises two interpretative possibilities: the Belinda of 1712, who more closely resembles Fermor, was either less beautiful or more given to faults than her 1714 counterpart. Pope’s claim that he has only changed what might identify her personally suggests that aspects of the portrait that are unaltered—the jeweled cross on her white breast, her mind “Quick as her eyes, and as unfixt as those”—do not refer specifically to Fermor. We are left with two possibilities: either Fermor was only characterized by her “Female errors,” or Pope is being disingenuous about how much Belinda is meant to correspond to her. Fermor was, in fact, rather unfairly trapped into a choice of self-portraits in being made to choose between two prefaces to The Rape of the Lock. The text that Fermor rejected was a thirty-line poem, “To Belinda on the Rape of the Lock,” which abounds in proffered typologies. In the space of thirty lines, Pope offers Fermor, as Belinda, a choice of Helen, Eve, and Lucrece (13, 7, 21). In rejecting these archetypes, Fermor might have been trying to resist being interpellated as another fallen woman. The poem opens with a quatrain as equivocal as anything in the prose letter: Pleas’d in these lines, Belinda, you may view How things are priz’d, which once belong’d to you: If on some meaner head this Lock had grown, The nymph despis’d, the Rape had been unknown.29

The first word insinuates that Belinda, and therefore Fermor, enjoys flattery. The ambiguity of the second line is that it could describe either a single case of giving greater pleasure following dispossession of a general principle. These lines are just as ambiguous as Pope’s sally in the dedicatory epistle that “If this Poem had as many Graces as there are in Your Person, or in your Mind, yet I could never hope it should pass thro’ the World half so uncensured as you have done.”30 The third line of the rejected proem alludes coyly to “this Lock,” but is the head that grew the “Lock” Fermor’s or Pope’s as the writer of the “Lock”? The poem maintains this poise between praising Pope and praising Fermor. Even as it 124

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offers Fermor a variety of archetypes Pope offers himself, implicitly, as the corresponding chronicler of her misfortune, thus suggesting himself as a Homer (Helen), Milton (Eve), or Shakespeare (Lucrece). It seems most likely that Fermor chose the letter rather than the poem simply because the letter disclaims the resemblance between Belinda and Fermor on which the prefatory poem is predicated. Perhaps with the letter Fermor felt (mistakenly) that the playing field was more level than in the nakedly complex poem she was offered. The irony is that the letter she preferred is ruder about her and does more work to cultivate a privileged class of readers and thereby exclude another sort. The poem does evoke a degree of double vision, so that readers see some preening on Pope’s part included with some low-level sneering at Fermor.31 But the letter’s courtesies are more egregious—“I know how disagreeable it is to make use of hard Words before a Lady” (50)—and its barbs the more stinging for it. Fermor did some of Pope’s work for him in choosing the more innocuous-seeming text that disclaimed the typological resemblance she wished to avoid. She demonstrated in so doing that she was not among the inner circle of readers that Pope was cultivating. Most important, she offered Pope a proof of concept: that some readers could be made to feel especially included without alienating other readers yet unaware of their exclusion. Pope had finessed Jacobite poetry’s double vision to the point that an excluded group might not know that they were being excluded, while the included group could gather from internal clues the grounds on which they, and the poet, were superior. The principle action of the poem takes place at Hampton Court. The lines of the 1712 version introducing the setting read as follows: Close by those Meads for ever crown’d with Flow’rs, Where Thames with Pride surveys his rising Tow’rs, There stands a Structure of Majestic Frame, Which from the neighb’ring Hampton takes its Name. Here Britain’s Statesmen oft the Fall foredoom Of Foreign Tyrants, and of Nymphs at home; Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey, Dost sometimes Counsel take—and sometimes Tea.32 125

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William III had moved the court to Hampton from Whitehall, and was criticized for doing so. William had spent extravagantly on improving the palace and its gardens, and Hampton had gained a reputation for sexual dissolution. This passage implies that “Nymphs” are domestic tyrants, and that native statesmen are easily distracted by the triviality of sexual indiscretion. McLaverty argues convincingly that the Baron’s reference to Delariviere Manley’s The New Atalantis after the scene of the rape makes Manley’s text a touchstone of conservative sexual politics for the poem. 33 The Rape of the Lock makes clear in both versions, though the revision emphasizes the point, the Whiggish contention that moral and aesthetic standards have martial consequences for the nation. Pope’s poem reads cultural phenomena as proximate causes of national effects in a way that is concordant with Dennis, Addison, and Shaftesbury. But Pope differs from those by safeguarding his poem from being interpreted as a nonironic, straightforward contribution to public discourse. Through mechanisms like the letter to Fermor and other poetic sleights detailed below, Pope works to keep The Rape of the Lock a private, unique utterance. For example, Jacobite poetry often referred to the Duke of Marlborough as “Pam.” “The reference to Pam in the Rape of the Lock card game . . . may be the equivalent of a masonic handshake, inviting a response of gratified surprise in a Catholic, Tory or Jacobite reader,” James McLaverty observes.34 So how much of Pope’s poem functions like a Masonic handshake, engineering its own audience of cognoscenti? Is the rhetoric and affective arsenal of Jacobitism simply a convenient tool for Pope, or is the implied Jacobite association itself significant? Although critics have debated the possibility that Pope’s cultural politics have a Jacobite form in his poems, they omit to mention what an innovative thing it was to have a Jacobite cultural politics in the first place.35 The practice of explicitly aligning cultural practices with political outcomes had hitherto been a Whig tactic: if The Rape of the Lock contains this innovation, it is the result of blending Whiggish and Jacobite modes of literary activity. Dryden approaches this issue in Mac Flecknoe, where the nomination of an inferior laureate and historiographer royal is correlated with the parlous political scene, but Dryden does not posit a causal 126

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connection between the two. The Rape of the Lock is the first pro-Stuart poem of the late Stuart era to imply this causality.36 We can excavate the extent to which The Rape of the Lock develops a privileged insider audience by examining one of the poem’s many hundreds of readings and using that to pinpoint the way that the poem’s structural logic dictates its reception. In “Pope’s Libertine Self-Fashioning,” James Grantham Turner argues for the fact of Pope’s libertinism, especially in The Rape of the Lock. Turner suggests that Pope sought to combine polite and libertine discourses in his letters to the Blounts, “To confirm both these identities simultaneously, the respectable and the corrupt, is precisely the task of polite libertinism.”37 Turner explores the ambiguity of Pope’s libertine references and concludes: “The point is . . . to establish a bond between those who share the joke and feel comfortable with the illicit reference, while putting out of countenance the unsophisticated or pretentious outsider.”38 Turner’s critique of The Rape of the Lock springs from “[t]he doubleness that all critics find in the poem,” which he finds “is therefore not just a matter of scale, heroic versus trivial; it hinges also on Pope’s multiple allegiances—to polite discourse and to the libertine subtext—and it expresses an attitude divided between ingratiation and insult.”39 Turner’s reading of the poem is ideal for our purposes in that it is both doctrinaire in its method and innovative in its content; it exemplifies why The Rape of the Lock has a long and happy interpretative shelf-life ahead of it. Turner’s analysis hinges on its doubleness, and all critics find that element in the poem because doubleness both invites attention and refuses analysis. The poem’s doublenesses—mock and yet heroic, satirical yet affectionate, polite yet libertine—multiply in parallel with attempts to reduce it to a single discourse. The doubleness that Turner mentions is not just a facet of the poem but its governing logic and organizing principle. The Rape of the Lock blends Whig and Jacobite interpretative communities. From the first, it takes a procedure of cultural critique predicated on the basis that a healthy and thriving nation depends upon a morally upright culture and participation in a public discourse. From the second comes the dedication to plausible deniability through enciphering that cultivates a privileged—and private—audience around a text, the impulse 127

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toward scurrility and scandal, and the burgeoning flirtation with ad hominem attacks. The union of these two traditions explains the poem’s inexhaustible critical fertility. It is public and private, moral and complicit in immorality, mock and heroic. The Rape of the Lock was also a doubling point for Pope’s career more largely; Ian Jack notes that it represents the moment at which Pope began his transition from an author operating like a court poet to what we would now recognize as a professional writer.40 McLaverty writes of the 1712 edition that “this stage in publication seems designed to retain contact with the original manuscript circulation and to keep open the route to the poem’s social origins.”41 Even though Pope would no longer be able to, or even expect to, come face to face with the majority of his readers when three thousand copies sold in four days, he took care to circulate inscribed pre-publication copies of the poem to John Caryll, the Blount sisters, Arabella Fermor, and Lord Petre. Pope’s 1714 edition represents his effort to capitalize on the poem’s success without upsetting the delicate balance between public and private in any way. Through his dedication to Fermor. Pope dictates the interpretative terms of the story of the poem, and of the story in the poem.42 The combination of the equivocal prefatory letter and the poem consolidates The Rape of the Lock’s connection to a real event and a real circle of people (who were themselves certainly a community circulating manuscript verse), while also—by, for example, disclaiming the correspondence between the fictional Belinda and the real Fermor—generalizing the poem into a broader satire on cultural malaise. The clearest form of doubling in The Rape of the Lock is in Pope’s couplets. Although An Essay on Criticism shows extraordinary poetic skill, its couplets are primarily narrative and descriptive. In the Essay on Criticism the couplet itself is not a vector for political communication. However gorgeous a form the couplet gives Pope’s content, it is relatively politically inert. In The Rape of the Lock, Pope’s couplets achieve the status of art form in and of themselves. It is in this sense of doubleness— in which Pope’s poetic fabric so perfectly corresponds to the organizing logic of the poem—that The Rape of the Lock rests most securely on its

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canonical laurels. Consider this couplet, taken from the description of Belinda’s toilette: The Tortoise here and Elephant unite, Transform’d to Combs, the speckled and the white. (1.135–36)

The couplet depicts the combination of discrete elements into a whole; a metaphor for the couplet form and for Pope’s literary-historical borrowings. In a process representative of the core of the mock-heroic mode, it traces the diminution of animals with storied literary and mythological heritages into domestic objects. The couplet arranges the elements of the sentence symmetrically: either side of the final object, the combs, the originating animals and their descriptors appear in order; tortoise and elephant, speckled and white. And yet, the couplet brings up a tantalizing ambiguity representative of the poem’s doublings. Are the plural combs a combination of tortoiseshell and ivory, or are there combs made individually of each substance? Do the combs represent a combination of the materials into a single individual object, or a juxtaposition of combs of different materials? Corresponding questions reverberate through our efforts to interpret the poem: are the literary-historical politics of the poem seamlessly blended together into a whole, or do they rub up against each other continually? The friction between the public and private dynamics of The Rape of the Lock, through which the poem is both a text that speaks covertly to a select group and a prescription for moral reform with national consequences, is in itself a recognizably Jacobite tactic. Jacobite poems inculcated a reading experience that mirrored the political dualities that Jacobites lived with. However, the enormous commercial success of The Rape of the Lock meant that this literary performance of affective privacy was available to a huge number of people. The six thousand readers of The Rape of the Lock were twice the number boasted by Addison of The Spectator. And like The Spectator, Pope’s poem prompted a considerable public response, which Pope worked to contain and control.

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A Key to the Lock A Key to the Lock, the satirical response that Pope wrote to his own poem, shows him working hard to control the interpretation of The Rape of the Lock. Pope offers and mocks as “manifestly ridiculous” a reading of the Lock as representative of the Great Barrier Treaty.43 A Key is, in a sense, a double bluff: Pope’s decision to satirize political interpretations indicates that it is on those grounds that his defense of the poem is most sensitive. It also shows Pope’s worries about the legibility of portraiture and the difficulty of successfully wrangling public interpretation. The Key is attributed to “Esdras Barnivelt, Apoth.,” supposedly a naturalized Dutch apothecary. The second edition of A Key added an epistle to Pope and commendatory poems to Esdras Barnivelt. Padding a text with spurious and satirical material was a tactic that Pope revisited on a larger scale in 1729 in the second edition of The Dunciad. But the additions to A Key demonstrate that he felt attacked both as a Jacobite sympathizer and as a corrupting imposter in the Whiggish realm of corrective cultural critique. The text begins with The Epistle Dedicatory to Mr. POPE. Pope doesn’t miss the chance to boast about The Rape of the Lock’s sales, claiming that “above 6000 of ’em have been already vended.”44 Barnivelt’s central metaphor in the epistle is that Pope’s poem is a contagion to which Barnivelt must minister in his profession of apothecary. He begins: “Though it may seem foreign to my Profession, which is that of making up and dispensing salutary Medicines to his Majesty’s Subjects, (I might say my Fellow-Subjects, since I have had the Advantage of being naturalized) yet I cannot think it unbecoming me to furnish an Antidote against the Poyson which hath been so artfully distilled through your Quill, and conveyed to the World through the pleasing Vehicle of your Numbers.”45 The metaphor of writing-as-physic had its most prominent recent deployment thanks to Whig poet Sir Richard Blackmore in his A Satyr Against Wit (1700), itself a response to Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary. Blackmore—also a physician and at this point doctor to the king—imagines wit spreading through London like a disease, harming the citizens and institutions it touches. Pope casts Esdras Barnivelt in the mold of a more radical and controversial doctor: the Whig and naturalized Dutchman 130

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Bernard Mandeville, author of The Grumbling Hive, revised in 1711 into The Fable of the Bees. This connection is confirmed by the fact that the dedicatory poem on page seven is signed “The GRUMBLER.” Pope interpellates Blackmore and Mandeville in A Key to the Lock because he knows that The Rape of the Lock, by contributing to the discourse of the politics of cultural practices, made an incursion into Whig territory. A Key to the Lock is Pope’s attempt to draw the poison of a Whig response. Moreover, Pope assays this work of self-criticism in a different way in the dedicatory poems to A Key. In these, Pope accuses himself of Jacobitism in poems that ape Jacobite poetic maneuvers. Evidently, Dennis’s jab that Pope had written An Essay on Criticism in a bid for the Jacobite laureatcy cut deep indeed. The Grumbler voices this fear in A Key: “Can Popish Writings do the Nation good? / Each drop of Ink demands a drop of Blood. / A Papist wear the Laurel! is it fit?” (7). The Grumbler voices the Hanoverian establishment’s great fear about Jacobite poetry: that literary insurrection leads inevitably to physical insurrection. Another commendatory poem to Barnivelt relies on classic tropes of Jacobite verse; it uses an anagram of the dedicatee’s name (Unbarel It) as the ruling conceit of the poem, and then presents “Unbarel It” (5) as an acrostic in rhyming couplets.46 This poem is by “a Well-willer to the Coalition of Parties”—a title adopted in 1715 by Whigs looking to shame Tories into silence by appealing to their patriotism.47 It urges Barnivelt to “Extract from Tory Barrels all French juice, / Let not Whiggs Geneva’s Stumm infuse” (5). Stumm was a kind of partly fermented wine, and “Geneva” was both “gin” and the epicenter of European puritanism. The second line of this couplet alleges that Whigs could well be radical Puritans, while the first suggests that Tories are disguising an inner Frenchness—Catholicism. The great ingenuity of this poem, written from one fictional Whig to another and employing Jacobite tactics in its denunciation of Jacobitism, is that Pope steals the thunder of all sides. Who could accuse him of having in The Rape of the Lock sincerely appropriated the cultures that he here so adroitly mocks? Pope’s mimicry forecloses the possibility of any future critic assaying these lines of critique in earnest. By deploying these burlesqued voices, Pope locks down interpretations of The Rape of the Lock with an extraordinary effectiveness. 131

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The readings that Barnivelt offers of The Rape of the Lock are not on the face of it absurd. Barnivelt writes that “Pam” in the Game of Ombre represents “the D[uke] of Marlborough” (21), as have James McLaverty and Pat Rogers more recently. But Barnivelt’s conjectures are interspersed with and overshadowed by comments that are unmistakably designed to ruin his credibility. His very first piece of analysis, “that Belinda represents Great Britain” rests on the line “On her white Brest a sparkling Cross she bore.” Although this isn’t necessarily a preposterous claim, Barnivelt makes it a predicate for his argument, rather than its conclusion. So Barnivelt is made to seem precipitous: the description is “Alluding to the antient Name of Albion, from her white Cliffs, and to the Cross, which is the Ensign of England” (11). Pope is fighting hard, here, against the lectio of suspicion, the practice from which modern criticism proceeds. By mocking the idea that The Rape of the Lock could contain allegory or typologies, as epic poems often do, he is bullying the reader into falling into line with a dictum issued, ironically, by Barnivelt: “It is a common and just Observation, that when the Meaning of any thing is dubious, one can no way better judge of the true Intent of it, than by considering who is the Author, what is his Character in general, and his Disposition in particular” (8). The extreme effectiveness of the intentionalist doctrine Pope prescribes through Barnivelt can be witnessed in the de rigueur opening to all analyses of The Rape of the Lock such as I deployed some pages above to frame my own criticism of the poem. If discussions of the poem do not begin with a description of the originating event, Pope’s connection to it, and its transformation into the poem, then that context is almost always introduced during the reading.48 This is not to say that Lord Petre did not cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair, or that John Caryll did not ask Pope to write a poem about it to laugh the families together again, or that Pope did not write and revise an extraordinary piece of work. It is simply to say that Pope still mediates our vision of the work through biographical and intentionalist lenses even in a resolutely postmodern critical world. It is to register the unparalleled success Pope has had in making us see the “Pope” that he wished us to see by deploying and then disclaiming the Jacobite and Whig functions of his poem. 132

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Windsor-Forest and the Apogee of Tory Poetics Windsor-Forest is a georgic and topographical poem that drew upon and expanded the design of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill.49 By using Coopers Hill as a model, Pope set Windsor-Forest on a soundly Stuart and pessimistic footing; Coopers Hill concludes with “a dark view of the possibility of establishing a balance between king and people. . . . If Parliament pushes its demands too far, there will be chaos.”50 This connection strongly recalls the parallels between the civil wars and the succession of George I that Jacobite poets asserted. Much has been done in recent scholarship to unpack Windsor-Forest in its political, literary, and cultural contexts; Pat Rogers and Joseph Hone have together provided an exhaustive account of its Jacobite and Stuart resonances. In the introduction to Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts, Rogers observes that “Pope unites his disparate sources and models to form a single allegorical statement, which celebrates Anne and at the same time constitutes a prescient elegy for the Stuart cause,”51 The line between pro-Stuart and Jacobite could be thin indeed, especially during Anne’s reign. Since Anne was Protestant, however, the line did exist, and Pope walks it in his loyalty to her in Windsor-Forest. Hone builds on Ian Calvert’s distinction between “‘outward-looking’ quotations from earlier authors, designed to be recognized by his readers, and more “‘inwardfacing’ allusions, which reflect his working method.” Hone adds a third category, “concealed allusion”: moments in a poem that “would have gone over the heads of most readers” but would have been “obvious enough to Lansdowne and his friends.”52 Howard Erskine-Hill reads WindsorForest as a “crypto-Jacobite poem”; Hone adduces a wealth of evidence that Windsor-Forest abounds in crypto-Jacobite allusions. Indubitably, Windsor-Forest is a conservative manifesto of British nationhood, whether or not you credit the Jacobite hypothesis. Another purpose of Pope’s manifesto is a rebuttal to Whig cosmologies that pleads for Stuart ideologies using Whiggish methods of reasoning. After Windsor-Forest’s dedication to George Granville, the poem sketches out this integration of fact-on-the-ground with justifying the ways of monarchs to men in precisely this way. The first section of the poem (7–42) summarizes the poem’s broader message. Pope begins by 133

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asserting the natural variety of the country, from its “russet plains” (23) to its “blueish hills,” “wild heath,” and “fruitful fields” (24, 25, 26). The forest as a source of timber for the British navy makes it synecdochic for British imperial and trading prowess: Let India boast her plants, nor envy we The weeping amber or the balmy tree, While by our oaks the precious loads are born, And realms commanded which those trees adorn. (29–32)53

Blair Hoxby has argued compellingly that Windsor-Forest represents Pope’s reimagination not only of Coopers Hill but of Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667), and that, in so doing, Pope is recuperating to the Stuarts the rhetoric of economic prowess evoked by Dryden and wholly appropriated by the Whigs in the intervening half-century.54 Additionally, this passage in Windsor-Forest recalls The Rape of the Lock’s couplet: “This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks, / And all Arabia breathes from yonder box” (1.133–4). Pope completes his domestication of the Dutch trading prowess evoked by Dryden in Annus Mirabilis: “For them the Idumæan balm did sweat, / And in hot Ceylon spicy forests grew.”55 If Belinda is using these products of the Orient, Windsor-Forest lays to rest any suspicion that she bought them from Dutch traders. Pope’s two poems together map out the whole distribution chain of ambers and balms: Windsor oaks as British ships fetch them from India back to London, where society belles wear them and take them to Hampton Court, making the whole enterprise distinctly British, even patriotic. Pope reclaims this cycle of trade from the Dutch, who are associated with Whiggism after 1688–89. Rather than locating in these lines Pope the imperialist, we see here Pope the patriot, whose imperialism is a by-product of his national pride. The circular flow of British trade and consumerism makes Britain great, and the poem is a demonstration of that greatness. Windsor-Forest continues by cementing the connection between material bounty and Stuart prosperity: Not proud Olympus yields a nobler sight, Tho’ Gods assembled grace his tow’ring height, 134

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Than what more humble mountains offer here, Where, in their blessings, all those Gods appear. See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crown’d, Here blushing Flora paints th’ enamel’d ground, Here Ceres’ gifts in waving prospect stand, And nodding tempt the joyful reaper’s hand;  Rich Industry sits smiling on the plains, And peace and plenty tell, a Stuart reigns. (33–42)

The most powerful single word in this passage is the “And” at the start of line 42. The line summarizes all that has gone before and implies causation intertwined with divine right. The pantheon of gods are busy at work in Britain because a Stuart is on the throne. The semi-colon of line 40 implies the hermeneutic equivalence of 33–40 and 41–42: Pan, Pomona, Flora, and Ceres represent productive agricultural labor, which in turn confirms the divine rightness of the Stuart line. Moreover, the “plenty” that this labor produces is inextricable from Britain imperial stature.56 Pope also addresses literary historiography in Windsor-Forest. He evokes Cowley along with Denham as drawing on a genius loci and thus, given the national symbolism of Windsor-Forest, on a kind of genius patriae. When Cowley died, his body was barged down the river to London. Pope represents this passage as a kind of incorporation into the forest: “O early lost! what Tears the River shed / When the sad Pomp along his Banks was led? / His drooping Swans on ev’ry Note expire, / And on his Willows hung each Muse’s lyre” (273–75). Cowley’s funeral progress down the Thames makes the land both perform his verse and embody it. Pope transforms Cowley into the ne plus ultra of river poets connected to the most important river of all, which, as we have seen, binds up the whole world in trade, empire, and divinely ordained rule. At the close of the first section of the poem, Pope heralds George Granville, to whom he had dedicated Windsor-Forest, as a national counterpart to Addison’s Montagu: “the Groves rejoice, the Forest rings! / Are those reviv’d? Or is it Granville sings?” (281–82). When the Forest itself sings with a homogeneous voice, the listening Pope imagines himself as unable to tell whether he hears Granville, or the “reviv’d” voices of Denham and 135

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Cowley. Pope’s suggestion is that the future national poet will carry the psyche and the political commitments of his forerunners. Pope’s final turn is to himself, reflecting on his “humble Muse in unambitious strains” and his origins “in these fields” where “First . . . I sung the sylvan strains.” (290n).57 When the poem ended here in its first iteration, Pope had established Granville as the heir apparent to the role of chief poet of the Stuart dynasty, emblematized by the landscape of Windsor, positioning himself in the remainder of the poem as a humble supplicant to Granville. In so doing, Pope directly inserts himself into a political lineage of pro-Stuart poets. Moreover, Pope claims that his position in that lineage is “unambitious”; apolitical, practically an accident of birth. Of course, the metaphor is more revealing than Pope might like: dynasties are accidents of birth, but they are still political. Windsor-Forest updates the equivocal maneuvers of Coopers Hill; where Denham’s poem ends with the poet’s voice in a pose of authority and ambiguity WindsorForest instead concludes with undermined poetic authority but a more strongly advanced royalism. Like Denham, however, Pope underscores the “analogy between kingship and poetry as a public responsibility that undergirds Coopers Hill,” while minimizing the scope of that “public” to encompass Granville and himself.58

First Laurels: The Works of 1717 After the Hanoverian succession of 1715, Pope “comprehensively distanced himself from all forms of political life by constructing himself as a literary author.” In constructing a “classicized Works” Pope planned to signal his unmistakable “emergence as a timeless classic author.”59 This has been an overview of how Pope absorbed and combined the affects and formal sleights of hand of two opposed cultures: the pseudo-aristocratic exclusivity of Jacobite manuscript literary culture and the public-spirited nationalism of Whig literary culture. In Pope’s hands, the two yielded him an highly elusive and patrician persona; entitled to reform others’ writing, but above such corrections himself, in the same phrases speaking intimately to some but not others, giving rules for criticism while foreclosing criticism of his own work. The texts briefly examined here formed (mostly) the heart of Pope’s ambitious and monumental 1717 Works. 136

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Here we see the origin of the myth of Pope’s early career, the myth that confers on Pope the highest laurels of literary authority: that his career followed the Virgilian Wheel in a progression from pastoral (Pastorals, 1709) to georgic (Essay on Criticism, 1711) to epic (The Rape of the Lock, 1712). 60 This puts Pope in the company of poets like Petrarch, Dante, and Edmund Spenser. But this post-hoc mythologizing requires that we overlook the factual record of Pope’s actual schedule of publication, let alone the order of composition. When he visited Walsh in 1707 at Abberley Hall, Pope was working on a draft that would become Windsor-Forest (1713). Virgilian Wheel interpretations of Pope’s early career also overlook the companion pieces to The Rape of the Lock in Lintot’s Miscellaneous Poems and Translations: The Fable of Vertumnus and Pomona and The First Book of Statius His Thebais. Likewise unaccounted for by the Virgilian Wheel are two poems that accompanied the Pastorals, January and May and The Episode of Sarpedon in the sixth volume of Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies (1709). This is to say nothing of A Key to the Lock, his prose writing for the Guardian, and miscellaneous pieces he seems to have considered insufficiently weighty for inclusion. Exhaustiveness is not the determining criterion, but a particular form of monumentality. We’ve seen throughout this chapter that the composition and publication of Pope’s texts was a complex, overlapping process that resists being mapped onto any simple linear trajectory. However, because in his table of contents, Pope presented his works like this—pastoral, georgic, georgic, epic—the notion of that trajectory took hold and became an accepted fact of literary history. To challenge the myth of the Virgilian Wheel shows what it would mean to read Pope without “Pope,” as it were: not the story Pope told us to tell ourselves, but something more complex, more interesting, more layered, and more true. Exposing the factitiousness of the idea of the Virgilian Wheel as a governing form for Pope’s career invites us to consider what it was that Pope sought to conceal, as well as what he sought to gain. Pope’s aspirational presentation of his work in this form was a way for him to attempt to launder out its political associations. By presenting them as component parts of a larger classical body, Pope implies 137

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that whatever topical, political resonance they may possess, or have once possessed, is unimportant. Pope’s Preface to the 1717 Works is remarkably silent on the question of politics. The closest Pope comes to mentioning his own involvement in political contests is to say that “The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth; and the present spirit of the learned world is such, that to attempt to serve it (any way) one must have the constancy of a martyr, and a resolution to suffer for its sake.”61 This sentence performs the bait-and-switch we’ve become familiar with. The suffering of the wit is at once for a cause (making a martyr) and yet an individual matter. This metaphor opens up some uncomfortably clear channels of interpretation for Pope, which he is at pains to shut down later on in the Preface: “may these Poems (as long as they last) remain as a testimony, that their Author never made his talents subservient to the mean and unworthy ends of Party or selfinterest” (xxviii). The clearest example of Pope’s disclaiming of agency or self-interest in the Preface is the account Pope gives of his being “dipt in ink,” the process of becoming an author. He writes: I confess it was want of consideration that made me an author; I writ because it amused me; I corrected because it was as pleasant to me to correct as to write; and I publish’d because I was told I might please such as it was a credit to please. To what degree I have done this, I am really ignorant; I had too much fondness for my productions to judge of them at first, and too much judgement to be pleas’d with them at last. (xxvii)

The dynamics of taste governing Pope’s entry into the public world of letters with the aim of pleasing those whom “it was a credit to please” are clear. This is an aristocratic hierarchy of taste, resolutely distinct from populism. That the small number of people pleased by a text are the only ones with the authority to be worth pleasing is a Jacobite conception of the consumption of literature. The second sentence, remarkably, places Pope even above those pleased by his writing, because he has “too much judgement.” Pope is competitive about the hierarchical structures of aesthetic appreciation that he perceives in the literary marketplace and suggests in this proud disclaimer that he has met and 138

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exceeded the highest standards of judgment, and that his 1717 Works is evidence of this achievement.

Genealogy in 1718 In his field-reorienting article of 1994, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” Raymond Geuss turns the page’s orientation to landscape and draws a many-branched root, the better to explicate Nietzsche’s reading of the perversions wrought by the Apostle Paul on the teachings of Jesus. The root’s utmost tendrils—“psychological willingness of creditor to accept infliction of pain on debtor [for] default” connect to twigs. In turn those roots— “psychological connection between ‘having debts’ and ‘being about to suffer pain’” meet and form others, like expecting suffering for violating customs. And so finally to the two branches immediately before the root-stem, “pre-moral ‘bad conscience’” and “Paul’s priestly will.” This last, with “Jesus’s radically non-moralizing form of life,” finally results in Christianity. 62 Geuss’s schematic makes Nietzsche’s “grey science” look like simple, or simplistic, work. But even as the thumbnail it is, it captures irresistibly the spirit of Nietzsche’s genealogical method, a method by which to “undermine various beliefs about the origins of different forms of valuation.”63 Geuss notes that “what a new form of valuation does, it will be recalled, is take over and reinterpret existing forms.”64 Nietzsche’s example is happily apt to our own purposes, since Nietzsche’s goal was to show the contingency, historical determination, and constructed-ness of long-naturalized metaphorical structures. Genealogical writings provoke doubt about present forms of subjectivity; Martin Saar suggests that the object of the genealogical mode is to “put the readers’ identity into crisis by confronting them with descriptions about themselves that radically contradict their own self-understanding and thereby encourage them to revise their judgements and practices.”65 The Catholic rule of James II precipitated—or reactivated—existential anxieties latent since the Restoration. The Restoration happened for myriad reasons, but that republican writers’ arguments about the proper limits of royal prerogative, whether in Eikonoklastes or elsewhere, had been meaningfully countered was not chief among them. Nor was it that republican sentiment had been extirpated from the country. The Invitation to 139

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William of Orange—an uncanny return of Monck’s invitation to Charles in 1660—was part of a history of republican, and Whig, thinking about the rights of the monarch to impinge on his subjects’ liberty that can be traced back to John Pym’s refusal to pay Ship Taxes in 1635. By the same token, if the revolution of 1688–89 emerged from an existential crisis on the part of Whigs, it precipitated a mirroring crisis for supporters of the House of Stuart. The intellectual corollaries of those political orientations have been more exhaustively documented than can be summarized here, but it is no exaggeration to say that these crises of ontology were also crises of epistemology. The political settlement you favored brought with it comprehensive structures that determined how you could know who, or what, you were; what your rights and responsibilities in the polity were; how knowledge came into being; and who had the right to say what that knowledge was. Convergent roots exactly like those Geuss draws in summary of Nietzsche’s argument can be traced in this study. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the strategies two warring cultures devised to mitigate crises of being and knowing, themselves precipitated by a crisis of political settlement. In the analogy of Geuss’s root-stem, those strategies provided convergent materials with which Pope could alloy his claims to authority. In the more literal sense that those cultures were trying to articulate the existential necessity of their dominance, Pope found materials by which he could more or less obliquely advance the same case about his own poetic work and aesthetic dicta. What Saar elsewhere refers to as a “historicizing reflection on the emergence of forms of subjectivity” is precisely the aim of my argument. 66 Pope’s achievement was to generate and naturalize particular forms of subjectivity. My desire in this study is to estrange, and de-naturalize, those forms in order to show the reader how she might recognize the contingencies—in the first instance, on Pope’s work—of her own beliefs about genre and literary authority, in this period and beyond. Not at all coincidentally, given the political context of Milton’s work, my ambition bears a strong resemblance to Stanley Fish’s in Surprised by Sin: to suggest that the reader’s interpretation of Paradise Lost cannot but be, to some extent, an emergent property of the formal artifices 140

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of Milton’s verse. 67 And by an almost identical token, Harold Bloom’s choice of epigraph for the “Prologue” to The Anxiety of Influence, “It Was a Great Marvel That They Were in the Father without Knowing Him” (Gospel of Truth 22.27),Correct?} is meant to suggest that the work of the reader/writer is always more contingent than s/he realizes. 68 Jerome McGann similarly intervenes in The Romantic Ideology. 69 Each of these readers leverages genealogy as critique in order to contrive a “robust historicist picture of the self or forms of subjectivity”, the better to arrive at “a differentiated conception and typology of power and its forms.”70 That Milton and Romantic poets have exercised this kind of power over their readers is a more or less settled fact of literary historiography. Not only do I claim that Pope’s and Johnson’s implications of the reader as contingent to their own structures parallel similar implications asserted by other writers. Nor only that that form of contingency has had a peculiarly long shelf life. I further suggest that in the process of that implication, they engineered an enduring form for staking claims to literary authority that other writers have followed in their respective attempts to render posterity. History pretends to a disinterested accounting—or to the possibility of one—of the past, as though it and the historian were not contiguous. If a history tracks the development of an idea, or traces the treatment of a theme or phenomenon over time, it does so by positing an unchanging ontology. That ontological stability is then fundamental to the stability of the project as a whole. The history can proceed because the historian levels the ground from which s/he observes, in order to keep her lens steady and her gaze fixed. From this solidified footing, she can tease out epistemological changes, suggest a general trend to those changes, and make arguments for the significance of that trend. A genealogy offers no such guarantees. Its object is to show the logics governing the changing ontologies of its subjects. But those very ontologies constitute, if indirectly, part of the genealogist’s capacity to conceive of being, to say nothing of knowing. Why then risk this abyssal recursion by writing a genealogy? Because the genealogist accepts the contingency of her perspective, in fact insists on the artifactuality of her very disciplinary situation as she does of the past phenomena she documents. Writing 141

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genealogically is the only way to show that historical phenomena do not just influence but create present praxis. In Pope’s hands, the authors whom Whig and Jacobite writers used as sources (for instance, Thomas Sprat, or Petrus Ramus) were unimportant. All that mattered for Pope was what his predecessors had had to say, and how they had said it. Where his predecessors had found their own materials was irrelevant. Pope purposively remediated his predecessors’ instrumental, purposive forms. His innovation was to pretend that he remediated them by elevating them into supposedly nonpurposive artifacts. Genealogy in 1718, connecting Jacobean lyric (and behind it, Philip Sidney, and behind him, More, Gower, and Chaucer) with Pope’s Works of 1717, would have suggested the recuperation of poetry from politics back into its own, less contingent and more self-sufficient, realm. That any such recuperation had been achieved through extraordinarily intimate engagement might yet escape notice. And any corollary assertions for a literary authority, cantilevered off that recuperated poetic, as sundered from political authority, might also seem possible. In the following chapter, we see Pope attempting a similar gambit with a new set of objectives, in response to new pressures and necessities. Whig and Jacobite legacies retain some relevance, but (as Brean Hammond has remarked) the predecessor who bothered Pope most was Pope himself. Pope of the 1730s had to reckon with Pope of the 1710s, and where the latter had found his raw materials was, again, of no importance. Subsequently, we shall encounter Samuel Johnson’s own rehearsal of this suite of maneuvers. Johnson finds a set of tools developed to serve specific needs and uses them for his own new purposes. Jacobites leaned on Cavalier tropes to bolster their literary support for their cause, as Pope first adapted Jacobite models of reference and then engaged with his own legacy. Similarly, Johnson would encounter the Pope of the 1730s as his principle antagonist. I trace this bald trajectory to illustrate the simple truth that while the causal chains bringing Cavalier poetic forms to the prose couplets of Samuel Johnson might be direct, the nature of each link in that chain is specific to its context at a very small scale. Genealogy is useful, then, in two ways. As grand récit and as a set of 142

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granular analyses; it has an appropriately Jacobite double vision. I began this book alluding to The Castle of Otranto and The Left Hand of Darkness as progenitors of generic innovations that assumed authoritative positions in their respective cultures. Thinking genealogically is a heuristic designed to inculcate a combination of opposed habits of thought. On the one hand, it insists on the necessary perversity, for the generalist, of focusing on the utterly local and specific. On the other, it gestures irrepressibly to cultural and intellectual morphologies at the highest levels and implicates the reader looking for, say, millimetric inflections of form in four poems written across six months, in that development. It invites us to think transhistorically and transculturally, and to see reflected in one another the geological time of the development of forms, and the particulars of the individual work of art.

Conclusion By 1717, Pope had laid the groundwork for how he was to be (and is still) perceived by students and scholars of early eighteenth-century literature. It took him only eight years to transform himself from an apprentice poet with a restricted manuscript circulation to presenting himself as the preeminent living poet. There was a political corollary to Pope’s lightning metamorphosis determining its nature and governing the speed at which it happened. At the time of the publication of the Pastorals (1709), Anne Stuart was the Torysympathizing queen of a newly united Great Britain, and Tory ministers held powerful positions in government. In 1709, it might have seemed possible that the Act of Settlement of 1701 might yet be overturned, or bypassed—that Anne might yet give birth to a male heir who might live, for instance, thus avoiding Hanoverian rule. Eight years later, however, every political cause that Pope likely cared for had failed, and every hope that he or other Tories might have entertained had been trounced. The outlook for a Tory in 1717 was grim. The house of Stuart was in an exile that would turn out to be permanent. The polyglot, cultured, intellectual Electress Sophia had been succeeded by her allegedly doltish son, George, and the reign of the Hanoverians over Great Britain had begun. Moreover, the Tory party had fallen from 143

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power and was in disarray. The Whigs had taken power and reformed electoral law so that Parliaments sat for seven years between elections, which allowed them a deeper consolidation of power. The failed Jacobite rebellion of 1715 ensured that Tories were entirely purged from all political and legal offices. The Whig party would rule unchecked until at least 1760, its dominance extending from 1714 until the succession of George III in 1783. Politically speaking, all was lost. The same fate befell Pope’s religion. Protestantism was unambiguously the state religion of Great Britain, and the Whig party’s staunch anti-Catholicism brought treatment of Catholics to an extraordinary nadir. The restrictions put in place were designed to cripple the Catholic community and render it incapable of amassing political authority of any kind. Catholics could not hold public office, nor could they vote. They had to live at least ten miles outside the center of London. After 1714, no Catholic could purchase land or property. And any Catholics who failed to recuse themselves within six months of turning eighteen, and convert thereby to Anglicanism, stood to lose any land or property that they might have inherited. Catholics had to register in county rolls and their numbers were monitored. In fact, no Catholic would hold public office in Britain until Daniel O’Connell successfully brought about the passage of the 1829 Catholic Emancipation bill. So firmly did Hanoverian lawmakers bear down upon Catholics that forms of legal disability remained in place until the 1920s, two hundred years later. It is no exaggeration, then, to say that every trace of political authority to which Pope likely felt any loyalty had been obliterated. The plausibility—in mainstream political discourse—of Jacobite political authority had evanesced, and with that evanescence, Jacobite manuscript poetic culture lapsed into ever deeper belatedness and resignation.71 Pope had taken on Jacobite forms just before the obsolescence of their originating context. With the sudden invalidity—or at least the marked and dominant suppression—of the political authority those forms had been designed to endorse, Pope had only a small window of opportunity in which to transfer their authoritative reference to a new object before they became irrecoverably dead metaphors. We should see Pope’s self-apotheosis in 1717 in the context of this 144

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foundational political reconfiguration. The literary authority Pope had garnered from Jacobite literature seems to have retained a some vestigial association with Jacobitism, as evidenced by John Dennis’s reading of An Essay on Criticism as a crypto-Jacobite text. The interpretive community constituted by Jacobite literature was sustained in part, as we saw in the previous chapter, by the closed hermeneutic circle of its membership. Pope’s objective was to redraw that circle with himself at its center. So it was, that for perhaps the last time, literary authority moved in the shadow of political authority and of the conditions of possibility that that authority generated. Pope’s 1717 Works marks a revolution in literary authority designed to correlate with that marked in political authority by the 1715 coronation of George I. It would be trivial to note that the remarkable achievement of the 1717 Works was to secure for Pope, at that moment and for the next few decades, the greatest literary authority of any living writer. But the real extent of this achievement can actually be determined by witnessing just how against the grain of his own milieu Pope’s victory ran. We have seen the political and religious oblivion facing Pope’s commitments; moreover, none of Pope’s cultural or intellectual causes prospered. A dialogic, polyvocal, public sphere bloomed and metastasized; critical, close, skeptical reading became more and more commonplace, scholarly editing became increasingly, then entirely, genealogical, writing confessedly for money became an acceptable way to earn a living, and so on. And yet, when surveys of eighteenth-century British literature cover the first half of the century, Pope’s work, particularly The Rape of the Lock, is an almost obligatory inclusion. We choose Pope to represent the period notwithstanding the thoroughgoing failure of every cause he endorsed. The link between politics and literature was sundered. Pope conferred upon himself this tremendous concatenation of literary authority to effect his accession to a seat of literary power. He could not be his chosen monarch’s anointed speaker. So he replaced that monarch with himself. The role of poet laureate itself would be a byword for bad poetry until the tenure of William Wordsworth in 1843 (although some might skip late Wordsworth and wait until Alfred Tennyson’s tenure began in 1850). The Hanoverian dynasty did not persist because it persuaded British 145

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subjects of its merit; neither did the Whig hegemony endure through reasoned argumentation. Those causes dominated British life for generations, not because they won a debate, but because (in different ways) they rendered debate impossible. By the same token, Pope did not owe his enduring literary authority to the enduring power of a set of claims whose probative value was up for reevaluation. Instead, he subsumed political and affective rhetorics into his writing so adroitly that he made substantive questioning of his authority structurally impossible.

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Chapter 4

Pope’s Moderate Ascendancy

Eleven years passed before Pope printed another major poem of his own. He was certainly busy—not only editing collections of poems by Matthew Prior and Thomas Parnell, but translating the Iliad and Odyssey and creating his own editions of Shakespeare. It was surely no accident that he sought to put his own stamp on Homer and Shakespeare. After Swift’s trip to England in 1726, their co-published Miscellany, and the scorn poured on him by Lewis Theobald and others for his “corrections” of Shakespeare, Pope returned to original composition with the 1728 Dunciad. Through the texts that followed the Dunciads, including the moral epistles, the imitations of Horace, An Essay on Man, and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Pope renewed and refined his efforts to arrogate all literary authority to himself and thereby to dictate the terms of literary judgment. This chapter’s title both represents Pope’s claims about his own status and is intended to suggest with irony just how disingenuous those claims were: the chapter documents Pope’s new campaign of an old culture war and measures the extent of his success at leveraging his literary authority for cultural proscription and description. In the 1730s, instead of contending for the approval of the literary public as he had done before, Pope positioned himself as morally indispensable to—or even constitutive of— that public. In the 1730s, he suggested that the nation and its readers desperately needed him and his correctives, rather than the other way around. Doing so necessitated further appropriation of contemporary Whiggish thought, in combination with the typological ciphering of the Jacobites and an apparently nonpartisan insistence on elevated, disinterested virtue. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first, “The Proper Study 147

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of Mankind in Thomson and Pope,” shows how James Thomson gave poetic form to physico-theology in The Seasons and explores how Pope responded to those forms and customized them to suit his purposes in An Essay on Man. The second section, “Epistles and Imitations: Pope’s Moderate Ascendency,” analyzes Pope’s Epistle to Cobham, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated to demonstrate the apogee of his combination of Whig and Jacobite techniques. I close with a summary discussion of Pope’s countervailing, everpresent talent for malice. I do not discuss here what many consider Pope’s defining works, the Dunciad, the Dunciad Variorum, or the Dunciad in Four Books. Many of the following arguments apply equally to the Dunciads, not least the typological method of reference that requires specialist knowledge to decode, and the linkage of the cultural state of the nation with its national prestige (particularly through his satire of the poets laureate). Just as the Key to the Lock tried to preempt readings of The Rape of the Lock by making such exercises seem trivial and foolish, the editorial apparatus of the 1729 Dunciad staged a variety of forms of cultural discourse that had become commonplace. Pope’s own hurt feelings over his edition of Shakespeare provided the prompt for the Variorum, but the comprehensive scope of Pope’s poem afforded a similarly comprehensive array of opportunities to preempt, trivialize, misrepresent, and—through ventriloquism—silence. The very first annotation in the 1729 Dunciad, “It may be doubted whether this is a right reading,” suggests Pope’s hurt over the response to his edition of Shakespeare. Calling out the inanity of the suggestion that he had mistaken his own intention and been unfaithful to himself (by changing nothing from the first edition) masks a deeper cathection on Pope’s part than we might suspect. Recall that Pope’s first “significant” literary acquaintance was with William Wycherley, whose work he was involved in helping to edit. And Pope was continually involved in the furtherance and development of the literary careers of a variety of writers. So while ambition was indubitably a factor in Pope’s work on Shakespeare, given the regularity of his collaborations, ambition could not have been his only motive for editing the plays. Notwithstanding the Dunciads’ jeux 148

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d’esprit, they were born out of wounded pride too . Doubting whether the first lines of the Dunciad were a “right reading” suggested the corollary absurdity of questioning Pope’s readings of Shakespeare. The Dunciads are so transparently maneuvers in the cultural war outlined in these pages that it would be otiose to list them. They are pertinent to our analysis here only insofar as the candor of their partisanship has served to make the marginally less-explicitly partisan texts of the 1730s seem, by contrast, entirely removed from worldly concerns. As we saw in chapter 1, though it predated Whiggism itself, physicotheology was a vector for, and later inheritor of, the systems of Whiggish thought that had sprung up after the accession of William III. That system received its most lasting encapsulation in poetry in James Thomson’s long poem The Seasons.1 One of the sleights of hand physico-theology also performed provided the main grounds on which Pope and Thomson competed in the period between the first edition of Thomson’s Winter (1726) and Pope’s publication of An Essay on Man (1733).2 Thomson’s The Seasons uses physico-theology to articulate Whiggish political philosophy.3 Physico-theology’s assertion that all animate beings are endowed with souls of commensurate value makes it strongly opposed to anthropocentrism.4 If physico-theology’s political corollary is harmonious self-government in which all components of the political system endorse and contribute to the overall order, then anthropocentric interpretations of nature correspond analogically to autocracy; one element, man, has been made by God to be qualitatively different from the rest of the system and is thereby entitled to rule over it with or without its consent. These two competing visions of nature and of man’s role in it map onto competing political economies: a participatory democracy (of sorts) on the one hand, and a divinely ordained monarchy on the other. The Seasons set physico-theology into the context of the passage of the year, and enumerated the various applications that it could have to urban and rural pursuits in each season. Thomson’s poem is an epic of nationhood and an exploration of man’s place in the natural world, which Thomson imagines being like well-ordered civic society; natural law is a spontaneously self-organizing and emergent phenomenon of a functioning social order in which all parts are equal under God. In An Essay on Man, 149

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Pope appears to adopt the profoundly Whiggish structures of Thomson’s poem, while in fact replacing Thomson’s values with his own opposed political economy; nature is properly a de jure state run by man for his profit alone. Thomson’s Britain is Whiggish: inclusive, progressive and Modern. Pope’s is Tory or Jacobite: exclusive, conservative, and Ancient. Thomson praises scientific enquiry; Pope scorns natural philosophy as hubristic. Where Thomson asserts that nature produces spontaneous egalitarian order, Pope insists that only God’s law prevents anarchy and that nature exists to serve man under God. Thomson hails Britain as a polite state built on a participatory government; Pope sees Britain as succeeding only where it obeys laws given by God or laid down by the Ancients. In this chapter’s first section, I read An Essay on Man as a bravura attempt to foreclose the discursive space opened up by Thomson’s poem, through which Pope seeks to reclaim the fashioning of both the nation and its literary culture as the preserve of a small elect. In the chapter’s second section, I argue that Pope uses desacralized classical typologies in the Jacobite tradition to cultivate a cognoscenti of readers. That cognoscenti was made complicit with Pope’s vision of contemporary Britain: a morally deficient culture, above which Pope stands untainted. I trace how Pope conflates his moral and literary exceptionalism in order to suggest that his prominence is a matter of national urgency. Pope capitalizes on these exceptionalist claims in the First Satire and the Epistle to Arbuthnot and ends up asserting his claims for total cultural and national preeminence. These claims are made, paradoxically, on the basis of Pope’s adoption of that most Whiggish property of all: moderation. This moderation is accessible to Pope because he undertakes Horatian imitations; the Horatian pose is rich in possibilities, not least of which is the transformation of Pope’s satire into an ironic and compassionate aequabilitas—a forerunner of Johnson’s satire manqué. This Whiggish pose only draws further power from the Jacobite exclusivity of readership that Pope has cultivated. Taken together, these two sections show Pope’s remarkable success at fashioning himself as the writer of indispensable moral and literary importance for British culture.

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The Proper Study of Mankind in Thomson and Pope Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man is usually considered within a certain set of local contexts; whether as a part of his unfinished opus magnum, as an episode in his friendship with the prominent Tory politician Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, as a theodicy, or simply as a happy disguise for “penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment.”5 Perhaps counterintuitively, it was also a specifically targeted response to James Thomson’s The Seasons. While re-situating Thomson’s pre-Romantic diction as an emanation of his own local context, and challenging the notion of Pope’s Augustan exceptionalism by showing his thorough engagement with a poet writing apparently far outside his own cadre, I show how the two poets used a common theodical framework of physico-theology, but derived opposed conclusions from it. The Seasons and An Essay on Man present differently inflected theodicies strongly correlated with the two writers’ deeply held political and religious commitments and their beliefs about the future of British literary production. As Leibniz had done twelve years earlier in La Monadologie, Thomson’s physico-theology attributes consciousness to matter down to an almost atomic level; in The Seasons the component parts of beings and organisms—eyes, ears, even cells—are endowed with agency. 6 In An Essay on Man, conversely, these component parts only have consciousness or agency in particular formations or combinations.7 Pope’s poem seems to be a conventionally physico-theological work, and it appears to adopt the profoundly Whiggish structures of Thomson’s poem, while in fact replacing Thomson’s values with his own opposed political economy. That Pope and Thomson’s poems are both theodical is well known, but revealing the specific correspondences between the two shows how the differing theodicies were stalking horses for altogether larger cultural debates.8 Thomson praises scientific enquiry, which Pope scorns as hubristic. Thomson asserts that nature produces spontaneous, egalitarian order, while Pope insists that only God’s law prevents anarchy and implies that nature exists to serve man under God. Thomson hails Britain as a polite state built on a participatory government; Pope sees Britain as succeeding only where it obeys laws given by God or the Ancients. An Essay on

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Man is a bravura attempt to foreclose the discursive space opened up by Thomson’s poem. Pope reclaims the fashioning of both the nation and its literary culture as the preserve of a small elect.9 The physico-theological perspective holds that the best way to understand God is through a rigorous scientific understanding of God’s work, creation. The implicit politics of physico-theology depends upon the equal participation of all members of a natural “commonwealth” in the overall scheme of a “conjunctive all.”10 Physico-theology was immensely popular, as was Thomson’s formulation of it; The Seasons was the one of the bestselling poems of the eighteenth-century. Physico-theology was first articulated by Walter Charleton in The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (London: 1652), and was expanded upon by John Ray in his 1692 The Wisdom of God and 1693 Three Physico-Theological Discourses.11 William Derham transformed Ray’s more limited account of the natural world into a thoroughgoing account (in particular) of man in Physico-Theology: Or, a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation (1713).12 Derham’s was the most recent and influential formulation of physico-theology for Thomson. Physico-theology was a markedly Whiggish school of thought, devoted to the open and consensual derivation of scientific knowledge, political decisions, and literary norms.13 Pope’s engagement with, and transvaluation of, the physico-theological values expressed in Thomson’s poem was central to his larger project of self-fashioning. An Essay on Man appears to use the same machinery as Thomson’s poem, but repurposes it to Pope’s own ends. In Pope’s poem man both does and does not occupy a privileged place in nature. Rather than being an embedded part of a system encompassing all flora and fauna, nature exists to furnish man with his needs, Pope sometimes suggests. While Pope is often strongly against anthropocentrism, he sometimes implies a quasi-anthropocentric belief in a categorical difference between man and the rest of nature; such a belief has a constellation of corollaries: the positions that human self-knowledge is the best way to understand God, that scientific enquiry is hubristic and disobedient, and that obedience to the laws unilaterally devised by God, king. and a small literary elite was the only sure path to a virtuous and moral society. 152

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On March 20, 1726, Sir Isaac Newton, alchemist, mathematician, member of Parliament, warden and master of the Royal Mint, and president of the Royal Society, died. Different factions promptly sought to present Newton’s life in competing lights. Pope wrote the following epitaph: Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.14

Pope intended this couplet to be inscribed on Newton’s tomb. Although it was rejected as an inscription, it is profoundly revealing. It imagines a thoroughly Augustan Newton, ushering us between binaries of Night and Light, emphasizing Newton’s works as an individual genius in his Opticks (“Light”) and the Principia (“Nature’s Laws”) over Newton’s work as a member of society at the Mint, in Parliament, as an economist, lecturer, teacher, and luminary of the new era of science. In fact, the Newton that Pope imagines is a lot like Pope himself: a lone ranger and epistemological deus ex machina, singlehandedly bringing truth to the people through his great works. Thomson also memorialized Newton, and his To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton (1727) gives a much fuller account of the extent Newton’s career, praising his work on planetary movements, gravity, comets, the movement of sound, and the composition of light and color.15 Thomson’s memorial underscores Newton’s importance to contemporary British patriots.16 “O Britain’s boast!”, he writes: O’er thy dejected country chief preside, And be her Genius call’d! her studies raise, Correct her manners, and inspire her youth; For, though depraved and sunk, she brought thee forth, And glories in thy name! . . .

thy sacred dust

Sleeps with her kings, and dignifies the scene.17

For Thomson, and other Whigs, Newton represents Britain’s actual present and possible future greatness. Newton’s personal qualities (“how mild, how calm, / How greatly humble, how divinely good” (To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, 148–49) are imagined as fostering moral fiber, the intellectual caliber of the nation’s unborn scientists, and national stature 153

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as a whole. Both Pope’s couplet and Thomson’s poem treat Newton’s discoveries physico-theologically—tending toward the greater discovery of good through scientific enquiry. Pope highlights the congruity of Newton’s work with Christian orthodoxy in a way that is wholly appropriate; as Newton wrote to Richard Bentley of the Principia, “Sir, When I wrote my Treatise . . . I had an Eye upon such Principles as might work with considering Men, for the Belief of a Deity.”18 In Pope’s imagining, Newton’s advancement of the popular understanding of all things natural was indistinguishable from advancement of the popular understanding of God. Indeed, so compatible are Newtonian natural philosophy and theology for Pope that Newton is a transparent agent of God’s creation in his couplet; God’s vehicle for revelations about the mechanics of his creation. Pope and Thomson were not, however, so closely aligned in the future; between Pope’s 1727 couplet and his publication of An Essay on Man in 1733 (and probably by the time he was composing it in 1730–31), Pope recognized the magnitude and sophistication of the system Thomson espoused in The Seasons, its political corollaries and literary consequences. An Essay on Man was a counterblast to that system and to its implications for Britain’s political, scientific, religious and literary self-imagination. Thomson’s The Seasons is a vast undertaking; “the one poem written in the century following Paradise Lost that can lay genuine claim to epic status.”19 The poem’s size and unusual composition have led to its being variously described as an epic, an ode, and most recently “ecogeorgic.”20 The poem encompasses the seasonal cycle of Britain’s weather, flora and fauna, contemporary agricultural methods, the daily and seasonal rhythms and customs of both village and city life, and recent scientific and geographical research. Physico-theology was an embellishment of the Great Chain of Being to make it compatible with contemporary scientific and philosophical debates. God was in every living thing equally, and the intricate interrelation of the parts of God’s creation was itself a proof of God’s existence. Jonathan Kramnick cites Margaret Cavendish’s claim that matter was “rational and sensitive” in its smallest particles. According to this view, Kramnick writes, “The ultimate material of the world . . . has a kind of consciousness out of which the consciousness of larger entities is made.”21 154

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Physico-theology, then, was capable of containing both panpsychism, as expressed by Cavendish, and emergence, since the interrelation of consciousnesses to produce the consciousness of a higher entity—emergence— was itself a demonstration of the existence and beneficence of God. As John Ray writes in his Preface to The Wisdom of God, The particulars of this Discourse serve not only to Demonstrate the being of a Deity, but also to illustrate some of his principal Attributes, as namely his Infinite Power and Wisdom. The vast multitude of Creatures, and those not only small but immensely great: The Sun and the Moon, and all the Heavenly Host, are Effects and Proofs of his Almighty Power. . . . The admirable Contrivance of all and each of them, the adapting all the parts of Animals to their several uses: The Provision that is made for their Sustenance.  .  .  . And Lastly, Their mutual Subserviency to each other, and unanimous conspiring to promote and carry on the publick Good, are evident Demonstrations of his Sovereign Wisdom. (WG, Preface, A7–8)

The system that Ray describes is not a mute mechanism designed by God as evidence of his potency: “mutual subserviency” indicates that each component part of the system is animate, and that all component parts contribute to the glorification of God, and that interactions among parts are integral to that glorification and to the sustenance of the whole. Accordingly, Ray is adamant that anthropocentrism is misguided: It is a generally received Opinion, That all this visible World was created for Man; that Man is the end of the Creation. . . . For My part, I cannot believe that all the things in the World were so made for Man, that they have no other use. For it is highly absurd and unreasonable, to think that Bodies of such vast magnitude as the fixt Stars, were only made to twinkle to us; nay, a multitude of them there are, that do not so much as twinkle, being either by reason of their distance or of their smalness, altogether invisible. (WG 1: 167–69)

Not only is creation not designed around Man’s convenience: much of it exists in spite of man’s entire ignorance of it. This raises the important 155

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corollary that aspects of God’s creation are created as much for themselves as for Man: “There are many species in Nature, which were never yet taken notice of by Man . . . which yet we are not to think were created in vain; but . . . to partake of the overflowing Goodness of the Creator, and to enjoy their own Beings” (WG 1: 169, emphasis mine). If species were created to enjoy their own beings then they are conscious, soulbearing creatures. It follows, therefore, that physico-theology posits that the souls of trout, for example, are as divine as those of humans. Physicotheology applies the paradoxically anthropomorphic labels like “people” or “tribes” to all animals, to anything that has an animus.22 This vision of God’s creation that was at once systematic, self-justifying through the very fact of its operation, and fully participatory, found strong political sympathy among supporters of William III. These supporters were anxious to shore up the godliness of their elected monarch and to emphasize the rightness of a system in which all could participate (rather than their experience of exclusive and unrepresentative government under James II). The more perfect the physico-theology, the more it maps onto the physical reality of the world as discovered by empirical and natural science, and coordinates that reality with the Anglican and Hanoverian settlement. Physico-theology was the natural theological analogue to the systems of Whiggish political philosophy—especially Locke’s—that sprang up after the accession of William III; The Seasons was the principal poetic encapsulation of that system. Physico-theology is also the main ground on which Pope and Thomson competed over the period between the first edition of Thomson’s Winter (1726) and Pope’s publication of An Essay on Man (1733). Thomson’s Seasons uses physico-theology to articulate a Whiggish and participatory political philosophy.23 An Essay on Man was a counterblast to the panpsychism of Thomson’s system and to its implications for Britain’s political, scientific, religious, and literary selfimagination. Thomson’s poem is an epic of nationhood and an exploration of man’s place in the natural world, which Thomson imagines as being like wellordered civic society. In The Seasons all natural bodies draw on the animating spirit and are bound together by it. There is a close political analogue to this binding participation: after the accession of William 156

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III, all officeholders, no matter how unimportant, had to swear an Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy to William and Mary in order to retain their offices and be deemed active participants in the Commonwealth. Thomson articulates the nature of this force repeatedly in The Seasons, as here in Spring: HAIL, Mighty Being! Universal Soul Oh Heaven and Earth! Essential Presence, hail! To Thee I bend the Knee, to Thee my Thoughts Continual climb, who, with a Master-Hand, Hast the great Who into Perfection touch’d, By Thee the various vegetative Tribes, Wrapt in a filmy Net, and clad with Leaves, Draw the Live Aether, and imbibe the Dew.24

The “Essential Presence” is what allows plants to respire. Here and throughout The Seasons Thomson reconciles theology with contemporary scientific research, such as the fact that plants drink from the air using their leaves. This encapsulates what John Sitter and Philip Connell have called the “apologist,” reconciling principle of physicotheology. 25 As is commensurate with acknowledging all animate beings to be equally worthy before God, throughout The Seasons Thomson uses anthropomorphic nouns for non-human subjects. Thomson’s goal, in line with Ray and Derham, is to treat all forms of life equably: “from the vegetable world / To higher Life, with equal Wing ascend / My panting Muse” (Spring, 27–28). Accordingly, Thomson describes birds as “The plumy People” (Spring, 12), “the houshould, feathery people” (Winter, l: 88), and “the gay troops” (Spring, 28). Swallows are “The swallow-people” (Autumn, 1: 781) and Thomson tends carefully to the feathered race’s “little Souls” (Spring, 30), asking in one of the many passages pitched against hunting, “But you, ye Flocks, / What have ye done? ye peaceful People, what / To merit Death?” (Spring, 30).26 Keenleyside writes that “human” and “people” are not “stable” terms in Thomson’s system; rather, they are inclusive terms for consciousness-bearing organisms. Thomson emphasizes the scientific basis for this apparently figurative 157

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language, and conjoins this with implicit metrical arguments for its descriptive accuracy. Near the start of Spring, Thomson insists: These are not idle Philosophic Dreams: Full Nature swarms with life. . . . Thro’ subterranean Cells, Where searching sun-Beams never found a Way, Earth animated heaves. The flowery Leaf Wants not it’s soft Inhabitants. (Spring, 10)27

The three stressed syllables of “Earth animated heaves” provide a sharp contrast to the previous line’s regular iambic pentameter. This metrical interruption of alternating strong and weak stresses with three strong syllables aurally describes the marked activity of the earth. The trio of vowels that start the words, along with the full stop that follows them, slows down the rhythm of the verse to a chthonic pace. The return to alternating strong and weak syllables in “The flowery Leaf” corresponds to the return of the poetic vision to more usual subjects than the heaving cells of the earth. Thomson articulates his enthusiasm for life in its vegetable forms in his references to “abundant vegetable soul” (Winter, l: 570), “living Herbs” (Spring, 15), and “the flowery race” (Summer, l: 211–12). Thomson also praises insects, since “Nor shall the muse disdain / To let the little noisy summer race / Live in her lay” (Summer, 1: 235–37), and describes the “nameless Nations” (Spring, 10) and the “Ten thousand forms! Ten thousand tribes!” that “People the blaze” (Summer, 1: 248–49).28 Ever adversarial, Pope’s clearest engagement with The Seasons refers to the moment when Thomson explicitly addresses critics of “th’unbounded scheme of things” (Summer, 1: 279): “Wanders a critic fly: his feeble ray / Extends an inch around, yet blindly bold / He dares dislike the structure of the whole” (Summer, 1: 293–95). These myopic detractors, among whom Pope would shortly number, Thomson imagines as flies: aimless and too insignificant to perceive the magnitude or magnificence of the system in which they too are enmeshed. Pope responded directly to the “critic fly” in this couplet: “Why has not man an microscopic eye? / For this plain reason: man is not a Fly” (An Essay on Man, 1.193–94). This couplet tries 158

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to dismiss both of Thomson’s claims; that critics of his poem are qualitatively no different from flies (which is in accordance with the panpsychic interpretation of creation) and that they are shortsighted. Pope’s couplet also gives the hint of the grounds on which Pope’s whole objection will be founded. Thomson’s metaphor is predicated on the animate equivalence of men and flies, and since both are part of nature, and God’s spirit animates both, they are equally participants in the overall system. Pope’s blunt remark, “man is not a Fly,” insists upon the categorical difference between man and nature that underscores his reinterpretation of physico-theology so as to reject participatory panpsychism in favor of a more hierarchical emergent theory of consciousness, according to which consciousness only inheres in particular configurations of atoms. Moreover, Pope’s opprobrium for men who use a “microscopic eye” (see below) is not only a sideswipe at over-particular critics like Dennis, but at Robert Hooke. As Kevis Goodman observes, in his censure of the “microscopic eye,” Pope is unexpectedly more in accord with John Locke than is Thomson. For Locke, any single artificially enhanced sense would disorder the way in which sense data achieve their “Audience in the Brain,” and such disorder would leave sense data unable to “be perceived by the Understanding,” resulting in “Sounds without Signification.”29 The specificity with which Pope’s couplet addresses Thomson’s lines makes it unmistakable that Pope’s poem is meant as a rebuttal of Thomson’s. Where Thomson urges his “panting Muse . . . To higher Life, with equal Wing ascend” (Spring, 27–28) Pope’s Muse’s wing is unequal. Pope appears to endorse a physico-theological system of Thomson’s sort, but he actually treats nature as a resource on which man is entitled to draw upon for his own betterment. Thomson certainly anticipated that his poem would attract Pope’s attention. It has been remarked that Pope’s Dunciad made a straw man out of Whiggism, using a very outdated sociopolitical model, which no longer bore much resemblance to its actual political context.30 Newton had died in 1727, but his scientific career had begun to wane roughly around the time of George I’s accession to the throne in 1715. After the publication of the second edition of the Principia, and especially following his appointment as master of the Mint in 1717, Newton was mostly 159

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preoccupied with theological and alchemical pursuits. To claim, as Thomson did in his poem to Newton’s memory and in The Seasons, to be the chief national memorialist for Newton, his scientific methods and his discoveries, was thus to valorize the social and political circumstances leading up to 1715. So it was reasonable for Thomson to worry that Pope would want to intervene in Thomson’s memorialization of Newton and his system. The Britain of the time leading up to the arrival of the house of Hanover was the Britain of Pope’s youth, the crucible of his literary success, his deepest friendships, most lasting rivalries, and strongest political commitments. The Seasons was a reminder, also, that the years immediately following the first publication of Derham’s treatise could easily have turned out very differently. However, Thomson’s anticipation of Pope’s intervention took an ingenious shape. Pope is the only living poet mentioned by name in the 1730 edition of Thomson’s poem: . . . . from the muses’ hill will Pope descend, To raise the sacred hour, to make it smile, And with the social spirit warm the heart: For tho’ not sweeter his own Homer sings, Yet is his life the more endearing song. (Winter, 469–73)

Thomson’s public persona was safe: Pope could scarcely satirize a poet who had called him the living representative of Parnassus without looking ungracious, and he returned the compliment by never mentioning Thomson. Pope was not, however, deterred from implicit competition. He takes Thomson’s politicized system and makes it seem apolitical; refers to the same Lockean and Shaftesburyean political genesis stories that Thomson does, but uses them without attribution and attaches them to his exclusive structure. Where Thomson mentions Locke and Shaftesbury as figures for readers to admire and emulate, Pope transposes their ideas onto his own ideological structure based on giving laws rather than consensually devising them. Finally, by endowing only certain higher-level creatures with consciousness, principally, man, Pope worked to displace nature from the diffuse center of the system Thomson had articulated. For example, 160

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Pope’s quatrain on the fitness of man’s sensory capacities to his place in the Great Chain of Being reads: Presumptuous Man! the reason wouldst thou find, Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind! First if thou canst, the harder reason guess, Why form’d no weaker, blinder, and no less! (An Essay on Man, 1.35–38)

On the face of it, this seems an orthodox articulation of physico-theological principles: the attunement of man’s sensorium, and therefore his ability to perceive and interact with the world around him, accords to his God-given station within it. A comparison with the parallel passage in Thomson’s Spring, however, reveals the two poets’ contrasting agendas: And to the Curious gives th’amazing Scenes Of less’ning Life: by Wisdom kindly hid From Eye, and Eye of Man: for if at once The Worlds in Worlds enclos’d were push’d to Light, Seen by his sharpen’d Eye, and by his Ear Intensely bended Heard, from the choice Cate The freshest Viands, and the brightest Wines, He’d turn abhorrent, and in Dead of Night, When Silence sleeps o’er all, be stunn’d with Noise. (Spring, 11)

Pope’s quatrain addresses the “reason” that Thomson finds in Spring for the sensitivity of the human sensorium, and finds it implicitly “Presumptuous.” The sensory overload that Thomson warns against isn’t justification enough for the attunement of the sensorium for Pope: his note makes clear, man’s senses have been divinely made to conform to his station in nature. But those people whom Thomson refers to as “the Curious”— those who have “microscopic” eyes—are even worse than presumptuous. Pope alleges that microscopic vision is useless because it doesn’t advance our faith in, or knowledge of, God, as though the kind of scientific enquiry that was foundational to the Royal Society were both literally and figuratively myopic. An Essay on Man is expressedly anti-anthropocentric, but Pope’s 161

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attitude toward anthropocentrism is confused by his description of preand postlapsarian human interactions with nature. Pope describes the prelapsarian “state of nature” thus: The state of nature was the reign of God: Self-love and social at her birth began, Union the bond of all things, and of man. Pride then was not; nor arts, that pride to aid; (An Essay on Man, 3.147–50)

The problem with reading these lines as a prescription for contemporary practice is that they describe a specifically inaccessible state. This raises the distinct possibility that the Shaftesburyan, Whiggish sociability Pope describes among nature’s beings is in fact impossible in a fallen world.31 The possibilities for postlapsarian interaction, however, seem distinctly less egalitarian: “the voice of nature” instructs “man” to learn how to bend creation to his will. And the end result of this process, by which nature rose to art, is distinctly unWhiggish: . . . by nature crown’d, each patriarch sate, King, priest and parent of his growing state; (An Essay on Man, 3. 214–15)

Pope presents monarchical, hierarchical order as, in some sense, natural to postlapsarian humankind, since the social love of prelapsarian interaction of all with all is by definition impossible. The hierarchical order that Pope—however reluctantly—advocates is some distance removed from Thomson’s optimistic description of the present-day “conjunctive all.” The opening couplet of the second epistle of An Essay on Man, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man” (2.1–2) puts Pope’s anthropological approach (problematic to reconcile with the unsettled matter of Pope’s stance on anthropocentrism) front and center. Since human perception is attuned by God to a certain level, the most respectful exploration of God limits itself to the objects naturally perceivable, without resort to artificial perceptual aids like the microscope. Pope’s end-stopped couplet rhyme (scan/man) aurally reinforces the sense of the couplet: verb and object are inescapably juxtaposed. 162

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The OED cites this particular couplet in its definition of “scan”: “2. To criticize; to test or estimate the correctness or value of; to judge by a certain rule or standard.”32 The OED’s reading of Pope sympathetically interprets the couplet as an appeal to conventional piety and humility. The structure of Pope’s couplet, however, surely implies that “scan” is being used as a near-synonym for “study.” “Scan” had several meanings in the eighteenth century, including “3. To examine, consider, or discuss minutely.” Compare to Thomson’s deployment of the same verb, “scan” from Autumn: Oh Nature! all sufficient! overall! Enrich me with the knowledge of thy works! Snatch me to heaven; thy rolling wonders there, World beyond world, in infinite extent, Profusely scatter’d o’er the void immense, Shew me; their motions, periods, and their laws, Give me to scan; thro’ the disclosing deep Light my blind way: the mineral Strata there; Thrust, blooming, thence the vegetable world: O’er that rising system, more complex, Of animals; and higher still, the mind, The varied scene of quick-compounded thought, And where the mixing passions endless shift; These ever open to my ravish’d eye; A search, the flight of time can ne’er exhaust! (ll. 1252–65)

Pope and Thomson do in fact use the same sense of “scan”: minute examination. For Thomson, the proper study of mankind is man, but it is also everything else animal, vegetable, and mineral: his use of “scan” relates to the abstracted properties of nature’s “rolling wonders.” Buried in the middle of a line and as a subordinated part of speech (to “give”), “scan” is one component of Thomson’s sentence roughly equivalent to “light” and “shew,” other verbs of inquiry. Thomson’s integration of “scan” into his syntax counterpoints the distance Pope introduces through his oppositional syntax. Of course, “scan” also refers to the act of prosodic evaluation. In a 163

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literal sense, Pope’s couplet inveighs against religious poetry in favor of poetry on human subjects. But Thomson and Pope’s relative meters also bespeak their competing agendas. Pope’s couplets are almost universally end-stopped, and his couplets are typically loosely connected units. Syntax and meter are closely aligned to create a linear movement of sense. Thomson’s syntax and meter, however, are not closely aligned; his blank verse is heavily enjambed, and units of sense are arranged in irregular and apparently organic passages that correspond only loosely, if at all, to line endings. Pope’s poetic form implies an artificial deeply hierarchical organizing logic to its content. Pope’s couplet form corresponds to the theory of emergent cognition he espouses, such that meaning only inheres in the predetermined syntax of externally formed units. For Thomson, on the other hand, semantic units are irregularly and organically placed within and across lines. Thomson’s form recalls Andrew Marvell’s closing peroration in “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost”: “The verse created like thy theme sublime, / In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme.”33 Miltonic imitation was undoubtedly a major objective for Thomson in The Seasons, but Thomson’s choice of blank verse accords just as much with the “natural,” interlaced and reciprocal system of God’s presence in nature as it does with literary imitation. Milton wrote in his introduction to the 1674 edition of Paradise Lost that “This neglect then of Rhime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.”34 Thomson’s choice of blank verse, like Milton’s, corresponds to his political commitment to a free and Whiggish Britain.35 In the tradition of Whig verse he celebrated in An Account of the Greatest English Poets, Addison writes in praise of the Whig poet Charles Montagu, “How negligently graceful he unreins / His verse, and writes in loose familiar strains.”36 Addison’s enjambment performs the unreining he describes: the metaphor of unreining, of unbinding a horse to let it move naturally and unimpeded by man’s artifice, is enacted by the displacement of the object of the verb over the line break. Abigail Williams writes that “the praise of the literary merits of the poem displays Addison’s own commitment 164

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to the Williamite regime. Aesthetic and evaluative judgements cannot be separated from political concerns, since the appraisal . . . conflates literary form and political content.”37 “Unreined” enjambment is a literary form whose Whiggish pedigree can be traced back from Thomson to Milton via Addison. Both Pope and Thomson’s choices of meter are intimately connected, therefore, to what they choose (in Pope’s sense) to “scan”: their scientific, political, religious, and literary agendas. Pope reflects on Thomson’s own agendas, parodying physico-theological vision as that of “the poor Indian / whose untutor’d mind / Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind,” and thus equating physico-theology with a rudimentary and mystical panpsychism (An Essay on Man, 1.99– 100). Pope is ironic about the Indian but prefers him to the man mislead by “proud Science . . . taught to stray / Far as the solar walk, or milky way” (An Essay on Man, 1.101–2) Scientists, in Pope’s understanding, are searching for an “Angel’s wing” or “Seraph’s fire” (An Essay on Man, 1.110) potent images evoking Luciferian ambition and Promethean theft. Behind Pope’s condemnations of science lurk the implications that some knowledge is forbidden and that seeking that knowledge is a transgression against God. As Pope writes shortly after; “In Pride, in reas’ning Pride, our error lies; / All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies. . . . Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods. / Aspiring to be Gods, if Angels fell, / Aspiring to be Angels, Men Rebel” (An Essay on Man, 1.123–28). Pope’s lines trace the arc of upward movement through aspiration and ambition and following fall. Even without the explicit comparison to Lucifer and man’s first disobedience, the key word “error” strongly connotes the fall. For Pope, a scientist’s desire to “rush into the skies,” such as Thomson’s asking nature to “snatch me to Heaven,” is a cardinal disobedience. This contrast between the poets’ cosmic epistemology also corresponds to the contrast between Protestant and Catholic approaches to science. Pope’s quarrel in An Essay on Man was not necessarily with science per se but with the structures of learning that it promulgated. These structures were open, depended on debate, were heavily discursive, and took for granted the existence of external truths that persistent enquiry could uncover. The intellectual procedures of science derived knowledge bottom up from first principles; conversely, Catholic natural philosophy gave 165

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laws from the top down and declared knowledge by fiat. Not coincidentally, the modern Whiggish Britain connoted by the Royal Society was by definition Protestant while the Catholic political economy represented by Pope’s poem endorsed the divinely given right of kings to rule, and held that that right was inalienable. Each poet honors his philosophical and political forebears. This contrast between Pope’s and Thomson’s attitudes to science and divinity was one that had already been struck by their differing accounts of the lovers John Hewit and Sarah Drew, who were killed by lightning at Harcourt Stanton in July 1718. The incident was reported in the press and Pope wrote the lovers an epitaph, which was engraved on their tomb. Thomson’s account of the incident appears in Summer, ll. 894–944. Where Pope’s account rather sentimentally claims that “Victims so pure Heaven saw well pleased,” Thompson’s theodicy rises only far enough to exclaim, “Mysterious Heaven!”38 Thomson’s account of the storm is decidedly scientific in contrast to Pope’s, which explicitly accredits God as the source (“the Almighty . . . / Sent his own lightning . . . / And snatch’d them in celestial fire” (“On Two Lovers,” 5–18). Thomson conversely traces the origins of the storm from “unusual darkness,” the supposed fermentation of “nitre, sulphur, vitriol” in the “baleful cloud,” thunder, hail, and finally to lightning, whether as a lone strike or “in red whirling balls” (Summer, 828–68). Only once he has described the physical process of the storm does Thomson backtrack and mention the storm’s victims, “Celadon” and “Amelia” (Summer, 896–87). Insofar as divinity enters the picture for Thomson, it is as an dimly perceived arbiter of providence: the mystery of Heaven that Thomson invokes is the opaque calculus of justice, not of the origins of lightning. Conversely, Pope’s account of the event uses the behavior of the natural world as a God-given index to the morality of men and women, and he interprets the death of Hewit and Drew as a narrative of virtue rewarded: Here pitying Heaven that virtue mutual found, And blasted both, that it might neither wound. Hearts so sincere, the Almighty saw well pleased, Sent his own lightning, and the victims seized. 166

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............................... Think not, by rigorous judgment seized, A pair so faithful could expire; Victims so pure Heaven saw well pleased, And snatch’d them in celestial fire. Live well, and fear no sudden fate; When God calls virtue to the grave, Alike ‘tis justice soon or late, Mercy alike to kill or save. (“On Two Lovers,” 2–22)

Pope attempts a Panglossian explanation of an apparently inexplicable tragedy. The difference between Thomson and Pope’s accounts of the storm and its consequences are concomitant to their cosmologies: Thomson focuses on the total movements of nature, Pope on the souls and fates of humankind. Just as An Essay on Man scorns those who “inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n,” Pope here focuses on constructing a providential argument for the heavenly event rather than on examining the event itself, since the movements of particles in the air are events that take place without consciousness. In Pope’s poem, the only probative value of the fate of Hewit and Drew is that which can be extracted through a closing moralitas. Thomson’s memorialization concentrates on the physical laws at work in the event. Thomson’s only mention of divinity is equivocally poised between admiration and awed dismay: “From his void embrace / (Mysterious heaven!) that moment, in a heap / Of pallid ashes fell the beauteous maid” (Summer, ll. 936–38). Keenleyside argues acutely that Celadon’s mistake is a kind of anthropocentrism; that Thomson undercuts “Celadon’s ironic assurance that Amelia is different from a tree or a sheep or a tower. Thomson insists that she is not.”39 The single parenthetical mention of Heaven indicates that Thomson’s poem is concerned first and foremost with discovering the laws of nature through scientific enquiry, and that it hopes through that discovery to reach up to understanding God. Pope, on the other hand, posits that readers’ key concern should be their own moral rectitude, and that “The proper study of Mankind is Man” (An Essay on Man, 2.2). 167

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Pope’s interest in displacing the newer model of science represented by Thomson’s poem with his own, much older, model, didn’t have much to do with science. Pope’s chief concern was with the shape of the intellectual cultures likely to coexist with contemporary science. Pope was opposed to the very notion of a collaborative and polyphonic intellectual culture, because it ran counter to his own ambitions for intellectual and literary hegemony. The irony is that Pope chose to make these claims on politically enemy territory and was, by 1733, fighting a distinctly rearguard action. To assert the necessity of a hegemonic intellectual culture that proceeded by imitation from natural laws in a poem that was in part responding to the Royal Society’s greatest verse advocate was characteristically radical. Still more remarkably, Pope was largely successful. The mode of learning that Pope proposes as an alternative is quite different from that described by Thomson. Rather than analysis, argument, dispute or deduction, Pope imagines early man bidden by nature: Go, from the Creatures thy instructions take: Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield; Learn from the beasts the physic of the field; Thy arts of building from the bee receive; Learn of the mole to plow, the worm to weave; Learn of the little nautilus to sail (An Essay on Man, 3.172–77)

Pope imagines man made to rule over nature, “Man’s prerogative to rule, but spare” (An Essay on Man, 3.160) and envisions civilization as the combination and perfection of natural techniques: a conventional Aristotelian version of art’s imitation of nature. Notice the consistency of Pope’s commitments in the Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man. In each Pope castigates would-be innovators by urging them to conform to rules that he declared were innate and natural: “Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; To copy nature is to copy them” (Essay on Criticism, 139–40). Pope assumes the prerogative of declaring what is natural and what not, and so, in the role of self-appointed prophet, the privilege of making the laws that he urges others to follow. Pope sees man as ruling nature with noblesse oblige. Thomson however is explicit that men who put nature to their own ends, as Pope imagines 168

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they ought to do, are “Tyrants.” Before the fall, Man was “A Stranger to the Savage Arts of Life, / Death, Rapine, Carnage, Surfeit, and Disease, / The Lord, and not the Tyrant of the World” (Spring, 15), whereas Thomson addresses contemporary man as “tyrannic lord!” and asks, “how long, how long, / Shall prostrate nature groan beneath your rage, / Awaiting renovation? When oblig’d, / Must you destroy?” (Autumn, ll.1089–93). For Thomson, Man should participate in the betterment of nature rather than presuming to rule over it. Thomson’s opposition to hunting stems from the specter of this tyranny. Thomson believes that men and animals differ in degree; Pope, in kind. This is why Pope anoints men the “imperial race” (An Essay on Man, 1.209). Whether man has a prerogative to care for animals or the entitlement to use them for his needs, the corresponding political analogy is clear. Thomson’s vision is a vision of a fully participatory nature in which all animate creatures coexist in a comparable and scaled system (Ray’s “mutual conspiring” [WG, A8]); Pope’s imagination of nature is of a realm with a single, qualitatively different, ruler. This correlates to Thomson’s collaborative vision of British intellectual culture (viz. his citation of Locke and Shaftesbury) as opposed to Pope’s autocratic model (in which Locke’s and Shaftesbury’s political origins narratives are arrogated without credit). Thomson’s nature is harmonious and co-operative, like a Whig Commonwealth, and Pope’s is subordinative, like a (Tory) monarchy. Pope’s justification of hunting is worth examining in some detail for the way in which it bespeaks his political philosophy: Grant that the pow’rful still the weak control; Be Man the wit and tyrant of the whole: Nature that tyrant checks; he only knows, And helps. another creature’s wants and woes. Say will the falcon, stooping from above, Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove? Admires the jay the insect’s gilded wings? Or hears the hawk when Philomela sings?— Man cares for all: to birds he gives his woods, 169

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To beasts his pastures, and to fish his floods. .................................... All feed on one vain patron, and enjoy Th’extensive blessing of his luxury. ............................ Nay, feasts the animal he dooms his feast, And till he ends the being makes it blest; Which sees no more the stroke, or feels the pain, Than favour’d man by touch ethereal slain. The creature had his feast of life before; Thou too must perish when thy feast is o’er! (An Essay on Man, 3.49–70)

The whole arrangement of man and the ruled stock of animals that Pope imagines is a Hobbesian Leviathan: while outside the man’s rule falcon, jay, and hawk predate on defenseless prey, the man’s subjects enjoy his protection and the use of his resources in return for their lives. This passage on hunting is close to the heart of An Essay on Man’s political arguments and to their literary payoff. Pope justifies hunting in his poem so emphatically because the qualitative difference it implies between hunter and hunted corresponds to the qualitative difference between ruler and subject and, implicitly, between writer and reader. The harmonious coexistence that Thomson imagines is replaced by organized and divinely sanctioned subordination to a single ruler. Pope’s earlier claim that “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body nature is, and God the soul” (An Essay on Man, 1.267–68) is of a piece with his emergent theory of consciousness and the hierarchical, even Cartesian, vision that corresponds to it. Not only does the couplet form mark a distinction between God and nature, a distinction that Thomson effaces through panpsychism, but it portrays God as animating nature’s otherwise inert body. An Essay on Man shows Pope wresting Thomson’s Whiggish literary structures into a form that is at once monarchist and self-promoting. Pope’s implicit deployment of Jacobite rhetoric in An Essay on Man is aimed at the furtherance of literary objectives, rather than at political, let alone Stuart, goals. The Jacobite rhetorics in An Essay on Man—the 170

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supremacy of God’s law over Man’s law, the importance of natural law, and the folly of man’s investigations and interferences—are deployed without emphasis on political corollary. But the obliqueness of the political reference does nothing to detract from its centrality to Pope’s argument. Even though the resulting literary artifact appears apolitical, in fact it seethes with political rhetoric directed to literary ends. Pope’s transformation of Thomson’s version of fully panpsychic physico-theology into a softer, quasi-anthropocentric perspective is his most thoroughgoing and successful domination of Whiggish thought, a bravura foreclosure of the discursive space that Thomson’s poem had opened up. The disjuncture between the pursuit of the natural sciences and Pope’s poem—since natural scientists were unlikely to take to heart Pope’s “Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!” (An Essay on Man, 2.30)—has one final consequence. Pope’s poem was not intended to shape the scientific sphere; that battle was well beyond him. But An Essay on Man was intended to make it impossible to write a progressive and ideologically committed poem without an armature of irony so heavy as to make other movement impossible. An Essay on Man necessitated a separation of literature from scientific advocacy. Despite the magnitude of Thomson’s achievement, he had very few imitators after An Essay on Man; most eighteenth-century verse after 1733 addressed instead the moral quandaries of man’s “isthmus of a middle state,” an isthmus that was considered contiguous neither with the animal and vegetable kingdoms nor with the celestial. An Essay on Man was Pope’s most successful fusion of Jacobite exceptionalism with Whiggish universalism, and it ensured that for eighteenth-century poets to come like Samuel Johnson, “The Proper Study of Mankind” would remain “Man.”

Epistles and Imitations: Pope’s Moderate Ascendency Richard Temple, first Viscount Cobham, was a staunch Whig and ally of the Duke of Marlborough, a distinguished soldier, diplomat and politician. At the family seat at Stowe, Cobham set out to design some of the most spectacular gardens in England with the help of William Kent, Sir John Vanbrugh, and Charles Bridgeman. It was in the context of his passion for gardening and his appreciation for poetry that he and 171

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Pope—himself of course a keen horticulturalist—became acquainted. In the 1730s, Cobham became the rallying-point for the growing Whig opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, and it was at Stowe that “Cobham’s Cubs” gathered around him, including Frederick, Prince of Wales.40 When Pope published the Epistle to Cobham in 1733, Walpole had just dismissed Cobham and several other high-profile critics from government, and Cobham’s political profile, perversely, had begun to rise. The Epistle to Cobham was published in the same year as An Essay on Man, and must be viewed as part of the same political and literary movement. Pope thought very highly of the Epistle to Cobham, and, in wanting it to be placed at the end of his four moral epistles, imagined himself to “imitate those cunning tradesmen, who show their best silks last.”41 These four epistles, taken with An Essay on Man, were designed in Pope’s words, to comprise “a system of Ethics.”42 Pope’s attempt of a systematic survey of ethics and men’s characters shows how deeply the Whig intellectual project of systematization had penetrated contemporary British culture. In this sense at least the modality of Pope’s project owed to Whiggish forerunners. Christine Gerrard documents the careful distance Pope kept between himself and the opposition “patriot” Whigs, but Pope nonetheless chooses to praise Cobham in particular. Pope’s praise of the patriot Whig as, specifically, a patriot signifies either a genuine alliance or the desire to feign one. 43 Part of Pope’s “system” in his moral epistles was to show the public that he had managed to cultivate a highly exclusive circle of friends and admirers. Just as Pope’s prefatory note to The Pastorals boasted of the number and prominence of the poem’s readers, so too the titles and dedications of the “system of Ethics” proclaim the quality of his connections. Pope dedicated An Essay on Man to Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and the Epistle to a Lady to Martha Blount. Richard Boyle, third earl of Burlington and the dedicatee of an eponymous Epistle, was a prominent Whig nobleman and grand patron of the arts and architecture.44 Allen Bathurst, first Earl Bathurst, was a high-profile Tory and critic of Walpole’s policies. Dr. John Arbuthnot, was, among many other things, head of the Royal College of Physicians. Taken as a group, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, Burlington, Bathurst and Cobham make up a pantheon of political 172

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vitality and social exclusivity. The fondness and intimacy of Pope’s address to each dedicatee advertises just how rarified Pope’s acquaintance is. Pope takes the Horatian imitations as an opportunity publicly to fashion an elite group of cognoscenti. Pope’s fashioning of a quasi-coterie, along with the depth and range of his allusions in his “system of Ethics,” make An Essay on Man and his Horatian imitations a decidedly tricky proposition for readers looking for inclusive enlightenment and pleasure. Where Pope’s earlier works foster a dynamic of included cognoscenti and excluded others, the moral and ethical system of the Horatian imitations works much harder to subordinate the reader to Pope’s intellectual law-giving and his moral integrity. The ending of the Epistle to Cobham displays one element of Pope’s debt to Jacobite writing. The poem closes with a peroration on the “ruling passion” and then with a series of portraits, the last of which is Cobham’s.45 These portraits are meant to show the different ruling passions of different characters. The poem ends: And You! Brave COBHAM to the latest breath Shall feel your ruling Passion strong in Death: Such in those moments, as in All the past, “O save my Country, Heav’n!” shall be your last.46

On the face of it, this closing gesture praises Cobham’s patriotism just at the historical moment when that patriotism was becoming a major political force. But there is a key intertext: Pope was reusing this imagined dying utterance from an epitaph he had written in 1732, less than a year earlier, on the death of the exiled hardline Jacobite bishop Francis Atterbury, which concluded: Then mix this dust with thine—O spotless Ghost! O more than Fortune, Friends, or Country lost! Is there on earth one care, one wish beside? Yes—‘Save my country, Heav’n!’ he said, and died.47

Gerrard reads this transferred dying wish as “a singularly suggestive indication of Pope’s shifting sense of political interests,” but Pope was not an opposition Whig in 1733 just as he was not—any longer—meaningfully 173

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Jacobite in 1732.48 Pope’s repurposing to a Whig of the Jacobite epitaph he wrote not only shows his readiness to adopt Jacobite poetics for other, non-Jacobite purposes, but makes an “Ambodexter” out of the phrase “Save my Country, Heav’n!” which can be read either as a reference to a devout Jacobite or as the imagined utterance of a patriotic Whig. This makes the closing, and supposedly triumphant, line of the Epistle to Cobham seem on second glance a little skeptical. At the very least it deflates claims to significance for Cobham’s nascent opposition by departicularizing it and equating it generally with all dissent. Most of all, however, the self-consciously doubled epitaph shows that for Pope the particularities of politics were not necessarily that important to him; what mattered rather was that Pope himself got to control how its participants were memorialized. Finally, the supposed system of the poem bears further examination. Sitter has argued powerfully that Pope’s poem advances the position that any rigidly systematic map of ethics and character will inevitably fail, and the Epistle to Cobham advocates a rigorous and thoroughgoing humility in the mind of any potential judge of others’ characters.49 This nosce te ipsum position is consonant with that of An Essay on Man.50 Rather than delivering any promised system in the Epistle to Cobham, in fact, Pope proposes a skeptical anti-system: There’s some Peculiar in each Leaf and Grain Some unmark’d Fibre, or some varying Vein: Shall only Man be taken in the gross? Grant but as many sorts of Mind, as Moss.51

The only advice that Pope offers as a surefire way to know people is to discern their “ruling Passion” (174); “This clue once found, unravels all the rest” (178). Despite the pitch of Pope’s rhetoric against classification, the discovery of a ruling passion is quite consonant with a system of types and taxonomies. But Pope’s valorization of the “peculiar” implies, conversely, that a system of knowledge of character ought properly to perceive each person as things unto themselves. Using such a diverse system would entail laborious work that systems are devised to circumvent. And in it, the relativities of people’s competing judgments reappear, and the 174

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hierarchies that a public system of knowledge might hope to level spring back into place. And so we see that Pope has, once again, appropriated a Whiggish idea and emptied it out of its political significance: leaving only the image of himself as ultimate arbiter. Pope’s other significant encounter with Cobham had to do with gardening.52 Pope’s own passion for gardening was well known, but Cobham’s garden was designed to evoke more than ephemeral pleasure in its viewer: the gardens at Stowe were a concerted political statement of opposition to Walpole’s rule. Stowe’s gardens were built around three principal structures: the Temple of Ancient Virtue, the Temple of Modern Virtue, and the Temple of British Worthies. The Temple of Ancient Virtue houses Socrates, Homer, Lycurgus, and Epaminondas (respectively, a philosopher, a poet, a lawmaker, and a soldier). The Temple of Modern Virtue was built as a ruin and houses only the headless bust of a recognizably Walpolean figure; the implication being that contemporary virtue is ruined and led by a ruin of an individual man. The Temple of Ancient Virtue looks out over the Temple of British Worthies; Ancient Virtue receives the morning light and British Worthies the evening light. If a viewer stands in one temple, the other temple is reflected in the pool of water separating the two. The Temple of British Worthies is a staunchly Whig monument to Britishness, designed to compete with Queen Caroline’s Hermitage. The two attempted to portray “authentic” Britishness: Queen Caroline was allied to Walpole, and Cobham opposed to him. The Hermitage displayed busts of Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and William Woolaston. Cobham’s Temple of British Worthies houses an extraordinary array of busts of soundly Protestant figures, almost all of whom stand for things Pope and his political allies repudiated.53 These figures include John Milton, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, and Sir Thomas Gresham. These were key figures in the establishment of a Whiggish state and science. Yet others have inscriptions over their busts: John Hampden, “Who with great Spirit, and consummate Abilities, begun a noble Opposition to an arbitrary Court, in Defence of the Liberties of his Country.” This is a reference to Hampden’s refusal to pay Charles I’s Ship Tax in 1634. Hampden was jailed for this, beginning a series of events that led to deep splits 175

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between king and Parliament. John Locke’s inscription praises the fact that he “refuted the slavish systems of usurp’d Authority.” That “usurp’d Authority” was the political theology of Charles II’s reign. Even William III (Pope’s “unfavourite King”) is in Cobham’s Temple.54 William’s inscription recounts that he “by his Virtue and Constancy, having saved his Country from a foreign Master, by a bold and generous Enterprize, preserv’d the Liberty and Religion of Great Britain.” There is considerable irony in claiming that the Dutch-born William saved Britain from Charles II, an English-born “foreign Master.” In the context of this profoundly Whiggish set of plaudits, the most extraordinary inclusion of all is Pope himself, whose bust sits next to William III. Sadly, history does not relate what Pope thought of his neighbor’s inscription. Pope’s own inscription reads, in full, Who uniting the Correctness of Judgement to the Fire of Genius, by the Melody & Power of his Numbers gave Sweetness to Sense, & Grace to Philosophy. He employ’d the pointed Brilliancy of Wit to chastise the Vices, and the Eloquence of Poetry to exalt the Virtues of human Nature; and being without a Rival in his own Age, imitated and translated, with a Spirit equal to the Originals, the best Poets of Antiquity.

The key values that this inscription highlights in Pope’s oeuvre are “sense,” “grace,” and “virtue”: a set of values that position Pope as a Whig writer committed to contributing to the moral integrity of the nation. The inscription fashions Pope as a sort of Modern poet; by implying the equality of Pope’s “Spirit” to the classical poets he translated—principally, Horace, Homer, Virgil—the inscription indicates that in Pope the British Worthies have a poet the equal of any in antiquity. The inscription under Pope’s bust challenges, or complicates, the hierarchical relationship between Stowe’s elevated Temple of Ancient Virtue and the Temple of British Worthies. By cultivating Cobham’s friendship and through the machinery of the Epistle to Cobham, Pope pulled off an aesthetic coup, ensuring that he was immortalized in the landscape gardens at Stowe in the pantheon of British worthies alongside Shakespeare and Milton. 176

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Pope’s quest for national and cultural supremacy culminated in two subsequent poems: An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated. In the Houghton manuscript of An Essay on Man, the last folio is a sketch for the start of a Horatian imitation. The lines were included in modified forms in some editions of An Essay on Man; the Houghton manuscript clearly predates Pope’s decision to address The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated to George II, as “Augustus.” In this context we must see that satire as the connective tissue between the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and An Essay on Man that cements his position in the forefront of cultural production and judgment.55 The First Satire shows Pope reflecting directly on his use of typologies and ciphers, and on the consequences of that practice: F. Better be Cibber, I’ll maintain it still, Than ridicule all Taste, blaspheme Quadrille, Abuse the city’s best good men in metre, And laugh at peers that put their trust in Peter Ev’n those you touch not, hate you. P. What should ail ’em?  F. A hundred smart in Timon and in Balaam. The fewer still you name, you wound the more; Bond is but one, but Harpax is a score. (First Satire, 37–44)

Pope’s lawyer friend Sir William Fortescue, who corresponds to Horace’s Trebatius, urges Pope to be specific in his satiric criticisms, since his supposed decorum in using ciphers causes more upset than being specific would. Pope’s apparent defense of his practice is complex and unclear (First Satire, 47–102). Syntactically speaking, Pope’s answer is defiant: “Each mortal has his pleasure . . . / . . . I will rhyme, and print.” In fact, Pope’s reply to Fortescue includes more satirical and pseudonymous portraiture; the couplet on “Sappho” is instantly recognizable to the reader as referring Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: From furious Sappho scarce a milder fate, P—x’d by her love, or libell’d by her hate. (First Satire, 85–86) 177

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Lady Mary was famous for being scarred by smallpox, having pioneered an inoculation against it, and for having tested it on her children at great risk. Part of the charge of this couplet is generated by the friction between the pretense that Pope is talking in generalities about “a Sappho,” referring to a type of woman, and the detail offered by the couplet that makes it clear that Pope is in fact referring to a specific woman. The conflict between typology and ciphered portraiture, which is familiar to us from Jacobite poetic references to “a Sarum” or even “a King,” generates a community of readers who, as in The Ambodexter, are bound together by their ability to understand the “true” latent content of the poem. Pope’s claim to have been poxed by Lady Mary’s love is both an allegation that she is promiscuous and sexually diseased, and an allusion to her highly controversial efforts to inoculate her children against smallpox. This implies that a relationship, whether sexual or not, with Lady Mary was like enduring a disfiguring and potentially fatal disease. Pope conflates Lady Mary’s marred physical appearance with her moral state, just as she would do in return in Verses Addressed to the Imitator of Horace. Ironically, Pope sets this highly legible vignette in the specific context of justifying his use of pseudonyms on the grounds of their harmlessness and his passion “for Virtue” (First Satire, 107). If Pope’s pseudonyms are types, then his satire is general; if they are ciphers, then his satire is specific. Because Pope has taken care to ensure that the reader understands the specifics of the Sappho reference, Pope can claim, albeit paradoxically, to make such references in pursuit of general virtue. The result is a strange inversion: by giving the reader the key to the Sappho cipher and rooting it in specificity, Pope makes his general satire seem decorous because of the indecorousness of this individual attack. As Pope would have it, Sappho’s contravention of Virtue makes her fair game. When Pope claims that he is “To VIRTUE only, and her Friends, a Friend,” he is both evoking a supposedly universally accessible ideal, and at the same time referring to an exclusive clique (First Satire, 123). The circle Pope has in mind numbers a little over ten, of whom Dryden, William Wycherley, William Congreve, Gay, William Walsh, Francis Atterbury, Thomas Parnell, and Matthew Prior were already dead at this point; Bolingbroke, Swift, and Arbuthnot were still alive. But this poem 178

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offers the possibility that readers can count themselves among the friends of virtue, and thus join Pope’s party. Pope has managed to present himself as being of that oxymoronic group, “the disinterested party.” Having established that Pope is virtuous, that his targets are vicious, and that reading Pope makes readers virtuous because they are brought into his standards of taste and virtue, the heart of the poem claims: My head and heart thus flowing thro’ my quill, Verse-man or Prose-man, term me which you will, Papist or Protestant, or both between, Like good Erasmus in an honest mean, In moderation placing all my glory, While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory. (First Satire, 65–70)

Pope is a “Verse-man,” a Tory, and a Papist, but no matter. Pope knows that his literary appropriations are visible to both Tories and Whigs, and he takes advantage of this weakness to paint his self-interest as disinterest. As both Abigail Williams and Ethan Shagan have shown, “moderation” was freighted with a variety of Whiggish significances in the early eighteenth century.56 Pope unmoors moderation from its political context; neither Tory nor Whig, it becomes a quality specific to Pope.57 Pope’s supposed transcendence of party-political animus symbolizes his surpassing of the cultural limits normally imposed by literary genre or religion. Pope wants his virtue, his moderation, and his glory to be matters of universal concern. If his poetry seems to stand or fall on the grounds of a truly disinterested virtue, his stance transcends party divisions and becomes an issue indicative of the health of British literary culture. This is the work to which Pope puts the concept of moderation. Pope’s foray into the territory of moderation is also a specifically Horatian move. Erskine-Hill argues that Pope’s turn to “moderation” is part of a larger move toward aequabilitas in Pope’s Horatian imitations.58 Erskine-Hill uses aequabilitas to describe both “balance of mind” (292) and “equivocation and irony” (332), citing Horace’s wide-angled perspective in “Cum porepserunt primis animalia terris” as an example of the very long perspective into which aequabilitas could throw matters. ErskineHill sees Pope’s Horatian imitations as vehicles for his assaults on vice, 179

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evil, corruption, and incompetence (339). I would like to suggest that in his addition of this more generalized satiric mode to his poetry, Pope’s work approaches what Walter Jackson Bate called, in another context, “satire manqué.”59 Bate finds the “prototype” for satire manqué in Dr Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes, which, he says, blends the “astonishingly savage” with moments of sympathy. Pope’s compassionate aequabilitas coexists with astonishingly savage passages such the satire of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Pope’s aequabilitas is a kind of immature, not fullyfledged, satire manqué avant la lettre. Pope’s Horatian imitations allow him the opportunity to indulge in personal satire as well as the chance to be “gloomy” about “political rot” and to “[discourse] on vice and virtue . . . preaching the ethical life to his readers.”60 To see Pope’s attempt to manipulate a kind of ostentatious aequabilitas or moderation, we must move on to his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot is the point at which Pope’s combination of the Whig and Jacobite literary cultures reaches its height. In it, the Whiggish mode of discussing culture and nationhood and the Jacobite cultivation of the correct readerly sensibility and knowledge base merge completely. It is through the combination of the two that Pope is able to imply inescapably that he is the supreme artist of his day, without ever saying so explicitly. As much as the speaker of the poem dislikes being consulted, “All fly to Twit’nam and in humble strain / Apply to me, to keep them mad or vain” (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 21–22), he complains just as much about being entangled in London’s literary milieu at all. The lines “‘Dare you refuse him? Curl invites to dine, / He’ll write a Journal, or he’ll turn Divine” express implicit irritation on Pope’s part about being enmeshed in any part of literary dialogue (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 53–54). The writing of a journal is as inconsequential as the question of whom Curll invites over to dinner, but when Pope ventriloquizes Arbuthnot as saying this, he makes a subtle conflation. As a bookseller and printer, Curll was a considerable economic force in London throughout Pope’s career.61 Implicitly, the speaker of the poem is imagining Arbuthnot to be warning him that by passing up this young poet, he will lose not only real capital, but cultural capital too. By declining to collaborate with a writer who 180

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is also courted by Curll, Arbuthnot’s supposed reasoning goes, Pope is incurring an opportunity cost, missing out, getting behind. By twinning this idea with the premonition “He’ll write a Journal,” the imagined Arbuthnot is warning Pope that all literary production is a potential threat to any literary preeminence that Pope might imagine he has. The pose of disinterestedness that Pope affects in this poem is worth contextualizing among his other works, which often lacked the same equipoise. An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot was printed less than two years after An Essay on Man engaged so strenuously, if covertly, in political conflict, and only five and a half years after the Dunciad Variorum. And Pope continued to revise An Essay on Man until well after the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot was published. So even if Pope achieves a sustainable moderation in his Horatian work, we must weigh carefully any claims he makes to have reached a general disinterestedness, even before we evaluate the internal evidence for those claims. The poem makes typological attacks on a range of figures, the identities of some of whom we may guess at, and some not. I’ll return to the nature of Pope’s enciphering shortly. But Pope also names names; Edmund Curll, Leonard Welstead, Colley Cibber, John Henley, Eustace Budgell, and Ambrose Phillips, to list a few.62 It is these men whom Pope associates with “Grubstreet.”63 For Pope to name real names in the same poem that he offers ciphers for the readers’ decryption is a way for Pope to naturalize the metaphor of the cipher. By naming this list of men, Pope’s grouping of them, and his association of them with Grub Street is elevated into a simple statement of fact, compared to the more epistemologically volatile ciphers. It is in contrast with these names and their wrongdoings that Pope narrates his own genesis as a writer: I left no calling for this idle trade, No duty broke, no father disobey’d. ............................ But why then publish? Granville the polite, And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write; Well-natur’d Garth inflamed with early praise, And Congreve lov’d, and Swift endur’d my lays; 181

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The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read, Ev’n mitred Rochester would nod the head, And St. John’s self (great Dryden’s friends before) With open arms receiv’d one Poet more. (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 129–42)

Rarely has a claim to strength so masqueraded as an admission of weakness. Pope disclaims agency at every turn. He portrays himself as a helpless subject of others’ actions, relying heavily on “would,” which subjunctively implies that had Walsh, Granville, and Rochester not acted as they did, Pope might not have published. On Pope’s account, the courtliness of Talbot, Somers, and Sheffield was an active inducement to publish. Pope makes this disingenuous advertisement because he is treating aristocracy and literary fashion as correlative to taste. Almost all the figures that he mentions belong to a former age. In a sense, this befits an origins narrative. But it also marks Pope’s desire to be apart, not of the present moment. Being explicit about his early enthusiasts is a way for Pope to signal, once again, his exclusivity and his pedigree. Pope’s use of names in listing his supporters is turned inside out when we come to the two famous portraits of the poem, Joseph Addison and Lord John Hervey, whom he enciphers as Atticus and Sporus respectively. 64 These disguises are as penetrable as possible. It is in these two portraits that Pope deployed what he learned from Jacobite poetry in manuscript with the greatest finesse. Where in Jacobite poetry a certain undecidability of reference was desirable, and the knowledge of the reference was used to generate solidarity among readers, in these two cases Pope took to its very height his version of this principle: a decidability of reference generated through the correct kind of reading was used to generate solidarity with the writer alone. Pope doesn’t care whether readers of his poem agree with or endorse one another. He cares whether they endorse him. Whether or not the character sketches correspond to “their” subjects, Pope inserts textual clues to make it impossible to mistake his intended meaning. He makes the reader begin thinking typologically earlier on in the poem, when he imagines flatterers comparing his body to the bodies of great 182

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writers (“I cough like Horace . . . ” (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 115–24)). More potently, he salts clues about the identity of the two portraits into the text of the poem. The line immediately before the Atticus portrait sees Pope’s imagined enemies “swear, not Addison himself was safe” (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 192). And of course, though dead for sixteen years at this point, Addison is not safe. Pope’s imagined enemies are quite right. Pope’s comparison of Atticus to Cato at line 209 is an explicit tip-off. And finally, the subjunctive mood of the whole portrait (“were there one . . . Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?”) matches the subjunctive mood implied in Atticus’s judgments (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 193–214, 201–4). These signs are unmistakable, and they are meant to be. A reader can “decipher” this portrait without much prior knowledge of Addison.65 In the space of twenty-two lines, Pope sets a test for the reader and then ensures that the reader passes it. The reader cannot possibly not know the answer to the question Pope has framed. Here, just as in An Essay on Criticism, the reader is made to be of Pope’s party without knowing it. There are final satiric ironies in this portrait, past its performativity and its hypocrisy (“And hate for arts that caus’d himself to rise”). By being first typed as “Atticus”—a great Roman patron of the arts who took the moniker “Atticus” in homage to the Greek culture he loved—Addison is set up by Pope as a similarly artistically benevolent figure. Conversely, Cato was not especially artistic. By moving Addison from “Atticus” toward “Cato,” Pope devalues Addison’s artistic achievements in favor of his rather more brief political career, culminating in a very brief stint as secretary of state. The second irony is that Addison is being punished above all for being an arbiter of taste, the position that Pope himself most covets. It is ironic to satirize Addison for being like Cato, giving his senate “laws” (implicitly, of taste), since Cato was lionized as a hero of liberty and consensual rule. The typological alternative (in the world of Addison’s Cato) is Caesar; a role Pope is, apparently, happy to fill. The man giving laws is as much Pope as Addison. Pope covets the position he criticizes Addison for occupying: arbiter of taste, judge of correctness, key influencer of opinions. Addison’s fault, here, is to have dominated the Whiggish terrain of public opinion and civil discourse on taste, of which Pope was jealous. 183

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The Sporus portrait (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 305–33) had more contemporary topicality and so deploys fewer direct references than does the Atticus portrait. Nonetheless, it is thoroughly decodable. Sporus himself was Nero’s lover, so Pope immediately narrows the field of reference to those courtiers known—or widely suspected—to be gay or bisexual. The majority of the portrait dwells on what Pope deems sexual deviance. This bespeaks Pope’s own deep anxiety about his potency. Witness the line that follows the Sporus portrait, in which Pope says of himself that “if he pleas’d, he pleas’d by manly ways.”66 Hervey’s bisexuality was widely known, making the Sporus portrait especially clear. 67 Pope’s reference to Hervey’s close relationship with Queen Caroline shows Hervey, like Satan, “at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad” (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 319). But Pope’s note to this reference, as though to disambiguate it, reads “In the fourth Book of Milton [Paradise Lost, 4.800], the Devil is represented in his Posture. It is but justice to own that the Hint of Eve and the Serpent was taken from the Verses on the Imitator of Horace.” Hervey was also well known to be the co-author of the Verses on the Imitator of Horace, along with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Pope uses the factual resemblances between his characters and their targets (on questions, say, of authorship, or medical history) to imply an (im)moral resemblance. Attuned readers cannot but know that Sporus is Hervey, and so the reader cannot but be forced into sharing Pope’s moral framework. Pope’s enemies are painted as iniquitous, and Pope as an innocent, a friend, a bereaved son, and a humble aspirant poet. Pope closes the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot by implying, in his Shaftesburyan way, that virtue overrides all other considerations, including his own well-being and the power of the state. Having “stoop’d to Truth, and moraliz’d his song” (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 341), however, Pope writes that his references will be “memorable long, / If there be Force in Virtue, or in Song” (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 386–87). Pope and his poetry are themselves synonymous with virtue, and of peerless moral, cultural, and national importance.

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Genealogy in 1745: What Did Pope Get out of Enmity? In August 1740, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to the countess of Peterborough that “the word malignity, and a passage in your letter, call to my mind the wicked wasp of Twickenham.”68 The nickname stuck. From Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on, to Joseph Warton, Malcolm Arnold, Lytton Strachey, Oscar Wilde, F. W. Bateson, and others, the idea of Pope’s malice has served as a node connecting his various flaws. For Lady Mary, the image of the wasp was old ground by the date of this letter, but the metaphorical charge of using the wasp at first glance to connote wickedness, and at second glance to imply that wickedness is implicit in Pope’s very body, is as powerful as ever. The figure of speech not only indicates senseless, venomous assault, but a pinched, deformed, inhuman figure: his wickedness and his deformity are two sides of the same coin. This metaphor about Pope’s malice that draws together his body and his poetics runs through the reception history of people who have tried to articulate why they hate Pope. Arnold’s dismissal of Pope as “prose” implies Pope’s other failures of form, moral and bodily. Lytton Strachey’s description of the “fiendishly clever” Pope resembling a monkey ladling boiling oil onto the heads of his enemies is perhaps the most extreme example of supposed connection between Pope’s malice (“fiendish”) with, on the one hand, his body, and on the other, his moral failures, and includes the idea that Pope is engaged, not in writing poetry, but in barbaric siege warfare. It is worth asking why, perhaps uniquely among poets in the English literary-historical tradition, Pope continues to upset people. Even in the present-day, scholars air similar charges about Pope on Twitter. What is it about his work that still arouses such ire? We can answer this with recourse to a contradiction characteristic of the literature on Pope. Biographers and scholars have noted (though not usually in the same critical breath) an opposed pair of qualities: the malice of his writing, and his talent for friendship. Perhaps a more fitting corollary would be, as I have noted elsewhere, that Pope had a gift for enmity. 69 Just as Pope’s friendships were doubtless both genuine and expedient, so too were Pope’s enmities. Paul Baines and Pat Rogers have

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illustrated beautifully the ways in which Pope and Curll made convenient boogeymen for each other, and how each enabled the other to do things that would have otherwise been impossible.70 That Pope paid more attention than was seemly to the exigence of his personal relationships is a charge often laid at his feet. Maynard Mack chronicles Pope’s sometimes frustrating experience working with William Wycherley, and shows how the younger poet is indisputably “paying court.”71 Brean Hammond illustrates the complex, shifting interactions between Pope and Bolingbroke, such that at certain points each sought, or lent, authority by association with the other.72 In Pope’s writing, his subscription lists, his dedications—and perhaps most of all in his publications of his letters—he trumpeted his relationships with powerful men with an emphasis on their power and his access to them.73 Perhaps as complex, and strangely overlooked in the historiography, Pope has also been infamous for his enmities, or adversaries. There are, in truth, too many enemies to enumerate, with too various a set of causes, but any such list would have to include (at the least) John Dennis, Colley Cibber, Edmund Curll, Elkanah Settle, Eliza Haywood, Richard Blackmore, Lord John Hervey, Sir Robert Walpole, the duke and duchess of Marlborough, Queen Caroline, Stephen Duck, John “Orator” Henley, Lewis Theobald, and Richard Bentley Sr. Some, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Joseph Addison, began as friends and became enemies. And these are just the people who knew him personally! Some of these enmities were surely naturally occurring, arising from mutual antagonism and dislike. But many enmities were not only provoked by Pope, but publicly maintained by him, often to the bafflement of those involved.74 We must consider, therefore, the possibility that like so many of the artifacts of his life, Pope’s enmities were products of expedience. Whether as representatives of the preposterousness of contemporary theatrical practices, or of shallowness of opera, or of the meretriciousness of Whiggish fashion, or of the idiocy of modern editing techniques—many of the “enemies” I list above were simply standard-bearers for their chosen fields. The assaults they endured at Pope’s hands were simply part of Pope’s seeking both to arrogate to himself the sole right to say what was or was not true art, and to offer as a backup a range of derogatory justifications 186

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should that first aim falter. Helen Deutsch’s thumbnail of the history of Pope scholarship characterizes two schools: “Reuben Brower’s Horatian champion of moral integrity and Maynard Mack’s civic-minded inheritor of a literary and political tradition of retirement.75” Brower and Mack’s responses correspond to their readings of Horace, but it is Pope’s Horace to whom they are comparing Pope. Deutsch’s own account argues for the somatic fact of Pope’s deformity, and the “conceptual couplet” of monstrosity itself, as prime movers behind Pope’s poetics.76 I agree entirely with Deutsch that the causes and manifestations of Pope’s poesis have to do with personal traits far beyond his control. Pope was only “moral,” or Horatian, or indeed malicious, when appearing to be so would serve his anxious, peerless, gargantuan literary-historical ambition. Take, for instance, the “Atticus” portrait in Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, which Pope drafted in 1716 and sent to Addison, who died in 1717. The portrait appeared in print in the London News Gazette in 1721, after which there is some evidence that it briefly circulated in manuscript. So accustomed are we to studying the hermeneutic self-sufficiency of this portrait in its context in the Epistle to Arbuthnot that we never stop to ask ourselves why the portrait is there in the first place. Pope’s decision to print this portrait in 1735, nineteen years after its composition and eighteen years after Addison’s death, begs the question of its own making. Indeed, why does the Epistle to Arbuthnot contain three portraits of enemies, although Pope wrote to Arbuthnot that his intention in it was to defend his satiric practice? One reason can be found in the scandal surrounding Pope’s Epistle to Burlington, in which the pseudonymous “Timon” was supposed by contemporary readers to refer to James Brydges, duke of Chandos.77 Despite Pope’s protestations to the contrary and the imperfection of the correspondences between Timon’s villa and Chandos’s own home, Chandos was generally believed to be Pope’s intended target. Dr Johnson was among those believing Pope had someone specific in mind, and said as much in his Life of Pope. In this instance, Johnson’s literary authority wholly overrode Pope’s. Pope continued to insist that “Timon” was intended to be a generalized caricature of tasteless wealth, senselessly spent. There are many 187

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reasons to believe Pope, but none of them are relevant here, inasmuch as who “Timon” refers to is not in itself important. What matters is that Pope claimed to have meant one thing and his readers persistently believed another. This is an extraordinarily rare occurrence in Pope’s career. We do know, however, that Pope was aghast to see what he had imagined as transparently general so drastically misconstrued as specific by his readers. Pope complained to Swift not long after the publication of Epistle to Burlington of “an age . . . so willing to misapply characters.”78 However, as we have seen, in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, Pope sets interpretative tests, while ensuring that readers cannot not be in possession of the necessary information. The response to the Timon/Chandos comparison suggested that Pope’s literary authority could be questioned by loosening his interpretative grasp on his own text, and Epistle to Arbuthnot might be considered a bravura exercise in reasserting it. Let us return, then, to Pope’s claim to be defending his satiric practice in Arbuthnot. Might it not be the case that defense meant not justification to him but violent contestation? The three portraits—Atticus, Sporus, Sappho—give Pope three occasions to enact the interpretative processes that he depended on to generate literary authority. That these pen portraits are variously homophobic, misogynist, hypocritical, and mean-spirited in fact marks the extent to which they served Pope’s larger project. Pope was skilled in equivocal portraiture (e.g., Arabella Fermour/ Belinda), but in this instance he had little use for equivocation. Just as the texts of Jacobite and Whig writers ultimately served polemical ends, Pope’s writing in the second half of his career is often purposeful even when it strikes postures of “moderation” and detachment, which his affected Horatianism helped sell. This was, perhaps, the crime for which Pope could not be forgiven by his contemporaries, and for which he is still now held to account. Pope’s enmities were not just opportunistically taken up, and perversely and unnecessarily perpetuated. They were maneuvers in a larger campaign to acquire and defend authority. This campaign resulted in Pope’s treating almost everyone from his closest friends (e.g., Jonathan Swift) to his supposedly bitterest enemies (whether Curll, Walpole, Theobald, Bentley, or someone else depends on the year) as mere means to various ends.79 Pope 188

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used formerly purposive forms in allegedly purposeless contexts, and falsely claimed thereby to have removed his writing from the spheres of instrumentality and expedience. His use of the armatures of friendship and enmity respectively were likewise presented as organic favor or disfavor, and they sometimes surely were. But that matériel was continually deployed to strategic effect. 80 The battlefield upon which Pope arrayed his weaponry was littered with that of his would-be opponents. Pope’s own collection of pamphlet attacks on himself, held in the British Library, runs to four volumes. 81 The front of the first bears a legend adapted from Job 31: 35–36: “Behold it is my desire, that mine Adversary had written a Book. Surely I would take it on my Shoulder, and bind it as a crown unto me.”82 . This collection comes to an end with a poem supposed to be by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “Her Palace placed beneath a muddy road,” and there is no internal hint as to why the collection stopped there. Perhaps, as James McLaverty notes, “Pope stopped collecting the attacks in 1733” because he had found at last the work “that advanced the charges he wanted to answer.”83 What has been described as malice, or vengefulness, or spite, or invective, or bile, is in fact something at once rather more pedestrian: mere opportunism. Assuredly, Pope had political sympathies, but those sympathies were irrelevant to the raw material that their literary cultures might generate. By the same token, Pope likely had feelings we could characterize as misogynist, homophobic, classist, reactionary, cruel, and indeed genuinely wounded, but those feelings were irrelevant to the raw material that both their causes and their expressions might generate. Political affiliations and inner states were only significant insofar as they offered an exigent aegis for the further arrogation of authority. Pope’s choice of William Warbuton as his literary executor was canny. Pope scholars continue to try to come to terms with it, canniness included. Warburton would go on to produce a nine-volume edition of Pope’s work. The public was given to understand, not unreasonably, that Warburton’s edition accurately represented Pope’s wishes. McLaverty’s peerless exploration of the fidelity of Warburton’s work to Pope’s intentions through the lens of Warburton’s addition of a single comma to An Essay on Man notes that that editor, and those who have followed him, generally fall 189

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prey to “the urge to regularize Pope’s position[s]”84 Warburton’s goal was in fact to mount a rearguard defense of Pope’s doctrine of the relationship between Reason and Virtue in the poem from attack by J. P. de Crousaz. The episode reveals the larger dynamics at play in Crousaz’s accusations of “fatalism and unorthodoxy” (McLaverty, 383). The goal of Warburton’s 1751 edition was to cement Pope’s legacy, even to the point of presenting his work (falsely, in this case) as beyond reproof or criticism. Like judges, all editors are “activists” even though they claim to be but faithful mediators. However, as McLaverty notes, Warburton’s departure from every printed text Pope authorized of An Essay on Man suggests that his activism, if faithful, had a larger goal in view than anything in its text. There are twin impulses in Warburton’s act: the burnishing of Pope’s reputation, in this instance, and the presentation of Pope as an author who was still, seven years after his death, able to answer and silence his critics. For Pope to be vulnerable to such a significant charge as Crousaz’s in An Essay on Man would imply that Pope’s authority was as mortal as its first begetter. Warburton’s job, in the largest view, was to ensure that Pope’s greatest work, his literary authority, was immortal and invulnerable. As with the writers discussed in chapters 1 and 2, we might well ask of any given passage of Pope’s simply, “Did it work?” It would be profitable to address the same question to his oeuvre as a whole. Given Pope’s career of “warfare upon earth,” as he put it in the Preface to 1717’s Works, we need only look to Oliver Goldsmith’s application to him of the soubriquet “Augustan.” Goldsmith’s appellation is proof positive of the ways that literary and political authority traveled together and then parted ways, after which Pope sought a position of literary authority corresponding to the political authority of George I. Pope did not represent himself as an Augustus, of course, but as a Horace, writing to or for his own Maecenas, Bolingbroke. Goldsmith’s calling Pope himself “Augustan” affirms Pope’s will to power, acknowledging his success in remaking the literary sphere into a kingdom of his own. Pope’s total arrogation to himself of the right to judge cultural productions persists because we have not—yet—worked out how to read Pope in such a way that we read neither with nor against the grain of 190

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his ambitions. Resistance to his claims reifies them. Pope’s achievement is to have overdetermined the discourse of his ambitions so as to render them almost nondiscursive. Merely observing that grain is the first step to being free to choose one’s own modality of reading. For Pope is not necessarily malicious, any more than he is good. Neither can or should he be judged morally on the basis of his work any more than other authors so concerned with their readerships, from Ronsard to Coetzee. We will continue to litigate these questions for as long as we continue to choose to read Pope in the way of his own devising. To decline to make that choice, or to decline to recognize it as a possibility, is to fail to acknowledge the enframedness of our own capacities for judgement to Pope’s literary authority. When critics and editors humbly decipher Pope’s texts, glossing, as editions routinely do, the typologies of Belinda as Arabella Fermor, of Atticus as Addison, of Sporus as Hervey— we treat the texts as referentially stable artifacts and thereby accede to the moral and political claims to truth that, thanks to Whiggish discourses of moderation, they carry with them. Until we recognize that those claims to truth are, in fact, claims to power, our work on Pope will remain in the long intentional shadow he casts, and in which he dictates to his readers the manner in which he is to be read and understood. By treating Pope’s work in this way, teachers, critics, and editors remain stuck in the role of providing exegeses of Pope’s heuristics. On this account, part of the goal of working on Pope is not to analyze him, but to recover and explain the intentions motivating his densely referential and allusive poetry. Suspicious reading of the kind I have modeled in this chapter is liberating in that it opens up to analysis the plurality of cultures, themes, and trends that Pope uses and in which he is entangled. In its most utopic potential, my analysis will allow us to include or exclude Pope in literary-critical and literary-historical readings and arguments at our own liberty, without that choice in any way reflecting an affiliation to—or disaffiliation from—the local, personal, partisan causes in which, whether knowingly or not, we have allowed ourselves to be enlisted. The final chapter of this book traces the ways Samuel Johnson engaged with the literary authority that Pope had constructed. Using many 191

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of Pope’s techniques, Johnson managed to bind together his literariness and his authority even more closely than did Pope. In so doing he managed to cast an even longer and deeper shadow over the literary history of the eighteenth century, and over the shape literary authority has taken in British literary culture ever since.

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Chapter 5

Samuel Johnson’s Struggle with Pope

The Invention of Mastery So much for the inauguration and canonization of the “Age of Pope.” We can pull clear of that closed hermeneutic circle and watch as it is successfully absorbed by, and into, a subsequent “Age of Johnson.” Samuel Johnson is still revered by scholars of a certain profile in eighteenth-century studies. This reverence has the same flavor now as it did when Johnson first cultivated it, two hundred and fifty years ago. And this is because Johnson built a closed system of his own in which to trap his readers.1 Like Pope’s, Johnson’s system relied on two contradictory impulses. On the first hand, Johnson constructed his literary authority by developing, and exploiting, an agon with previously existing forms of literary authority. These were the monuments of literary history Pope had built to memorialize himself. Here, Johnson worked to overgo Pope, to be bigger, to last longer. But on the second hand, Johnson linked the development of his literary authority to a quite proprietary sense of belatedness. Johnson, of course, would never have used a word so unfreighted with religious, or at least moral, cargo. The effect of these two movements in combination is striking indeed: Johnson struggles for dominance and renown in works that also explicitly argued for the futility of their own undertaking.2 I break Johnson’s literary career into the categories of poetry, prosody, and the tasks of monumental editorship. In each, I show Johnson inhabiting different postures—imitation, metempsychosis, satire manqué, judgment, compassion, moral teaching, and (re-)mediation—by way of discovering how best to circumscribe Pope.3 One result of Johnson’s labors is that the groundwork for what one critic, giving voice to a critical commonplace, calls the “post-Romantic emphasis on individual authors” 193

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was laid a long way in advance of the Romantics.4 When William Wordsworth writes in his Essay Supplementary to the Preface that “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed: so has it been, so will it continue to be,” he imparts this very lesson.5 That “truly original poet” (126) Wordsworth imagines is one who seizes authority, and molds both the taste of his day and the literary history of future ages. The critical taste Johnson forged in his struggle with Pope—and the very particular shape and role of literary authority as personated by Johnson—has become sedimented and naturalized. No longer is Johnsonian authority a first-order consequence of his confrontation with Pope. Johnson’s reflexive literary judgments are offered as prima facie truths about humankind, as though their effects upon the literary objects they are meant to judge were purely epiphenomenal to their main purpose. Consequently, the gravitational field of Johnson’s literary authority encompasses and orients its readers just as much as the objects it is used to read. My final goal in this chapter is to show through this the artefactuality and genesis of that Wordsworthian taste—“our taste.” The moniker “the Age of Johnson” takes its cue from Johnson’s ironic remark in The Adventurer in 1753 that the age “may be stiled with great propriety The Age of Authors.”6 Gillian Paku writes that “the insistence with which his admirers have used Johnson’s name to co-opt titles, enlarge the lexicon, and enable an Age of Johnson seems to confirm the link between Johnson as an individual and his authority over the meaning and dissemination of his texts, over his personal life, and even over the period in which that life was lived.”7 The concluding pages of this book explore how it was, precisely, that Johnson managed a complete fusion of his personal and his literary authorities. Many factors make Johnson hard to criticize, and make the veneer of his authority seem like the real thing. Chief among them are his performative and overdetermined prose style, and his continual vacillation of those performances between self-doubt and piety. By contrast. Pope’s Dunciads offered cover for less ostentatiously activist work to pass as though void of activist intentions. In the same way, Johnson’s tirelessly binary habit of thought gives the illusion of nonpartisan thought. In turn this 194

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nonpartisanship resembles the blunted, or foiled, satire of satire manqué. The Johnsonian criticism itself is the judgment; and the “foil” is the repudiation of that judgment’s worth—a repudiation that ironically, Eliotically underscores the judgment itself. Johnson’s insistence on his impartiality confers moral authority by dint of supposed abstention from the frays he describes (and in which his descriptions participate, often decisively). The reader will see here, then, that Johnson has turned Pope’s own apparatus of disinterested judgment back upon him. Johnson appears not to share Pope’s willingness to make victims out of the targets of his satire. Rather, he suggests, as Pope did, that his—and only his—textual moral instruction is both necessary and sufficient for the amelioration of the country’s national standing. The antitheses that structure Johnson’s prose have often been said to show his mind moving between poles; guiding the reader to a position, undercutting it, and moving on to a new, more powerful formulation. The signal contribution of this chapter to the field of Johnson studies beyond the scope of this book is to untangle the riddle of those antitheses. They are couplets. Johnson mounted the most novel and ingenious challenge to Pope’s indelibly characteristic iambic prosody—through (couplets of) prose. This chapter does not proceed through Johnson’s career in chronological order. This is because Johnson’s compressed, highly ironic prose couplets demand to be anatomized as such, as a prosodic form unto themselves, first. The second section, “The Vanity of Poetry,” returns to the start of Johnson’s career, and documents how in London Johnson made his most explicit references to Pope and worked to subsume a Pope-figure in a broader moral scene. It continues by exploring how, in The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson’s performance of satire manqué allowed him to make a much more plausible claim to moral authority than Pope managed to achieve through his comparable posture of aequabilitas in his Horatian imitations or moral epistles. The third section, “Monuments of the Age of Johnson,” surveys Johnson’s Dictionary, the “Preface” to Shakespeare, and the Lives. These texts recast the influences and authority of Johnson’s predecessors from within the crucible of Johnson’s self-memorialization.

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Prose Couplets The couplet is the ideal literary form of the aggressor. Pope made of it an inverted Procrustean bed on which ideas were stretched or truncated so as to fit his metrical feet. In Pope’s hands, the couplet became an instrument of domination. He used its innate binarism to cantilever antitheses into existence, and in the same gesture resolved them. And this is why Pope, and Johnson too, for that matter, forever seem to be solving problems faster than the reader can think of them. Johnson’s innovation of the prose couplet is an event in the history of genres which reproduces elements of this book’s argument in miniature. Johnson develops a new form by removing another from its originating context; he then represents distinctive formal properties that the first context had provoked as though they were naturally occurring structural features of a new context. If poetic pentameter couplets recreated the poetic principle of lineation as an oppositional conceptual structure, then prose couplets silently adopted that structure as a condition of existence. The result was a literary form imbued with such authority that, even now, readers cannot but be shuttled between its antitheses rather than seeing the prose couplet structure for what it is. The insight that there is a poetic structural quality to Johnson’s prose is not new. William Hazlitt writes of Johnson in “On the Periodical Essayists” that “the structure of his sentences . . . is a species of rhyming in prose, . . . each sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet.”8 Hazlitt writes here as though he has fundamentally misunderstood what couplets are: not shapes, but forms. There is plenty of daylight, after all, between mere rhymed pairs of lines and couplets. In his prose couplets, Johnson renders his parallelisms and antitheses syntactically, not metrically, and he denotes their taxonomies with punctuated structure, not through rhyme. By bolting the rhetorical force of the couplet onto the structure and syntax of prose, Johnson built the ideal vessel for the literary authority he wanted to project. The prose couplets I discuss below combine the compression and irony of poetic couplets with the flexibility and range of prose. Moreover, since the couplet was so strongly associated with Pope, the prose couplet offered Johnson

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a means to dress mutton as lamb by remediating Popean authority as a novel, organic curio of Johnson’s own devising. Hazlitt describes Johnson as “a complete balance master. . . . He never encourages hope, but he counteracts it by fear; he never elicits a truth, but he suggests some objection in answer to it.” What are we to make of this quirk in what Bate calls Johnson’s “dialectic form,” and Johnston and Mugglestone his bondage to “an apparently infinite series of oppositions”?9 For Paul Fussell, Johnson’s equivocations show that he is “very close to naked indecision.”10 John Richetti, however, finds that the purpose of the dialogic patterns of assertion and concession in Johnson’s prose is “the rhetorical cleverness that promotes thought and to that extent at least promotes truth, or rather the difficulties of seeing the truth.”11 By dramatizing Johnson’s antitheses as a performance of the difficulty of seeking after truth, Richetti textures Johnson’s style as an epistemological statement in itself. If Johnson’s greatness lay in “his ability to balance triumphantly assertive rhetorical bravura with concessions to alternative positions,”12 it would behoove us to consider the technical achievement of this balancing act, the antecedents and consequences of that technique, and its larger effects. The literary-historical reasons for this hybrid genre move are little investigated. Of course, just because the couplet form is judged to have reached its height in Pope, other uses or inflections of the couplet are not necessarily allusions to Pope.13 But Johnson used prose couplets to invert Pope’s causal hierarchy of deriving authority from literary writing. Recall that Pope used his poetics to mediate prescriptions of aesthetic judgment, and then associated a claim to personal authority with the implacability that those judgments accrued through their forms. Johnson, however, used prose couplets to engineer moral prescriptions that were the foundations for aesthetic judgments. Johnson derived literary authority from the implacability those judgments accrued through their moral basis. Pope’s literary authority depended primarily on his capacity to render naturalized and transparent the highly artificial expression of his aesthetic judgments; Johnson’s literary authority depended on his capacity to render naturalized and transparent the normative and highly artificial expression of his moral judgments.

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Let us taxonomize a little, the better to see these maneuvers. In The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson, W. K. Wimsatt finds that Johnson “tends to greater use of identical elements—to nearly identical constructions of almost equal length and weight.”14 Wimsatt isolates for particular attention parallelism and antithesis. For Wimsatt, parallelism consists in pairing, doubling, and in syntactic “doublets” and “triplets” (22). Wimsatt offers that parallelism can take the form “A, A; B, B” or “A, B; A, B”; antithesis “A; A1” or “A; B.” A triplet, then, could take the forms A, A, A; B, B, B, or A, B; A, B; A, B or A, A1; B, B1; C, C1. Indeed, Hazlitt echoes Johnson’s “balance” even while he criticizes it; his criticism takes the intentionally Johnsonian form of A, A1; B, B1 (hope, fear; truth, doubt). I adopt Wimsatt’s notation to describe Johnson’s couplets. If it seems like a bit of a blunt tool, well—it is. The virtue of that crudeness is its fidelity to the superordinate logics of the couplet and the sentence, which are structural rather than semantic. So. Where this notation indicates contraries or antimonies, what really matters for our purposes is that they denote only the roles assigned to those words by the structural logic of the sentence. Whether these are true antimonies or contraries is beside the point. While the notation “A, A1,” claims that pure contraries exist, the probative value of that claim is less important than its form. Wimsatt’s notation helps because it picks out the rhetorical structures Johnson uses to signal which terms are to be understood as performing the same role as the lineation of couplets. Its very fallaciousness is instructive, and I adopt it as more than a convenient fiction. We experience semantic shear, or friction, or torsion, as non-contrary elements are wrought into contraries. This bald device thereby exposes us more clearly to the power of the misshaping forces of Johnson’s prose. Johnson’s fluctuations between antitheses allowed him to remediate the now familiar dance of inclusion and exclusion that we know from Pope’s work, and which Johnson had used to great effect in his poetry. Johnson’s prose couplets make readers feel included in an exclusive framework. Take the following, of Savage: “It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.”15 198

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Balanced perfectly on its semi-colon, the chiasmus of this sentence performs the progress of intimacy followed by estrangement that it describes. This is a slightly unusual example of Johnson’s prose couplets, because its nouns are reused; the irony of the sentence is generated instead by the implicit oppositions created among verbs. There are in fact two sets of pairs. Each half of the sentence describes a two-part process. Finding and leaving; this is a straightforward pair and sets the reader up for the irony to come. The unexpected opposition of having and obliging prompts the reader to return to the second use of “friend” and reconsider it as either ironic or as in some way not straightforward. Likewise, the second “stranger” prompts us to return to the first: does that first deployment denote unfamiliarity or estrangement? The reader can imagine the repetitive to-and-fro of enduring an acquaintance with Richard Savage through the repetition of “friend” and “stranger.” This prose couplet uses antitheses, chiasmus, compression and irony to make a remarkably complex and nuanced set of statements about Savage. The finality of this new set of associations with “friend” and “stranger” has taught the reader something new; she is now better able to reflect on, even take part in, affective bonds of a wiser, more ironic group. When the reader reaches the end of the sentence, she is forced to return to the beginning and reread in the light of the coming ironies. Just as Pope did with the “Atticus” portrait in Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Johnson tests readers’ awareness, having first made it impossible for them not to know what the test asks of them. Johnson uses prose couplets either to introduce a topic or to round it off. This sentence comes at the end of four paragraphs on Milton’s versification: “He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse, but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.”16 This couplet cantilevers formal constraint to sum up many of Johnson’s foregoing judgments on Milton, his capabilities, self-esteem, and his uniqueness and inimitability. The vanity of thinking oneself capable of astonishing is juxtaposed with the humility of only hoping to please. These ironies touch on both the writer’s self-regard and on his understanding of the relationship between writer and reader. Johnson’s prose has typically been referred to as neoclassical, periodic, 199

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or balanced.17 I would argue that those periodic sentences are often syntactic braids that just as closely resemble couplets. So when Johnson writes, “The Idler never applauds his own idleness, nor does any man repent of the diligence of his youth,”18 we could taxonomize the sentence as A, B / A1, B1 (never applaud, idleness, / nor . . . repent, diligence). “He may descend into profoundness, or tower into sublimity” (A, A1 / B, B1), Johnson says of the Idler earlier.19 Compare this couplet from An Essay on Man: “Why doing, suff’ring, check’d, impell’d; and why / This hour a slave, the next a deity.” (1.67–68) (A, A1; B, B1 / C, C1.) The structural principles are the same. In Johnson’s condemnation of Pope’s pride in his financial well-being, there is a secondary main clause, making a more complex couplet. “Of this fortune, which as it arose from publick approbation was very honourably obtained, his imagination seems to have been too full: it would be hard to find a man, so well entitled to notice by his wit, that ever delighted so much in talking of his money.”20 There are two main contraries in the main clause following the colon: “wit” and “talking of money”; and the entitlement to “notice” versus the act of “talking” of oneself. So we could taxonomize this couplet as A, B / A1, B1. Like the best couplets, however, this one contains an additional irony: the folly of Pope’s talking of his money is counterposed with the supposed wit by which that money was gained. Johnson hints that Pope ill-deserves the fortune he gained by his wit, given his folly in talking about it. So there is a secondary taxonomy A / A1, sharing space with the other couplet structure and divided across the same caesura. The couplet is strengthened by the reader’s apprehension of its ironies. When Johnson writes that Pope’s “malignity to Philips, whom he had first made ridiculous, and then hated for being angry, continued too long” (1179–80), it is again with a couplet the structure of which we would record as A, B / A1, B1. The relationship of the two halves, however, is more complex. Johnson says that Pope hated Philips for being angry with Pope when Pope had made Philips ridiculous. The couplet elegantly compounds Pope’s offense in two strong verbs (“made” / “hated”). But because Philips’s anger (B1) is a direct consequence of Pope’s actions, it is Pope, perversely, who seems ridiculous. The relationship between B and B1 is 200

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plainly directly causal. Only Pope’s hatred and implied disbelief at this simple causal chain turns the ridicule of the couplet back from the hated to the hater. After all, which is the more ridiculous: the man who becomes angry when humiliated, or the man who, after humiliating someone, is outraged by his victim’s pain? One of the clearest examples of Johnson’s incorporation of the couplet form as a rhetorical structure is in the last sentence of his life of Savage: This relation will not be wholly without its use if those who languish under any part of his sufferings shall be enabled to fortify their patience by reflecting that they feel only those afflictions from which the abilities of Savage did not exempt him; or those who, in confidence of superior capacities or attainments, disregard the common maxims of life, shall be reminded that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.21

The sentence pivots on its semicolon and then again on its closing antitheses. It performs exemplary judiciousness, moderation, and moral didacticism. The closing pairs of three qualities with three judgments pronounced on them shows Johnson prioritizing moral character over natural ability. We could taxonomize the final portion of this sentence as follows: A (superior capacities) / A1 (common maxims); B (prudence) / B1, B11 (negligence, irregularity); C, D / C1, D1/ C11, D11 (knowledge, useless / wit, ridiculous / genius, contemptible). The two couplets are followed by an extraordinary triplet to close the text. As the antitheses become more pronounced (demonstrating as they do Johnson’s own counterposed “knowledge,” “wit” and “genius”), Johnson’s emphasis on virtue becomes all the more stentorian. In effect, Johnson shows his virtue by first demonstrating his intelligence and then subordinating it to his virtue. Johnson’s implication, as ever, is that all writers, himself included, are fallible and that that fallibility will undo all their works. This final sentence is fine example of Johnson’s version of Popean satire manqué. Johnson’s choice of “use” in this sentence (“will not be without its use”), further pinpoints moral didacticism as the text’s specific objective. The closing trio of adjectives (“useless,” “ridiculous,” and 201

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“contemptible”) are then blunted, or foiled, because they refer not to Savage but to those who imagine themselves above Savage. This sentence dilates and offers unexpected compassion for Savage in a movement of characteristically surprising introspection. This arrests the satiric momentum of Johnson’s “Richard Savage” and converts its restless energy into self-censuring moral proscription. As we shall see in The Vanity of Human Wishes, this is how Johnson’s authority appears so especially insuperable. Johnson’s willingness to draw the bounds of his moral instruction around himself confers a paradoxical authority on him. He needs not exceptionalism of conduct; he has chosen exceptionalism of judgment in its place. This final sentence of “Richard Savage,” however, shows only one side of Johnson’s mastery of the transmuted couplet form as a mechanism to assert authority. Johnson puts the prose couplet to more subtle use earlier in an account of Savage’s claims about his parentage.22 Taking Savage at his word, Johnson writes of the woman he claimed to be his mother: It was not therefore likely that she would be wicked without temptation, that she would look upon her son from his birth with a kind of resentment and abhorrence, and, instead of supporting, assisting and defending him, delight to see him struggling with misery; that she would take every opportunity of aggravating his misfortunes and obstructing his resources, and with an implacable and restless cruelty continue her persecution from the first hour of his life to the last. (129)

By the first comma Johnson has prepared us to expect a couplet-based structure to the sentence: A / A1 (wicked/temptation) forming an inverted pairing of effect and cause. The “that” following “temptation” creates the expectation of parallel syntactical structure along with the anaphora introduced by “that.” But Johnson undermines that expectation so as to heighten our apprehension of the countess of Macclesfield’s wrongdoing. The binary structures that Johnson leads us to expect in this sentence are either left uncompleted or imbalanced. The couplet structure relies on the supply of antitheses to match theses, and after wicked/temptation, Johnson creates very few such matches in this sentence: support, assistance, and defense are met at first, incongruously, with delight—revealed 202

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to be nefarious, in Savage’s misery. Aggravation and obstruction follow the semicolon after misery, only to be accentuated rather than balanced by implacability and restlessness. Not only is this sentence not full of the pose and counterpose of couplet-structured rhetoric; the scaffolding of the couplet emphasizes its marked imbalance. By using an antithesis in the first clause and thereby creating the expectation of couplet structure, the succession of denied thesis/antithesis pairs perform in syntactic form the overwhelming one-sidedness of the relationship between Savage and the woman Savage claimed was his mother. Whether Johnson portrays the injustice of Savage’s treatment at the countess of Macclesfield’s hands, or comments obliquely on the partiality of Savage’s account, we must (with Boswell) vibrate in a state of uncertainty. Either way, this kind of virtuosic performative writing recalls the high points of Pope’s An Essay on Criticism. The doubleness we see here in Johnson is the same habit of mind that characterized the culture of Jacobite poetry on which Pope drew so heavily. As we have seen, Jacobite manuscript poetry used form as a stalking horse for a second layer of content only accessible to readers able to decode it. Pace Hone’s suggestions of Pope’s lingering affection for the Jacobite cause, Pope used the same technique as Jacobite poets did, but outside the context of Jacobite poetics to cultivate a cognoscenti set apart not by their politics but by the correlated fineness of their taste and literary discrimination. Johnson brought more variables to the equation; the moral rectitude of the reader and, crucially, of the writer. Pope’s aequabilitas saw his targets’ moral failings as metonymies of a widespread cultural malaise from which he, and his loyal readers, were exempt. Johnson believed that no such exemptions were possible. He enjoins the reader to re-order his or her hierarchy of judgments in line with Johnson’s by subordinating literary to moral excellence. But Johnson’s signal reordering of his own hierarchy of values is performed with marked literary exceptionalism, which undercuts the universality to which his arguments lay claim.

The Vanity of Poetry Of all of Johnson’s work, his first entry into the literary marketplace shows Pope’s influence the most strongly. London was published by Robert 203

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Dodsley, Pope’s regular printer and a man to whom Pope had once lent £500 to set up his own business. London appeared just three days before Pope’s thematically similar One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight. A Dialogue Something Like Horace. 23 As Robert De Maria Jr. writes, “A comparison between the unknown, anonymous author of London and the most famous poet in England was inevitable and probably intentional.”24 Within this context we must understand London as Johnson’s bid to ally himself with, and avail himself of, genre systems of Pope’s devising, stylistically, thematically, and materially. Johnson’s poem appeared through a channel Pope had helped establish; the two poets assayed the moral justifications for political satire of the same stripe (anti-Hanoverian, anti-Walpolean). Moreover, “both Pope and Johnson conclude their poems with wishes for a return to less corrupt, sterner, and prouder times.”25 Johnson also peppered London with allusions to Pope’s work and incorporated Pope himself in the character of Thales. Whether or not, as Donald Greene writes, “[London] rehearses all the commonplaces of contemporary opposition propaganda against the Walpole regime,” Johnson’s poem fits into a recognizable set of literary practices.26 In choosing to imitate Juvenal’s 3rd Satire, Johnson was announcing his filiation from John Dryden, John Oldham, Barten Holyday and Nicolas Boileau, all of whom had also imitated it. I place Dryden first in this list because, though the tradition of imitating a classical poet and thereby claiming filiation from them is older than Dryden, Dryden’s use of classical poets was distinctive. As Richard Terry has argued, “Dryden revives Persius by translating him but also (it is hinted) by being the recipient of Persius’s transmigratory soul.”27 By imitating Juvenal, Johnson was claiming a complex metempsychosis of his own. The Drydenic association of the form did political work for Johnson. He was able to assume the twin positions of classical satirist and of a Restoration (and Stuart) poet. This implicit Stuart bias added to the poem’s anti-Hanoverian credentials and offered the benefit of inviting further comparison with Pope. Pope’s own agon with Dryden has been amply documented, not least by Pope himself: his Dunciad Variorum (1729) contained a table, be it howsoever ironic, showing the similarities among the accusations leveled at the two men. 204

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Pope’s own imitations at the time of London’s publication were Horatian, though Howard Weinbrot has warned against a certain type of reception of the Horatian imitations, arguing that “some of Horace’s perceived conventions were foreign to Pope’s satiric aims.”28 Pope’s attitude to Horace was often ambivalent. His epitaph “For One Who Would Not Be Buried in Westminster Abbey” ends by asserting that he “never flattered Kings like you; / Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.” When Pope in the Epilogue referred to Horace’s “sly, polite, insinuating style” that could “please at court, and make Augustus smile,” it was not with unmixed admiration.29 Indeed, Margaret Anne Doody has suggested that Pope’s Horatian imitations contained a commingling of Horatian and Juvenalian manners.30 this is also more or less Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s judgment in her “Verses Address’d to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace.” In his Horatian imitations, Pope offered a set of reasons why he would both rather retreat to the country—for Pope, his villa at Twickenham— and yet also feel drawn, even obliged, to satirize the city and thus argue for his own importance to London’s moral integrity. London seeks to make a similar case, with Johnson offering himself in Pope’s place. Thales’s role is decidedly that of a senior poet whom the speaker of the poem admires and wishes to emulate. His function in London is to allow Johnson to vocalize the stance of a poet and to present himself as that poet’s natural successor. By examining the kinds of claims Thales makes and the topics he addresses, we can arrive at an idea of which senior poet in particular Johnson is ventriloquizing. As Thales and the unnamed speaker wait for Thales’s boat, Thales explains why he is leaving London for the country. His disdain for the political and literary cultures of the capital leads him to resign its care to its irretrievably corrupted denizens: Here let those reign, whom Pensions can incite To vote a Patriot black, a Courtier white;31

This couplet on the perverse and easily bought Parliament refers unmistakably in “a Patriot” to the Patriot Opposition led by the earl of Cobham and Frederick, Prince of Wales, which sought to challenge George II’s court and its alliance with Robert Walpole. Pope’s Epistle to Cobham 205

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recorded patriotism as Cobham’s ruling passion (his last words are imagined to be “O save my country, Heav’n!” (265) and explicitly contrasted Cobham with “the courtier smooth” (252). Thales goes on to offer an apology for his own intractable honesty that strongly resembles the account that Pope gives of himself in the Epistle to Arbuthnot. Thales’s self-description is as follows: But what, my Friend, what Hope remains for me, Who start at Theft, and blush at Perjury? Who scarce forbear, tho’ Britain’s Court he sing, To pluck a titled Poet’s borrow’d Wing; A Statesman’s Logic, unconvinc’d can hear, And dare to slumber o’er the Gazetteer; Despise a Fool in half his Pension drest, And strive in vain to laugh at Henley’s jest. (67–74)

Thales’s concerns about the consequences of his ingrained honestly (“blush at Perjury”) recall “how wretched I! / Who can’t be silent, and who will not lie” (33–34). Similarly, his dismissiveness toward titled poets and statesmen echoes later lines from the same poem; when Pope says he will happily criticize a court poet like Lord Hervey (305–33) as much as “A hireling Scribler, or a hireling Peer, / Knight of the Post corrupt, or of the Shire” (364–65). Thales’s reference to Orator John Henley (74), the much-mocked preacher and showman who preached at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, returns us to Pope’s own joke about Henley, again in the Epistle to Arbuthnot: “Whom have I hurt? has poet yet, or peer, / Lost the arch’d eye-brow, or Parnassian sneer? / And has not . . . His butchers Henley?” (95–98). Thales’s scorn for a pensioned “Fool,” meanwhile, and reference to the “titled Poet” refer us back to Pope’s Satire II.i: Could pension’d Boileau lash in honest strain Flatt’rers and bigots ev’n in Louis’ reign? Could Laureate Dryden Pimp and Fry’r engage, Yet neither Charles nor James be in a rage? And I not strip the gilding off a Knave, Unplac’d, unpension’d, no man’s heir, or slave? 206

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I will, or perish in the gen’rous cause. (113–19)

Thales goes on to reflect upon the dangers of avarice, and the willingness of most to overlook it in their friends if they might have a chance to share in the hoarder’s bounty. In these lines, Thales again refers to figures familiar to us from Pope: “But thou, should tempting Villainy present / All Marlb’rough hoarded, or all Villiers spent; / Turn from the glitt’ring Bribe thy scornful Eye” (85–87). The duchess of Marlborough’s avarice was notorious; she had lent money to the government at rates that were considered usurious, as Pope remarks in Satire II.ii (1734): “Oh impudence of wealth! / . . . to thy country let that heap be lent, / As M—o’s was, but not at five per cent” (117–22). The money frittered away by George Villiers, the second duke of Buckingham, had also been recounted at length by Pope in the Epistle to Bathurst (1733), which sharply records the thriftless man’s death, “Great Villiers lies— . . . this lord of useless thousands ends!” (305–14) This profusion of references to Pope’s poetry comes in the space of the first sixty lines of Thales’s speech. All the references but one are to Pope’s Horatian imitations, and all are to poems Pope had published within five years of Johnson’s poem. Whatever other work Thales does for Johnson in London, it is clear, as he goes through a list of causes, flaws, and culprits from Pope’s recent works, that he also represents Alexander Pope. Having established these commonalities between Thales and Pope in the poem’s beginning, Johnson then expands the poem’s ambit to more general satire on the venality and hypocrisy of public officeholders. Johnson’s focus on financially motivated moral decay keeps London centered on ground Pope in particular had covered, whether in the Epistle to Bathurst or the Epistle to Murray (an imitation of Horace’s Epistle I.vi). Particular moments like the insincere “public mournings” that “the laureate tribe in servile verse relate, / How virtue wars with persecuting fate” (197–99) recall the Dunciad’s scorn for poets competing for the laureateship and Pope’s jab at “the Bays” in Satire II.i (23).32 These factors make London more than the same kind of satire as Pope’s Horatian imitations; they make it substantially imitative of this stage of Pope’s career. Thales’s references to types such as Orgilio (84, 207

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195, 208) recall Pope’s own satire on Timon (Epistle to Burlington, 99– 176). Pope’s note on Timon states that “This description is intended to comprise the principles of a false taste of magnificence” (99n). Timon’s home is replete with “trembling salvers” and needless marble halls (161, 152). Orgilio’s own home is clearly built in the same mold: “blessed with all the baubles of the great, / The polished marble, and the shining plate, / Orgilio sees the golden pile aspire” (206–8). Thales opposes Orgilio’s nouveau riche extravagance to “some elegant retreat” (212) of the sort that Pope finds at Stowe (70). Johnson also refers in passing to those corrupted individuals who “Can Balbo’s Eloquence applaud, and swear / He gropes his Breeches with a Monarch’s Air” (150–51). Balbus was a Roman lawyer and ironic type for incompetent speaking; Pope refers to “prating Balbus” in the Epistle to Arbuthnot (276); Johnson’s mock-Royal “groping” is a rehearsal of Pope’s heavily ironic “I cough like Horace” passage from the same poem (115–24). Johnson also extends and deepens Pope’s satires on George II in particular, even referring to George’s trips to his Hanoverian mistress (246–47) and connoting the ropes used to rig George’s personal “convoy” with the hemp used at Tyburn for hanging (242, 247).33 Thales consistently ties his moral critiques to the overall health of Britishness (8, 30, 69, 101, 112, 118, 249) just as Pope had done in his Horatian imitations and Moral Essays. It is in the context of this dense web of allusions to Pope that we must read the closing passage of London: Much could I add,—but see the Boat at hand, The Tide retiring, calls me from the Land: Farewel!—When Youth, and Health, and Fortune spent, Thou fly’st for Refuge to the Wilds of Kent; And tir’d like me with Follies and with Crimes, In angry Numbers warn’st succeeding Times; Then shall thy Friend, nor thou refuse his Aid, Still Foe to Vice forsake his Cambrian Shade; In Virtue’s Cause once more exert his Rage, Thy Satire point, and animate thy Page. (254–63)

Thales here reflects on the future poetic career of his interlocutor. At 208

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this moment in time, Pope’s publication of his imitations of Horace had slowed considerably. Living a more secluded life at Twickenham than he once had done, Pope appeared to be moving toward a life of comparative retirement and seclusion. The boat that Thales takes to Cambria signifies Johnson’s conjecture that Pope is preparing to depart the poetic scene; Johnson imagines here a passing of the satirical torch from Thales/Pope to himself. Thales even offers the same act of metempsychosis to the poem’s speaker from which Thales himself, as a vessel for the souls of Pope and Dryden, had benefitted. If Thales will “thy Satire point, and animate thy Page” then Thales’s corporate animus will be transferred to, and live on in, the future work of his mentee. London betrays Johnson’s indebtedness, or vulnerability, to Pope’s influence. Though Johnson would continue to grapple with Pope throughout his career, never again would Pope loom so large in his imagination. But London gives us the hint that Johnson’s formation as a writer, and his conception of the arena of possibility that a satirist could inhabit, was substantially indebted to, or even formed by, Pope’s work in the 1730s. Johnson’s second long poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, was published in 1748. De Maria writes, “In [The Vanity of Human Wishes] Johnson substitutes attention to the moral and ethical ends of education from his earlier examination of more specifically political matters.”34 Bate has suggested that Johnson’s satire in Vanity moved away from the explicitly political satire of London and into the realm of satire manqué.35 This “foiled” or “frustrated” satire “supposedly softens its mockery by dissolving it within a wider understanding.”36 Bate claims The Vanity of Human Wishes as “the prototype” for satire manqué, though, as noted above, we see the same impulses in Pope’s Horatian imitations. Johnson’s own adoption of satire manqué is merely exigent. We shall first follow Vanity’s effects before noting their possible disingenuousness. In Vanity, Johnson appears to refine his satire manqué by compassionating more deeply and thoroughly with the targets of his satire than Pope ever did. Vanity’s most savage moment, its judgment on Swift, is in context a saddened acknowledgement of the ravages of time: But few there are whom Hours like these await, 209

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Who set unclouded in the Gulphs of fate. .................................. In Life’s last Scene what Prodigies surprise, Fears of the Brave, and Follies of the Wise? From Marlb’rough’s Eyes the Streams of Dotage flow, And Swift expires a Driv’ler and a Show. (311–18)

Death, Johnson says, brings the diminution of all things; the wise become foolish, the brave afraid, the talented rote, great statesmen mild, and even the greatest satirists ridiculous. By prefacing the Marlborough/ Swift couplet with lines on the prodigious, the brave, and the wise, Johnson recontextualizes that couplet into pathos. In fact, the pathetic tone redirects the satiric or predatory energies of the subsequent couplet, so that the more acidic had been the tone of those last two lines, the more poignant they would be. In Vanity, Johnson challenges Pope for his position at the head of the realm of English literary tradition both more substantively and more obliquely than he did in London. With Vanity, we see Johnson’s effort, in Frederic Bogel’s terms, to claim and disclaim authority in a single gesture. Howard Erskine-Hill has argued more thoroughly than anyone that The Vanity of Human Wishes is, in its context, an anti-Walpolean text that intimates Jacobite sympathies.37 As we have seen, however, poetic gestures that start life as political signifiers over time become more and more substantially literary signifiers, referring back to their own perdured history more than to their originating circumstances. As Helen Deutsch writes, “By taking on the couplet form and the imitation of a Roman original (specifically Juvenal’s tenth satire) Johnson lets himself be partially determined by his most formidable satiric neoclassical predecessor, Alexander Pope, in the act of writing his own distinction.”38 This act of embedding operates on the same Jacobite-derived principle of cognoscenti that Pope brought to such a height, while the consequences of Johnson’s normative moral claims come straight from the heritage of Whig writing that extrapolated national moral consequences from individual actions—and reading choices.39 Accordingly, in my discussion of Johnson, I shall not look for evidence 210

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of Johnson’s actually existing Jacobitism in references to “Swedish Charles”40 as Erskine-Hill and others have done. 41 Instead I will look for vestigial traces of the literary forms of Jacobite energies as Johnson inherited them from earlier writers, among whom Pope was chief. Johnson’s Jacobitism is important not for what it indicates about his loyalty to the Stuarts, but for his affiliation with a certain oppositional, exclusive, and referential party of writing that sought to arrogate the mantle of national representativeness with a shadow set of “exiled,” but “true” literary utterances. It is a heavy and painful irony that a posture derived from Jacobitism should come to signify a text that stands fully outside the mainstream of political exigency. The moral authority that Johnson ironically gains by disclaiming any personal exceptionalism characterizes the poem, through which he rides on his usual hobby-horse of paradoxical inclusion and exclusion. The Vanity of Human Wishes’s standards for Britishness, morality, moderation, and faith fluctuate. While the poem warns that “the dangers gather as the treasures rise” (28) and cautions, of a pauper, that to “increase his riches [would] his peace destroy” (40), most of the poem is about the futility of temporal power. And in the poem’s relations to power, appropriately, Johnson once again struggles with Pope. Although Johnson joins a considerable heritage of poets writing about the dangers of political ambition, The Vanity of Human Wishes is unusual in that it actively encourages its readers to abjure power and wealth. Using the poem’s attitudes to political power we can observe a distinct gradient in political poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century and its relationship to its imagined readers’ virtue, starting with Jacobite verse and moving through Pope to Johnson. The political affiliations that he implied in his poems were not much less parochial, but Pope did at least invite readers to aspire to join a cognoscenti, making a connection between readerly expertise and the exquisite taste of the Tory or Patriot oligarchy. For Jacobites and Pope, virtue inhered in true loyalty; for Pope, additionally, in true learning. For both, however, virtue possessed a political corollary. The remarkable end of this gradient comes as Johnson proposes an anticlerical, populist form of Protestant providential virtue:

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Let history tell where rival kings command, And dubious title shakes the madded land, When statutes glean the refuse of the sword, How much more safe the vassal than the lord; Low skulks the hind beneath the rage of power, And leaves the wealthy Traitor in the Tower; Untouched his cottage, and his slumbers sound, Though confiscation’s vultures hover round. The needy traveller, serene and gay, Walks the wild heath, and sings his toil away. ..................................... Increase his riches and his peace destroy; (29–38)

Virtue has no political corollary for Johnson: indeed, true virtue and political advancement are practically inimical to one another. While Erskine-Hill reads the phrase “dubious title shakes the madded land” as a reference to the usurping house of Hanover (“dubious title”) and to the Jacobite uprisings (“madded land”), I think it just as likely that Johnson is implying that all titles are by their very nature dubious and untrustworthy. “Wild” describes the heath but also works as a transferred epithet: the traveller is serene in neediness, singing in toil, and natural in his connection to the land. Very few of Johnson’s readers would be the needy travelers exalted here. His presence is explained by the fact that the “needy traveller” typifies the moral imperative that Johnson suggests: financial security carries a moral taint. While human vanity inheres in efforts to rise higher on the social scale than vassal, hind, or itinerant beggar, the poem’s focus is on the moral decrepitude of Britain as manifested in its political corruption. Johnson counterfactually imagines a world in which money has no power, favorites no sway, and in which the criminal justice system works. Johnson continues after the portrait of the traveller, “Once more, Democritus, arise on earth, / With Cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth” (49–50). Johnson wants Democritus to imagine a state in which “Senates heard before they judged a cause; / How wouldst thou shake at Britain’s modish tribe” (60–61). He claims that the “modish” British legal system is 212

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unjust because it issues judgments precipitately—much as Pope wrote that “wretches hang, that jury-men may dine” (Rape of the Lock, 3.22). Johnson’s poem suggests that Britain is and has been marred by aspiration or ambition. The passage sealing this suggestion is this one: But will not Britain hear the last Appeal, Sign her Foes Doom, or guard her Fav’rites Zeal; Through Freedom’s Sons no more Remonstrance rings, Degrading Nobles and controuling Kings; Our supple Tribes repress their Patriot Throats, And ask no Questions but the Price of Votes; With Weekly Libels and Septennial Ale, Their Wish is full to riot and to rail. (91–98)

It is here that we see Johnson closing his syllogisms on the reader in order to propose his national importance. First, if disposable income leads to immorality, and if all Johnson’s readers have disposable income, then all of Johnson’s readers are ipso facto predisposed to immorality. Second, if all political aspiration leads to corruption, and if the country Johnson describes has a recognizable infrastructure of “Nobles,” “Kings,” and “Judges,” then the country is inevitably corrupt. Instead, the transferred epithet, “wild,” links the state of man to the country and shows us Johnson’s ideal Britain and his ideal man—agrarian, natural, and uncultivated. Johnson aims to inculcate in his readers a sensation of their fallibility and complicity in a broken system; as sophisticated, literate readers, they are all implicated in the quagmire he describes. Johnson issues a moral imperative to fight the pervasive depravity and to disseminate his particular model as a panacea for an ailing country. This is a measure of how successful Johnson’s didacticism is in Vanity; his moral logic compels readers to replicate his teaching by persuading others, a feat most easily achieved by having them read the poem. Again, the thoroughness of Johnson’s moral instruction ironically promotes his own stature. Johnson continues to indict himself in the most explicit self-portrait in the poem, which castigates the failures of scholars. Lines 142–46 of The Vanity of Human Wishes list the qualities a scholar needs; the sentence then pivots on a semicolon and lists the dangers to which scholars 213

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are inevitably prey. Johnson closes out his portrait of scholarship with this quatrain: See nations slowly wise, and meanly just, To buried merit raise the tardy bust If dreams yet flatter, once again attend, Hear Lydiat’s life, and Galileo’s end. (161–64)

As I showed in chapter 3, the argument of Pope’s Essay on Criticism made it logically impossible to be a true critic on the terms he set forth. In the same way, Johnson both promotes learning and then undermines it as a genuine possibility. He reveals the reader’s inevitable vanity, while framing the poem to show readers that Johnson can cultivate them through his moral pedagogy into a kind of excellence. After listing the difficulties of a life of scholarship (which no doubt reflect Johnson’s own experiences at Pembroke College, Oxford) he closes his section with Galileo and John Lydiat, two exemplary scholars who died in poverty and disgrace. With one hand, Johnson includes the reader in his capacious knowledge and experience; with the other he undermines the value of that knowledge and experience. This is the maneuver of Johnson’s that Hazlitt likened to a pendulum: he shows that the life of the mind is unsupported and unesteemed, and then swings back in the opposite direction to say that to desire esteem is vanity. The reader is expertly shuttled between undesirable states. Johnson finally criticizes those who are not learned for being blockheads (174). The reader is left on the horns of a dilemma: should one attempt, vainly, to be learned, or, stupidly, to ignore learning? This ambiguity is not a mistake on Johnson’s part. In service to his larger objective of showing the vanity of human wishes, Johnson illustrates brilliantly how regret attends every decision. Johnson uses a reference to Archbishop William Laud to stage another instance of the paradoxically inclusive and exclusive machinery of Vanity; Rebellion’s vengeful talons seize on Laud. .................................. And fatal Learning leads him to the block: Around his tomb let Art and Genius weep, 214

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But hear his death, ye blockheads, hear and sleep. (168–74)

Johnson’s adulation of Archbishop Laud and condemnation of rebellion is a royalist gesture, and fits in with the poem’s larger program of discouraging political ambition. Johnson here also deploys two references to Pope; one clear and one covert. Johnson’s lines on Laud betray a distinct resemblance to Pope’s own reflection on John Gay in Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot: Blest be the Great! for those they take away, And those they left me—for they left me Gay, Left me to see neglected Genius bloom, Neglected die! and tell it on his tomb;42

Pope’s investment in mourning Gay in this way is to claim that as a friend and a man of taste, Pope is loyal, insightful and true. Johnson uses Pope’s technique of referential exclusivity with remarkable skill. The political context of 1749 was dominated by the very real Catholic threat to Protestant rule recently quashed in the 1746 battle of Culloden. By praising Archbishop Laud, Johnson is reaching back to a pre–Civil War royalist martyr. Laud’s suspected Catholicism makes him a pointed choice for Johnson—contrarian, certainly, and possibly (given the Jacobite context of 1749) controversial.43 As the flashpoint in conflict that is older, but still very much alive, Archbishop Laud is an unusual but potent reference to make. As Pope uses Gay to signal his literary and social exceptionalism and to invite other readers to join him in the refinement of his taste, so Johnson uses Laud to signal his moral exceptionalism and invites readers to join him in recognizing the significance of his allusion to a royalist martyr. The final twist of Johnson’s dual allusion to Pope and Laud is accomplished by the last line on Laud’s death, “But hear his death, ye blockheads, hear and sleep.” Johnson’s use of the term “blockheads,” and his reference to sleep as the response of the blockheaded to all stimuli, must be references to Pope, recalling as they do the imaginary framework of The Dunciad. Duncery is inimical to the “Art” and “Genius” that Laud embodied; that public blockheads should hear of Laud and sleep indicates the extent to which the public is duncely. Johnson’s double reference to Pope, then, first invites the reader’s attention with “ye blockheads, hear 215

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and sleep,” an unmistakable echo to those in the know. In return for being awake to this reference Johnson’s readers have the pleasure of removing themselves from the national body of blockheads, even if they had not considered the pertinence of Laud’s example to the political context. Moreover, “hear and sleep” transforms a Dunciadic satiric impulse into a pathos typical of satire manqué; as Richard Feingold writes, “as the ‘satire’ of The Vanity of Human Wishes reveals, Johnson will more likely convert what he finds in a familiar form to some new one . . . sympathy, for example, rather than scorn.”44 The full and ramifying tangle of references to Pope coheres around strong links to the national importance of literary and moral cultivation. By evoking Laud and the apocalyptic sleep of the Dunces, Johnson makes the stakes for his readers as high as possible; nothing less than the religious and intellectual fiber of Britain is on the line. Johnson embeds Pope’s familiar rhetoric of cultural decline and isolation into the larger context of the religious unrest still playing out in Britain. This is how Johnson uses Pope’s work to assume British literary authority for himself. This passage on Laud contains in microcosm a significant example of Johnson’s considerable ability to assimilate, emulate, and even outshine the literary cultures of a previous generation of writers. London and The Vanity of Human Wishes are perhaps Johnson’s two most explicit efforts to seize the literary authority that Pope had arrogated to himself over the course of his career. The literary marketplaces with which Johnson had to contend, and the genre systems to which it was most suited, were radically transformed from that which Pope had dominated. In size and competitiveness, it demanded—and rewarded—different literary forms and strategies. These Johnson pursued in his monumental Dictionary, edition of Shakespeare, and Lives of the Poets.

Monuments and Last Things In his 1747 “Plan of a Dictionary,” Johnson announced to Lord Chesterfield that “one great end of this undertaking is to fix the English language.”45 Johnson imagined that “though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to 216

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reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.” The explicitly imperial bent of this proposal gives substance to the misgivings the poet John Clare (1793–1864) would have about standardization in the future. In the present, however, Johnson’s invocation of conquest suggests the accrual of bounty and renown for his sponsor. Lord Chesterfield was a Whig politician, and Johnson appealed to Chesterfield’s political sympathies by proposing to offer a holistic system of language. As Lynda Mugglestone writes, “advertisements published in 1747 make plain the normative intent of Johnson’s forthcoming dictionary.”46 In the 1755 “Preface” to the Dictionary, however, Johnson’s views had changed. Reflecting on his acceptance of the mutability of language, Johnson wrote that “If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? it remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.” The lexicographer ended up a historical chronicler who admitted that a Dictionary was an effort “which its own nature forbids to be immortal.”47 Those eager to cathect onto Johnson register this change as the progression from a Whiggish ideal of progress and systematization to a Tory reverence for historical precedent and process: “On the Plan’s side of the ledger, then, we see self-flattery, irrationality, inexperience, concepts worthy of derision, vanity, false imagination, unnatural and impossible restraint, and pride. On the Preface’s side, we see proper modesty, experience, freedom, thought, and growth,” Howard Weinbrot writes.48 It is much less contentious to determine the importance of the Dictionary for Johnson: it was his “definitive work, and the turning point of his career,” Lisa Berglund says.49 Johnson aimed to make the Dictionary a compendious store of moral teaching, theology, science, literature, and history, of encyclopedic scope. The evidence for the Dictionary as a systematic, codifying Whiggish document is neither merely that “Chesterfield wanted an authoritative (if not authoritarian) dictionary”50 nor only because Johnson’s arrangement 217

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of word senses according to principles of commonness of usage suggests “a kind of Baconian natural history applied to language.”51 In the “Preface,” Johnson imagines one possible satisfactory outcome of his labors: “I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.”52 This is a Whiggish set of instigators of the revolution in natural philosophy. As we saw in chapter 1, that revolution was conceived of in opposition to the Académie française, in terms similar to Johnson’s own. Indeed, competing with the French was as much on Johnson’s mind as it had been on Sprat’s a century earlier: Johnson writes in explicit opposition to “the embodied criticks of France” who “when fifty years had been spent upon their work, were obliged to change its oeconomy, and give their second edition another form.”53 There are traces of Whig ideology more deeply at work in the Dictionary. As De Maria notes, Johnson “employed ideological standards of admission. In the natural sciences, for example, a large proportion of the writers belong to the school of physico-theology. . . . Representative of the many books of this sort that Johnson chose are William Derham . . . and John Ray. Because Johnson found his illustrative quotations in such books, much of the vocabulary of natural science in Johnson’s Dictionary is accompanied by reminders of God’s benevolent omnipotence.” One example of the way that non-scientific words take on a physico-theological, and therefore Whiggish, cast, in the definition of “mundane” with this example: “The atoms which now constitute heaven and earth, being once separate in the mundane space, could never without God, by their mechanical affections, have convened into this present frame of things. Bentley’s Sermons.”54 William Derham’s Physico-Theology is cited in definitions of “cross (verb active)” “gauge” (“The vanes nicely gauged on each side, broad on one side, and narrow on the other, both which minister to the progressive motion of the bird”) and “take (verb active)” as well as words whose associations are more obviously with natural philosophy: ichneumon fly, mouse, nipple, novercal, quadrantal, quadrible, setaeous, soniferous, and vacillation. Johnson’s example for the use of “take in” (in 218

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the sense of “to comprise; to comprehend”) from Physico-Theology is: “Of these matters no satisfactory account can be given by any mechanical hypothesis, without taking in the superintendence of the great Creator.”55 Though Johnson cites John Locke “in key discussions of logic and epistemology all over the book,” quoting liberally from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Locke’s works on education, Johnson also quotes from Locke in situations that seem less immediately apposite. 56 For example, the very first citation under the heading word “another” reads: “He that will not lay a foundation for perpetual disorder, must of necessity find another rise of government than that. Locke.”57 This citation comes from the Second Treatise on Government. The full quotation in context, from the first section of the first chapter, reads as follows: All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam’s private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Johnson’s abridgment is clearly designed to make a politically radical text more palatable. This passage utterly rejects primogeniture and its analogues—including dynastic monarchy—as valid bases for government. Locke is clearly speaking not only against Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha but also against Hobbes’s Leviathan. Johnson’s condensation of this passage goes to the root of Locke’s critique: that there must be an alternative to Filmer’s and Hobbes’s models of power, and that alternative need not be based on the presumption of fear and disorder. We must also consider this: if Johnson truly intended to mask his political beliefs, then why 219

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turn to such a politically pointed text to illustrate the meaning of a word as banal as “another”? This is not the only such instance of Johnson’s smuggling in passages from the Second Treatise without attribution (s.vv., inter alia, “condemn,” “democracy,” and “first-born”), which indicates that along with Locke’s natural philosophy and theology, promoting the political philosophy of the accession of William of Orange was a priority for Johnson in the Dictionary. On the other hand, there is also evidence that the Dictionary is a Tory, or even Jacobite, work. Weinbrot remarks that critics on both the “Right” and “Left” consider the Dictionary a “Tory political and theological document.”58 Johnson’s contemporary Thomas Edwards remarked in a letter to Daniel Wray that that Dictionary was “a vehicle for Jacobite and High-flying tenets.”59 Lord Chesterfield’s protégé Matthew Maty remarked to Johnson in 1755 that he had neglected to properly inculcate the “principes de politique & de religion” that Chesterfield had wanted. 60 And this was before Johnson’s revisions for the fourth edition that made it more stridently conservative by including nonjuring and pro-Stuart theologians. It seems most probable, however, that like Pope before him, Johnson saw that the best route to a position of literary authority was through a synthesis of Whiggish prescriptivism subordinating private mores to public necessities with systematic argumentation, and Jacobite dissent creating and privileging a self-selecting community of “Loyal” adherents. In this way, Johnson could claim control of the Republic of Letters in the name of the public literary good, while seeming to assemble that systematically persuaded public out of an array of dissenting counter-publics whose existence depended on a rhetorical position of countervalence. Johnson knew quite well that his Dictionary was an unparalleled achievement . When Francis Wise wrote to Thomas Warton in the process of arranging to have the MA conferred on Johnson by Oxford prior to the publication of the Dictionary, he wrote that “it is in truth doing ourselves more honour than him, to have such a work done by an Oxford hand.”61 In the “Plan”we can find hints as to the origins of the Dictionary project, and the authority underpinning it. Robert Dodsley first gave

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Johnson a list of authors whom Pope had thought ought to be consulted by any lexicographer; Johnson wrote in his 1747 “Plan”: It has been asked, on some occasions, who shall judge the judges? And since, with regard to this design, a question may arise by what authority the authorities are selected, it is necessary to obviate it, by declaring that many of the writers whose testimonies will be alleged, were selected by Mr. Pope; of whom I may be justified in affirming, that were he still alive, solicitous as he was for the success of this work, he would not be displeased that I have undertaken it. 62

Pope’s select corpus was passed on to Johnson as a possible basis from which to proceed. Johnson’s reading almost certainly far outstripped Pope’s. But his use of Pope at this moment in the “Plan”is particularly striking. If Johnson were looking to reassure Chesterfield that his venture was underpinned by a greater authority still, then that authority was Pope’s. Nonetheless, even if Pope offered Johnson a convenient shorthand for the shape of literary authority to which he aspired, by 1755 such an allusion would have seemed callow to him. Johnson’s 1765 edition of Shakespeare seems to evidence more concern over the control over literary history than the Dictionary. 63 While Johnson wrote about Shakespeare’s “privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration,” the edition as a whole designs to put Johnson into a distinguished lineage of editors of Shakespeare. Johnson alleges that in general, “negligence and unskilfulness has by the late revisers been sufficiently shown,” and that “the faults of all are indeed numerous and gross,” saying: “To alter is more easy than to explain, and temerity is a more common quality than diligence.”64 He uses a typical couplet formation (A, A1; B, B1) to oppose past critical practices to his ideal one. Implicit in this couplet is a binary opposition between the entire past of Shakespeare editing (having the temerity to alter) and Johnson’s new edition (having the diligence to explain). Johnson’s review of his past editors is scathing. Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition is the first that Johnson addresses. Rowe does the least editing of any of the editors Johnson mentions, and thus escapes Johnson’s censure most. Johnson’s objections to Pope’s edition of Shakespeare (1725, 1728) 221

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are many. Most of all, Pope is criticized for having “thought more of amputation than of cure”— alluding to Pope’s practice of entirely omitting passages of Shakespeare that he found objectionable or poorly written, rather than correcting those textual corruptions he found. Johnson also takes umbrage at Pope’s remark upon “the dull duty of an editor,” saying that Pope “understood but half his undertaking . . . an emendatory critick would ill discharge his duty, without qualities very different from dulness.”65 The sting is rather taken out of this criticism of Pope by Johnson’s subsequent remarks on Theobald’s edition of Shakespeare (1726, 1733). Theobald was “zealous for accuracy . . . collated the ancient copies, and rectified many errors.” And yet Johnson judges Theobald harshly, calling him “a man of narrow comprehension and small acquisitions,” “weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus petulant and ostentatious,” and damning him with faint praise by saying “what little he did was commonly right.” The somewhat incongruous animus that Johnson directs at Theobald does seem uncannily akin to that shown by Pope in his own struggles with Theobald, as though London’s “Thales” were animating Johnson’s rage. This passage from the Preface of Shakespeare rehashes the conflict between Pope and Theobald thirty-five years earlier, as seen through Pope’s eyes. 66 Johnson’s own editorial practice was innovative; as Marcus Walsh remarks, “Johnson’s edition was the first exercise, in the editing of vernacular English texts, in recognizably and extensive variorum form, inheriting a methodology of seventeenth-century Dutch classical editing and establishing what would be the dominant methodology of learned Shakespearean editing for the rest of the eighteenth century and beyond.”67 But here we are presented with a puzzle: why did Johnson undertake the mammoth, laborious task of producing a sixth edition of Shakespeare’s works in sixty-six years, when he considered editorial work itself to be of little value? Part of the answer, as I have already suggested, lies in the appeal of competitively arrogating to himself control over the mediation of Shakespeare, then (as Jonathan Kramnick, Simon Jarvis, and John Guillory have argued) well on the way to becoming a totemic figure in British letters. 68 But perhaps more compelling, through his “concern for 222

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Shakespeare’s drama as the mirror of life,” Johnson was able to imagine a Shakespeare rather more like Johnson himself. 69 As De Maria notes, Johnson admired most the Shakespeare he found the most like Johnson himself; Johnson worked to make Shakespeare more like himself in two ways: by illuminating “his sense of the historical Shakespeare plying his craft in a real world of temporary customs, opinions, and phraseology” and also by “accommodating Shakespeare to his own rhetorical world, a place of timeless moral truths.”70 The two poles of being situated in a quotidian life and navigating a fixed moral world are two of Johnson’s most consistent preoccupations. So, for example, Johnson glosses Falstaff’s early death in Henry V as a practical decision: “That he once designed to have brought Falstaff on the scene again we know from himself; but whether he could contrive no train of adventures suitable to his character. or could match him with no companions likely to quicken his humour, or could open no new vein of pleasantry . . . he here for ever discarded him, and made haste to dispatch him.”71 As an example of Johnson’s tendency to “focus predictably on patterns of guilt and sorrow which Johnson believed universal but which he also experienced as conspicuous elements of his own inner life,” De Maria observes that of Shakespeare’s Don John saying in Much Ado about Nothing: I cannot hide what I am: I must be sad when I had no cause, and smile at no man’s jests; eat when I have no stomach, and wait for no man’s leisure. (1.3.11–13) Johnson comments: “This is one of our authour’s natural touches. An envious and unsocial mind, too proud to give pleasure, and too sullen to receive it, always endeavours to hide its malignity from the world and from itself, under the plainness of simple honesty, or from the dignity of haughty independence.”72

It is almost as though Johnson has been moved by Don John’s movement into antitheses to imitate him. Don John’s restless dissatisfaction seems to have spoken to Johnson very personally, and Johnson finds his remarks universal when they are more specific. Johnson’s own self-castigation for his pride, sullenness, and bouts of indolence, his use of “the plainness 223

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of simple honesty” and the high price of haughtiness come tumbling out in response to Don John’s perverse, melancholic independence. At moments like this, it is abundantly clear that Johnson’s innate competitiveness meant that he could not help denigrating what he truly viewed as inferior editorial performances. The last of the three main monuments Johnson erected was the Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81). This consolidated his position as authoritative and moral mediator of British literary heritage. Johnson’s innovation of the genre of literary biography is still practiced with only minimal alterations for the enjoyment and use of specialists and nonspecialists alike. The sixty-eight-volume edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets was designed by the conger that undertook it to be a ubiquitous one; Johnson would have known that this was an opportunity to be a comprehensive critic, a man of letters whose influence on the apprehension of literary culture was undeniable and inescapable. One quirk of the Lives was that Johnson did not have any say on which poets were included in the selection. That question was settled by which copyrights the publisher could find and/or afford. And we can discern Pope’s shadow here, because more even than Johnson, Pope had a capacious sense of the whole genre system of text, which, then as now, included the law. Excavating the full train of machinations Pope used is beyond our scope here, but suffice it to say that Pope had engineered legislation favorable to copyright by staging a landmark case on the author’s right to print (with Curll playing the role of patsy) in 1735. This was far from the most recent intervention in copyright law by 1779, but it was a highly significant step in the direction of tighter controls. In shaping the legal component of the larger genre system in this way, Pope exerted a silent influence on scores of writers to follow. Though the subjects of the Lives were chosen because they were literary men, the Lives are as much or more exercises in biographical writing as they are pieces of literary criticism. In “The Life of Johnson, The Life of Johnson, the Lives of Johnson,” Jack Lynch argues that Johnson’s biographical practice is as distinctive and as influential as his critical practice. Of Johnson’s critical influence, Lynch writes that “Johnsonians, from Boswell to yesterday, have certainly been influenced by Johnson’s 224

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critical practice; his concern with imitation, his comments on universality, and so on.”73 But Lynch’s corollary is that as readers and writers of biography “we, too, are heirs to Johnson’s conception about what is important in an early life, and rarely think it noteworthy that a biographer has devoted attention to things like a poet’s schoolmaster—it is natural, it is obvious. But it was not so obvious before Johnson. . . . Johnson’s . . . notions that guide his selection of facts in the Lives of the Poets continue to shape our thinking today” (141). In some ways Johnson shapes our thinking, but in a more structural sense Johnson’s influence was out of his hands. The choice of subjects was not made by Johnson but by the conger of London publishers who collaborated to produce the mammoth set of volumes. This choice had much to do with ownership, the availability of copyrights, and the feasibility of turning a profit on an already vast venture. The logic of the inclusions and exclusions has remained sedimented in the minds of anthology makers until relatively recently in literary historiographical terms: only in the 1960s and 1970s did makers of eighteenth-century anthologies begin to broaden their scope beyond the core of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, and Johnson. It is an irony of literary history that the selection criteria of what is so often referred to as “Johnson’s Lives” had very little to do with Johnson. Johnson wrote to Nichols, one of the publishers, that Rowe’s edition was “Your edition, very impudently called mine.”74 Johnson’s biographical practice, however, is another one of his key legacies. This practice was in some senses Plutarchan. In his Parallel Lives, Plutarch had compared complementary Greek and Roman lives and drew ethical parallels between each pairing. Plutarch’s opening paragraph of the Life of Alexander (here translated by Dryden) includes the following passage: It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as 225

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portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavour by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.75

It is in this context that we must see the distinction that Johnson draws between History and Life. In The Idler, no. 84, twenty years earlier, Johnson had articulated this distinction, observing that biography is “of the various kinds of narrative writing . . . most easily applied to the purposes of life” (298).76 When Plutarch finds more probative value in “an expression or a jest” than in “famous sieges,” we are reminded that Johnson is left unmoved by “the stratagems of war, and the intrigues of courts” preferring instead to “tell not how any man became great, but how he was made happy; not how he lost the favour of his prince, but how he became discontented with himself” (298). Favor and disfavor are ephemeral; happiness and virtue are timeless goods. Johnson’s focus on the moral value of each writer’s life and the choices that inform it makes his Lives an odd, and sometimes curiously unliterary, set of texts with as strong a focus on moral exemplarity as on what would now be recognized as literary criticism. As Lynch puts it, Johnson believes that lives make characters, and that characters make poems. So Johnson derives moral judgments from biographical information. Johnson’s proportioning of biographical to critical writing overwhelmingly favors biographical information. So there is a complex syllogistic play in Johnson’s treatments of his subjects, in which he struggles with each to a greater or less extent for authority over them and the history of the field of literary production of which they are made to be representative. Johnson believes that the most useful work a piece of criticism can perform is to improve a reader’s character. Characterological studies of writers are more valuable in this regard than critical studies, since biographical circumstances and choices (as Plutarch had noted) reveal a subject’s character more than his major works. Therefore the best way to improve a reader’s character, and the best method of writing about literary figures, 226

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was to write criticism explaining a writer’s character through biographical analysis. The consequences of this syllogism are that by asserting his control over the domain of writers’ characters, Johnson indirectly assumes control over their literary productions and their subsequent mediation and reception. However, the traffic of influence and control was not one-way. Johnson was significantly, albeit silently, influenced by Pope in his composition of the Lives of the Poets through his use of Joseph Spence’s Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Men as a key source.77 The role of Spence’s work in forming Johnson’s Lives has been acknowledged. Howard Erskine-Hill writes that “Boswell arranged for [Johnson] to consult the Spence MS, then in possession of the Duke of Newcastle, which greatly enriched the ‘Life of Pope.’”78 It has not, however, been acknowledged that Johnson used Spence as a source for many lives that touched on the period Spence covered (roughly 1700 to 1750); that he only had access to a corrupted, partial transcription undertaken earlier by David Garrick and then deposited with the duke of Newcastle; and nor has the reliability of an account based on Spence’s work been properly examined. Spence doesn’t seem to have considered it his job to scrutinize the truth of his subject’s claims too closely. As a proto-ethnographer of the literary milieux of his period, he was more motivated to offer a fragmented, multifaceted thick description than he was to give a definitive account. The urge to compile the Anecdotes is perhaps symptomatic of an emergent awareness of the consolidation of the author-function (a consolidation that Pope himself worked very hard to bring about).79 The partialities of Spence’s Anecdotes, and the corresponding inaccuracies in Johnson’s Lives, are largely the responsibility of Spence’s chief interlocutor—Pope. John Murray’s 1820 edition of the Anecdotes, which printed a version of the transcription of the manuscript undertaken by David Garrick, edited by Edmund Malone, makes a powerful case for the manuscript’s literary-historical importance in its “Advertisement”: Perhaps there never was a literary collection existing in Manuscript, with which the public appear to be so familiar as the present one of Spence’s Anecdotes; for since the days of Warton and Johnson, who 227

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were first permitted the use of this literary curiosity, it has been frequently referred to for many interesting particulars respecting some modern authors . . . Spence lived in an age when Taste first appeared among us, and Literature first began to diffuse itself among the nation. . . . Pope was “the god of his idolatry,” for Pope was the creator of an epoch in our literature. This period was a transition from one age to another. The immortal writer had to open an age of taste and correctness . . . he had to teach us to learn to think. 80

This passage makes a rich set of claims for the literary historical importance of Spence’s text. Not only does the editor confirm that Joseph Warton and Samuel Johnson (and, elsewhere, Owen Ruffhead) used the transcript of the manuscript in their foundational works, it claims that Pope inaugurated an entire epoch of literature. Most significantly, the editor remarks that Pope “had to teach us to learn to think.” In other words, the editor claims that Pope transformed the structuring structures that orient the delineation of methods of literary performance and appreciation itself. 81 Literary historians wishing to evaluate the reliability of Spence’s Anecdotes find themselves in a curious bind. Spence was motivated, on this editor’s account, to collect Pope’s sayings because he recognized that Pope was transforming the literary field. Moreover, the transformation that Spence observed has been compounded by the great influence of Spence’s work. Spence shaped literary history in two ways: his text bolstered the premise that the best literary history was predicated on biographical details; and it functioned as a source of those very details for eighteenthcentury critics like Johnson and Warton. Trusting—rightly—to Spence’s probity, Johnson erred when he transferred that epistemological authority to Spence’s sources. Johnson used the transcript of Spence’s manuscript heavily in his Lives, beyond just the life of Addison. Since a full evaluation is beyond the scope of this chapter, I use Johnson’s life of Addison below as an example of Spence’s importance to Johnson. Johnson did not know Addison, having been only ten years old when Addison died, and so the personal knowledge that Johnson draws upon comes largely from Spence—some thirteen separate anecdotes in all. 228

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Johnson retains plausible deniability if his claims are not entirely accurate: “History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but Lives can only be written from personal knowledge” (660). 82 And so it is that, for example, Johnson’s mediation of Spence’s relation of Pope’s account of the falling out with Addison persists in writing about Pope and Addison all the way through to the present day. Nonetheless, if Popean biases were accidentally preserved by Johnson, it is because Johnson’s Lives of the Poets has proven to be a very powerful preservative indeed. The judgments he articulated have, for the most part endured, with the exception of some that still rankle, such as his treatment of Lycidas. 83 And it was with an eye to the judgments of posterity that Johnson wrote, rather than to those of the present. It was originally hoped by the publishers who commissioned them that the Lives of the Poets would help sell more copies of their edition. This was not a concern that Johnson shared; he wrote exactly what he thought, which was more often than not negative. John Mullan has observed that “The Lives is remembered for its dismissive treatment of some works now universally admired. . . . Good explanations have been offered for all these antagonisms without much notice being taken of a kind of groundswell of complaint that characterizes all the Lives.”84 What are we to make of this groundswell, and how are we to reconcile it with the passages—often the very same sentences—in the Lives that are undoubtedly laudatory? Johnson’s passage on An Essay on Man in his life of Pope is a particularly clear example of Johnson’s vacillation between praise and blame. He begins by writing that the poem affords an “instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence” and then immediately after that remarks: “Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised.”85 Johnson then remarks upon the poem’s “blaze of embellishment” and “sweetness of melody” and its “vigorous contraction of some thoughts, the luxuriant amplification of others, the incidental illustrations, and sometimes the dignity, sometimes the softness of the verses,” which “enchain philosophy, suspend criticism, and oppress judgement by overpowering pleasure.”86 An Essay on Man, Johnson finally concludes, contains “lines unsuccessfully laboured,” “harshness of diction,” “thoughts imperfectly expressed,” 229

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“levity without elegance, and heaviness without strength.”87 Our confusion is complete if we return to Johnson’s earlier remarks on Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, where he writes: “[I]f he had written nothing else, [this] would have placed him among the first criticks and the first poets, as it exhibits every mode of excellence that can embellish or dignify didactick composition, selection of matter, novelty of arrangement justness of precept, splendour of illustration, and propriety of digression.”88 These moments of extreme dispraise show Johnson revisiting and vastly expanding Pope’s “nil admirari” (The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace, Imitated, 1). But there is another pattern to recognize in the to-and-fro of Johnson’s critical judgments on Pope’s Essay on Man and the point in his Preface to Shakespeare at which he “brings to an end perhaps the most eloquent celebration of Shakespeare’s ‘excellencies’ ever written,” John Mullan observes with this remark: “Shakespeare with his excellencies has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit.”89 Couplets such as these perform the same function as those we examined earlier, but in an opposite manner. Instead of solving problems at a stroke, Johnson offers solid judgments and then repudiates them on grounds unconnected to their foundations. Readers find solid ground washed away from under them over and over again. Johnson’s use of Spence implicates his Lives in a silent history that is favorable to Pope, doubtless quite contrary to Johnson’s intentions. This took place amid an effort on Johnson’s part, devoted to the service of the common reader, to become the chief mediator of British literary culture. This effort was at once vain, ambitious, pious, and anxious of reputation. Johnson wanted to reach a position from which “uncorrupted by literary prejudices” he could adjudicate to whom “must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.”90 Even in the culmination of Johnson’s critical influence, the long arm of Pope’s ambition reached into his work, whether with or without Johnson’s knowledge. This quirk of source history, with Johnson’s couplet-based prose, his performance of moral didacticism, and his half-concealed ambition gives just one example of how complex the struggle for literary authority was during its earliest expressions, and how contentious. We can say that Johnson succeeded in his struggle with Pope because 230

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he managed to accentuate those characteristics in himself that Pope had used to win authority to a greater degree than Pope had done. Johnson developed and finessed Pope’s typological frames of reference; he matured Pope’s performance of, or claims to, aequabilitas into satire manqué, and he transformed the lineal form of Pope’s couplets into the formal and rhetorical structures of his prose. Johnson transmuted Pope’s aesthetically predicated literary authority into an authority that rests on apparently naturally occurring moral intuition. Finally, Johnson exceeded Pope’s collection of literary monuments with his own, more complex, more durable, and more authoritative structures. We inhabit them still.

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I have always been struck by the scarcity, relatively speaking, of capital-T Theoretical work on eighteenth-century poetry. There are notable exceptions, but consider the embarrassment of such riches in medieval studies, or in studies of seventeenth-century poetry, or Romanticism, or Modernism, to say nothing of waters nearer to shore. This is because the eighteenth century is the period in which the rumors of the death of the author have been most exaggerated. In what follows I return to the question that closes the Introduction: what if? What if we cared less about aesthetic agnosis, notwithstanding its corollary support of, and arguments for, a public sphere that is certain to include a place for us? In other words what if literature—if reading—were not something we experienced, but something we did? We have seen the transgeneric process by which literary authority is constructed in genre systems that more or less still obtain today, and have shooed away a whole flock of canards of literary historiography. Some of these are the kinds of simplifications that might be equivocated in print, but that have full, vibrant lives in undergraduate and graduate classrooms and course catalogs. Others are part of the deeper structure of how humanists think and write about the purpose of art. In this coda, I list some of these as a first step to moving beyond them. I then suggest some characteristics of what using art differently might be like. First, the group of writers whom we call “Scriblerians” presented themselves as competent and ideologically coherent; other writers as personally and collectively incompetent and incoherent. Canard 1: there was only one coherent strain of English writing from 1689 to 1745; with a precursor in Dryden, it ran through Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, (in 233

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that order of importance, and perhaps Parnell, Prior, and Fielding) before culminating in and being recapitulated by Samuel Johnson. Canard 2: there were no other ideologically coherent cultural undertakings, still less a plurality of projects being undertaken by multiple overlapping groups. Second, “Scriblerians” called out “hacks” and “dunces” clustered in a real and psychogeographical “Grub Street,” responsible for the tsunami of nonsense that was London’s print boom. Canard 3: printing boomed in the early eighteenth century. It did not. At Pope’s death in 1744, there were still fewer titles printed than there were the year he was born. Canard 4: “dunces” was convenient shorthand for the new class of gullible and stupid people created by widened literacy and new mediality, whose innately weak minds were perverted and misled by “hacks.” These bad actors, with malice aforethought, churned out (or commissioned to be churned) oceans of drivel in search of remuneration. Sub-canard 4b: “hacks” and “dunces” were literary beings, but politicians had a symbiotic relationship with them. Politicians are mostly hacks; electors are mostly their dunces; compare the stock figure of “Squire Booby.” Sub-canard 4c: politics is a metaphor for literature; this is one way in which politics was supposedly purged from art in the early eighteenth-century. Canard 5: the fall of the Stuarts was calamitous as a literary phenomenon. If literary activity were to flourish under the Hanoverians, it ought to evince Stuart nostalgia. Witness our protracted inability to imagine historically contemporary novels and poetry as discursively contiguous fields. Canard 6: a literary aesthetics void of political associations and ambitions is not only possible but also a necessary condition for “good art.” Canard 7: politically committed literature is bad literature, especially politically orthodox literature. Sub-canard 7b: politics is not the proper demesne of literature or literariness. Analogies drawn from one world to the other have to meet a burden of proof. Such analogies are always speculative in the case of “good art.” In “bad art” those analogies are certainties and therefore deemed allegories (a deprecated mode). The question is not, what might literary authority have looked like without the interventions of Pope and Johnson? but rather, what might we have had instead? It might never have come into being as we know it; or it might never have been sundered from politics. We could pause to 234

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consider the cause of Jacobite manuscript poetry, which operated along these lines because with the exception of the dead, the authorial absence of anonymity was not a pretense, or a concealment, but a necessity.1 Pace the general failure of the movement, we might ask which Jacobite poems were “effective” at furthering their authors’ desires. From this we can think through what formal properties of those poems correspond to what parts of their enframing genre systems and political ecologies. Authors could have been vastly less important to our conception of literature than they are. Literature could have been judged by a set of rules like those conjectured by Addison or Dennis, designed to support an identifiable external imperative such as the promulgation of the state religion. If we had had a Whiggish aesthetic heritage, failures and successes would be attributed to individual works, but also to genres, or subjects, or approaches. Instead of literary authority, we might only be concerned with literary quality and aptness. Moreover, literature might have been able to win the esteem of readers as literature while also being uncontroversially reducible to propositional content. Beauty and instrumentality, in other words, could coexist. After Thomson’s The Seasons, we could have had a much richer heritage of sincere, propositional, scientific poetry, rather than one including Charles Churchill. To put this the other way around, our culture might never have developed its fetish for undecidable interpretive cruces. It might even have been artistically viable to express politically orthodox views. Without literal and figurative economies of prestige, and with only rules of composition and reception (bound into an overall system like that suggested by Dennis, designed to regulate cultural production the better to legislate private affect for public benefit), literature could have got on with the work of conveying beauty, or the value of social flourishing. Our aesthetics would be immeasurably less ironic. Perhaps we might regard piety with more kindness, as an indicator of the desire for something better for the author, for the reader, for third parties. Contrary aesthetics, as they are enlarged, quickly unravel into counterfactual histories, and from there to wish fulfillment. Looking at the legal and political histories leading up to this period, it is difficult not to see this consolidation of economic, cultural, and social authority in the 235

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person of a single writer as inevitable.2 But neither can we know how teleological such a counterfactual must always of necessity be. Certainly, however much the structuring structures of genre systems—themselves capable of being genealogized—already tended toward this consolidation, it could have happened differently. But without resorting to wishing undone the Act of Settlement of 1701, we can see glimpses of one promising road not taken. Aaron Hill’s positively Spenserian 1730 The progress of wit: a caveat. For the use of an eminent writer suggests to “Alexis” that his career is at a crossroads of sorts; his metaphor more akin to a fork in a river. The figure of “Fancy” guides Alexis through an allegorical scene that sees a vast, depthless ocean and from it rising up an immense spout of heavenly waters. These waters part; the one fork leads to a shallow strait of worldly pleasures and torments, the other to a calm archipelago. After a passage, the shallow strait plunges back into the base ocean, casting all borne on its tide into oblivion and nothingness. Here the speaker describes the water of worldly delights and pains: Lucid, like Truth, the treach’rous Water shone, And, o’er gay gilded Shoals, ran, tuneful, on; Pebbles, of Gem-like Hue, with painted Pride, Glow’d thro’ the Wave, and burnt, amid the Tide: Wantonly kind, the Sun’s enliv’ning Beams Shower’d, in light Spangles, on the dancing Streams: While Insect Nations, Gnats, and Wasps, and Flies, Ting’d in the Rainbow’s ever-changing Dyes, Sheathing their Stings, and, smiling, like the Fair, Peopled the Sunshine, and adorn’d the Air.3

To the best of my knowledge, no other writer ever dared put Pope’s own machinery to the work of critiquing Pope himself; the reference is unmistakably to the sylphs of The Rape of the Lock, peopling the blaze with their liquid bodies half dissolved in light. This scene is a thoroughly double-jointed compliment; Hill’s imaginary is entirely Popean, but mobilized in the service, not of satire, but of straight-faced critique. Less lively, on the Right, the Stream’s deep Flow, 236

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There, no false Colours mix’d their varied Glow; No gawdy Bottom catch’d the downcast Eye: Above, no flutt’ring Insects wing’d the Sky: Serenely solemn, All!—One equal Whole Flash’d not upon the Sense, but touch’d the Soul: Instead of Rocks, green Islands flourish’d, here, Silent, and fruitful, as the full-grown Year (18)

These green isles have no access from the water; only through the white swans that this side of the water has instead of insects; “Kind Birds, alone, gave Entrance o’er the Mound” (18). Together Fancy and Alexis watch untold millions of souls ascend in the surging stream, founder in the rocks, drown one another, and otherwise fall prey to various mischances prepared for them. Only a very few manage to steer their boats across to the deeper waters, and are then taken up by the swans to a deathless and peaceful island posterity: While abler Pilots, who, resolv’d, stood o’er, And, edging broad, gain’d, slow, the safer Shore; Snatch’d, from their sinking Seats, were born to Land, By watchful Swans, whose Wings the Surface fann’d: There, on green Islands, reign’d, escap’d from Cares, Lords of a blooming World, for ever, Theirs. (22)

Nor is this idle fantasy. Hill’s prosodic control is exemplary: “resolv’d” is performatively marked off by commas while the following line performs the incremental, uncertain, treacherous passage. The commas bracketing “gain’d” make it impossible to read without a metrical infraction, suggesting the extreme difficulty of the feat. After two lines beginning with regular iambs, “Snatch’d” is acephalous—and so on. Alexis and Fancy watch until “a Youth” appears, plainly Alexis himself or a cipher for him. The description of this youth (who suffers from spleen, but charms Heaven and earth with his song) achieves a Johnsonian equivocation in rhymed couplets. There are strange antitheses, but they are not actuated by the couplet structure: The Muses row’d him, and the Graces’ Care 237

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Trim’d his light Sails, and spread them to the Air; In his Boat’s Bottom green-ey’d Envy lay, And serv’d, as Ballast, while she clog’d his way: Down from her Chariot light-wing’d Fancy flew, And o’er him, loose, her Starry Mantle threw; Pleasure, Praise, Beauty, ’twixt his Shrowds trod gay, And danc’d the measur’d Moments soft away: Sportful as ZEPHYRS, in his Smiles, they strove, And the Young Loves forsook their Mother’s Grove. Thus fortunate, thus favour’d, and thus bright, Luckily negligent, and aptly light, He touch’d no Shoal, safe rounded every Rock, Despis’d all Danger, and sustain’d no Shock; (26)

This is sufficient to show the tremendous admiration Hill evinces for Pope’s work. What makes Hill’s criticism so powerful other than its technical sophistication (note, for instance, how often he manages to alliterate across a caesura) is that he freights his allegory with criticisms quite unblunted by the praises with which they intermingle. The insight that “Envy” “serv’d, as Ballast, while she clog’d his way” captures the way that Pope is indeed checked and impelled by the same forces; the music transported by the Muses and the Graces and shrouded by Fancy, the music that has “Pleasure, Praise, Beauty” themselves dancing in the wind of his sails and smiles, that very music leads the young and credulous astray. The youth is “Luckily negligent”: he happily avoids the ill consequences of his negligence and his negligence is itself good fortune, a felix culpa. His lightness too is apt; his negligence and lightness are enabling flaws and in some way integral to his performance. This is not equivocation, or satire manqué, or aequabilitas. Neither is it charitable or uncharitable. This is a mature understanding of the full constitution of Pope’s work. The youth quickly reaches the waters of posterity and glimpses “immensely distant” his “favourite Croud.” The swans descend to collect him when he notices that, as he passes into posterity, he can no longer hear his own song. Horrified by the silence, and longing for his own song and the insects of the far shore, Alexis turns back toward the other stream. He 238

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throws himself into the waters determined to catch the greatest number of gaudy insects and to crush the greatest number of fellow fly-catchers. In pursuit of this brief renown, the youth doesn’t notice that he is about to be carried to oblivion; the swans grieve his triumph, and Alexis cries out to Fancy to warn the youth, or to teach him the youth’s name so that he might call to divert him. Fancy appears at his side and tells Alexis that Not surer is that River Life’s Extent, “Or, by those Oceans, Birth, and Death, are meant; “Not surer Fortune is That dark Power’s Name, “That Left, Oblivion, and That Right Side, Fame, “Than, that no Son of Wit dares, justly, hope, “Fame dwells in Folly’s Paths, but thou, O POPE! (31)

Alexis starts with shock and begins to fall into oblivion himself, but his fall is arrested by “waiting Judgement.” Otherwise, the reader is told, Alexis would have been entombed by Contempt in the depths of his own folly. It is crucial that Hill’s speaker explain the allegory to Alexis, and that nothing be left ambiguous. The virtue of the narrative framing is that if it is required that Alexis understand the allegory, the reader will too; this is a more elegant solution to the problem of didacticism than that found by much, or most, moralizing poetry. With no recourse to ambiguity, the function of the poem is clear: to urge Pope to reform his poetic practice and shun the easy, attractive, destructive banality of satirical combat. Here at last is true literature and beauty without literary authority. This poem offers a different aesthetic framework from that which Pope ended up pursuing, despite the ethic epistles’ suggestion that Pope at least considered taking Hill’s advice. And there is an uncanny foreshadowing of the close of The Dunciad in Four Books in Hill’s warning lest Pope be “caught . . . wak’d, and stunn’d” / And deep intomb’d . . . in his own PROFUND” (31). This poem’s author manages to avoid mentioning himself, or jockeying for any kind of status with his subject. Instead, the piece only urges a fellow artist, with every appearance of sincerity and good faith, to work differently for the betterment of their poetry and for a better chance at the place in posterity he seeks and merits. 239

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It is essential that in the archipelago of Fame there is no more song, that “All was serene, the Air was hush’d around” (28). The purpose of an effective song, Hill tells Pope, is neither to please your own ear nor to win praise or trinkets, nor even to aid you in combat, but only to see you safely through straits and troubled waters. And once your song has accomplished its intended task, its purpose is to stop.

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Introduction 1. For a valuable orienting overview of these questions, see Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 270–92. 2. On those systems, see Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 3. The history of literary authority up to this point has been extensively documented. Landmark works like A. J. Minnis’s Mediaeval Theory of Authorship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984) have rooted western European literary authority first in scriptural commentaries. 4. John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), and Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). 5. Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 6. Colin Burrow, Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 7. Burrow, Imitating Authors, 345. 8. Burrow, Imitating Authors, 345. 9. See Graham Holderness’s searching exploration of these acrostics and other forms of poetic autopoesis, “‘A word-web woven’: Autobiography in Old English Poetry,” E-rea, 5.1 (2007), doi: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.178 (accessed May 25, 2022). 10. Thomas Keymer, Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 11. Burrow, Imitating Authors, 338–58. 12. Burrow, “Puppeteer Poet,” London Review of Books 44, 8 (April 21, 2022). 13. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?”,’ in Immanuel Kant, On History, edited, with an introduction by Lewis White Beck, translated by Lewis

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White Beck, Robert E. Anchor, and Emil L. Fackenheim. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1963. 14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement § 44, “Of Beautiful Art,” trans. with introduction and notes by J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1914). 15. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 139. 16. By the same token, when Adorno writes that “Art’s purposiveness, free of any practical purpose, is its similarity to language; its being ‘without a purpose’ is its non-conceptuality, that which distinguishes art from significative language” (140), one is hard pressed to imagine an artist of whom this might be true, if only because, pragmatically speaking and especially in the contexts of the kinds of art interesting to Adorno, artists do actually intend to create art. 17. Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” PBA 162 (2009): 325–70, at 325. 18. As Pierre Bourdieu notes, “it is necessary to write a structural history which finds in each state of the structure both the product of previous struggles to transform or conserve the structure, and through the contradictions, tensions and power relations that constitute that structure, the source of its subsequent transformations” (Bourdieu, “Landmarks,” in In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflexive Sociology, trans. M. Adamson [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], 42). 19. J. Paul Hunter, in “Sleeping Beauties,” offers an overview of the history of critical views of the couplet in order to argue that the couplet has been put to different kinds of political and literary-historical work. This work, Hunter argues, does not by and large respect a text’s local historical and aesthetic circumstances. He writes that “The governing practice of couplet study is . . . to watch the couplet “developmentally”—that is, to chart its progress historically from its beginnings . . . up to its supreme achievement in Pope—after whom, the cliché goes, it declined because he had brought it to perfection and there was nothing else to be done. Exactly how teleology exists so comfortably with Platonism, I cannot say, except that both views seem to share some common perception that they know perfection when they see it” (Hunter, “Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, 1 [2000]: 7). 20. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 141. 21. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 142, 144. Foucault writes that “Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity. . . . To follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations . . . that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us” (146). Foucault models a kind of entailed literary history, in which the results of a literary-historical enquiry are, as much as anything else, fodder for a literary-

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historical enquiry of the immediately succeeding moment. This kind of analysis, which treats results and analysis as mutually endogenous, is what William St. Clair means by a “systems approach” to literary and reading history: “We may be able to develop a conceptual framework from which provisional conclusions can be drawn, the data interrogated and re-interrogated, and the models themselves tested and refined” (The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 6). 22. Bourdieu writes that “fields are spaces of oppositions, and they are related through the homology of their structures” (“Introduction,” in Bourdieu’s Theory of Social Fields: Concepts and Applications, ed. Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangez [New York: Routledge 2014], 13). See also Craig Calhoun, who writes that Bourdieu assumes “a high level of homology among fields, an absence of systemic contradictions, and therefore a tendency toward social integration and stable reproduction of the encompassing field of power” (“Habitus, Field, Capital” in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 82). 23. Rachael Scarborough King, Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 12. 24. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), X: “Of Miracles,” n. 21. 25. See e.g., Marleen S. Barr, “Ursula K. Le Guin: An Anthropologist of Other Worlds,” Nature 555, 29 (2018), doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-02439-7, www. nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02439-7, and Philip W. Scher, “How Ursula Le Guin’s Writing Was Shaped by Anthropology,” Sapiens, February 5, 2018, www. sapiens.org/culture/ursula-le-guin (both accessed May 26, 2022). 26. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others (New York: Tor Books, 2002); Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem, trans. Ken Liu (New York: Tor Books, 2014). 27. Joseph Hone, The Making of Alexander Pope (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Other crucial recent interventions constellated around this point, including Betty Schellenberg, Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print in England, 1740–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) and After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures, ed. Rachael Scarborough King (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). 28. Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, 68 and 189. 29. Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 30. St. Clair, Reading Nation, 451. 31. “[T]he value judgements around which we have built our modern literary canon are inextricable from the cultural politics of the period,” as Abigail Williams observes in Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1685–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 18. 32. When Whig nonfiction prose was appropriated in turn, it offered an entire scaffolding for arguing that any action taken by a private individual ought to be

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predicated on the preservation of national liberty, which would in turn guarantee individual well-being. That scaffolding was portable enough to structure various phases of Pope’s arguments, undergirding his claims that endorsing his literary tastes was a matter of national, and therefore individual, liberty. 33. Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 34. Andrew Bricker offers a compelling overview of these questions in Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 35. Jacob Sider Jost, Prose Immortality, 1711–1819 (Charlottesville.: University of Virginia Press, 2015). 36. For a revisionist account of these mechanisms, see Thomas Keymer, Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 37. Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, 192.

Chapter 1 1. In Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Rachael Scarborough King calls the letter a “bridge genre.” Of no individual letter is this truer than of the letter of invitation to William of Orange. 2. “Letter of Invitation to William of Orange,” in Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1790), Appendix, I: 228–31. The signatories were the earls of Danby, Shrewsbury, and Devonshire, Viscount Lumley, Edward Russell, and Henry Sydney. 3. The landmark study of Whiggish literary cultures is Abigail Williams’s Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Williams documents the development of Whig poetic culture from the earliest moments in the life of the Whig party, the Exclusion Crisis, to its triumph in the succession of George I. This study owes a heavy debt to Williams’s pioneering taxonomy of the Whig literary field. 4. Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 12. 5. Philip Connell’s Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) is a significant exception to my assertion that these figures aren’t grouped together, linking Dennis, Shaftesbury, and the political applications of physico-theology. See particularly his chapters “Whig Poetics and the Church in Danger” and “The Literature of Physico-Theology.” 6. I focus on Whig nonfiction prose rather than on fictional prose or poetry because it was in nonfiction prose that writers made the case for a systematized, all-pervading social contract with the greatest strength and clarity. In System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2016), Clifford Siskin observes accurately that the long history of systematization shows a succession 244

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of heuristics for organizing knowledge and experience. However, he overlooks the extent to which systems were metaphors for cultural politics first, and structures to organize (and, later, rationalize) knowledge second. 7. Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 17–20. 8. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal-Society of London, in Restoration Literature: An Anthology, ed. Paul Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 225. 9. See Richard Nate, “Rhetoric in the Early Royal Society,” in Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society (London: Brill, 2016), 77–93, for an exploration of Sprat’s debts to Ramus. 10. Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 235. 11. Philip Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 181 dismissing any easy or automatic linkage of popular Newtonianism and mainstream Whiggism during the reigns of William III and Anne. 12. “Whig poets had long found useful political metaphors in Newton’s natural philosophy” (Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 187). 13. Clifford Siskin’s “The Problem of Periodization: Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Fate of System,” in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 101–26, argues that Newton’s innovative system was profoundly formative for Enlightenment thought, whose limitless ambition arose from the idea that “the universe could be known precisely because it was a system” (108–9). 14. Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, trans. Andrew Motte (London, 1729), 1: viii. 15. See Mark Knights, Representation and Misrespresentation in Later Stuart England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) for a lucid examination of the ways in which “philosophical enquiries” claimed the status of “principles” in Stuart England, so that matters of opinion were claimed as matters of fact. Knights argues that, in cases like the Warming Pan Scandal, the existence of this new kind of epistemological claim fueled the development of the two-party system. 16. John Theophilius Desaguliers, dedication to The Newtonian System of the World, the best Model of Government: An Allegorical Poem (London, 1728), iii–iv. Desaguliers expands on his allegory, asserting that “[t]he limited Monarchy, whereby our Liberties, Rights and Privileges are so well secured to us, as to make us happier than all the Nations round about us, seems to be a lively image of our System; and the Happiness that we enjoy under His present Majesty’s Government, makes us sensible, that Attraction is now as universal in the Political, as the Philosophical World” (v). “Desaguliers . . . used gravity as a metaphor for the ‘loose’ attraction that linked members of a commonwealth: the attractive forces holding every particle of the universe together were analogous to

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the ties of sympathy that disposed political subjects to cooperation. Gravitation embodied the politically charged trope of concordia discors, suggesting the happy coexistence of sociability and autonomy that characterized a society based on mixed-government principles,” Joanna Picciotto writes in Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 587. I return to the triangulation of gravitational attraction, sociability, and Whiggish literary culture in this chapter’s sections on Addison and Shaftesbury. 17. Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 70–71, 104. 18. Erland Sellberg, “Petrus Ramus,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2014/entries/ramus (accessed May 28, 2022). 19. Whig writers also differed from their predecessors in the subtlety with which they approach the syllogism as a logical construct. As Erwin Panofsky shows in “What Is Baroque?” in Three Essays on Style, ed. William S. Heckscher (Boston: MIT Press, 1997), 19, medieval and Renaissance logicians had various categories and subcategories of different kinds of syllogism (from one of which Panofsky adduces the origins of the word “baroque”). Whig writers tended to use syllogisms more simply as a method of binding together apparently unrelated elements into an apparently natural whole. 20. Sellberg, “Petrus Ramus.” 21. For recent work on John Dennis, see 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020), vol. 25, feature ed. Claude Willan, including essays by Dan Gustafson, James Horowitz, Phillip Palmer, Sarah Stein, and Pat Rogers. And see, too, Philip Smallwood, “Petty Caviller or ‘Formidable Assailant’? Johnson Reads Dennis,” Cambridge Quarterly 46, 4 (2017): 305–24, and Sara Landreth, “‘Set His Image in Motion’: John Dennis and Early Eighteenth-Century Motion Imagery,” Eighteenth-Century Life 40, 1 (2016): 59–83. 22. Connell, Secular Chains, 144. 23. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, 287. 24. John Dennis, Reflections Critical and Satyrical, upon a late Rhapsody, Call’d, An Essay upon Criticism (Bernard Lintot, n.p.: [1711]). 25. 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). 26. The charge that the ruination of Pope’s body was commensurate with that of his mind was especially deadly in the hands of Pope’s critics, most especially to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (1733). She ends the poem with this brutal rebuke: “with the Emblem of thy crooked Mind, / Mark’d on thy Back, like Cain, by God’s own Hand; / Wander like him, accursed through the Land.”

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In A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 110–12. 27. Seen through the long retrospective lens of literary history, Pope’s An Essay on Criticism marks the start of a sea-change in public literary discourse from monologic, preceptual writing, to dialogic, argumentative writing. Pope’s poem is just as preceptual in its disposition, but the diffidence and coffeehouse urbanity that Pope affects would be a model for a new, more discursive form of public discourse that would allow engaged discussions to take the place of disengaged serial assertions. 28. Implicit in this accusation is that Pope is part of a corrupt artistic tradition. For examinations of Pope’s Jacobitism, whether apparent or actual, 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): 123–48, and Pat Rogers, The Symbolic Design of “Windsor Forest”: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). 29. Joseph Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 39. 30. On the extent to which Pope’s early career positioned him as a leading public Jacobite poet, see Pat Rogers, Symbolic Design of “Windsor-Forest” and Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics, and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 31. By page 22, Dennis’s subdivisions have ramified to the point that the fourth grievance has been split into six parts, one of which divides into a further three, one of these into another five, and so on, for a full structure of the fourth grievance of 6.3.5.3.5.5. 32. Pamphlets of this kind have sometimes been grouped under the rubric of “projections” (of the sort satirized by Jonathan Swift in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels). “[P]rojecting was the mode of the age, even if a great many of the schemes were unrealizable. . . . 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 vitalizing part of the age,” Max Novak writes in his introduction to The Age of Projects (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), 21–23. At the “Projectors” Special Session at ASECS 2012, Novak remarked that “the spirit of the projector is asymptotic, and lies in the marshaling of ideological claims rather than in the achievement of practical goals.” 33. Substantiating this argument forms the bulk of much of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, particularly An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (1711). 34. See Julian Hoppitt, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). on contractarian constitutionalism, see Melinda S. Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999) and “Turncoats and 247

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Double Agents in Restoration and Revolutionary England: The Case of Robert Ferguson, the Plotter,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, 3 (2008): 363–78. 35. Blackmore acknowledged openly that Prince Arthur was a panegyric to William III. 36. Dennis’s ambitions are such that he repeatedly invokes Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning as a companion work to his own. The whole work as Dennis imagined it is a lofty goal only partly fulfilled by Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, in its literary and biographical study “of the most Celebrated English Poets Deceas’d” (i). 37. This argument that Edenic innocence augurs for epistemological privilege is taken up by Picciotto in Labors of Innocence, 31–128. She discusses Bacon on 141–56. 38. Dennis, Remarks upon Cato, a Tragedy (London, 1713). 39. There is a brief treatment of the similarities between Dennis and Addison in Paul Trolander and Zeynep Tenger. “Addison and the Personality of the Critic,” in The Spectator: Emerging Discourses, ed. Donald J. Newman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 175–99. Andrew Saunders has touched on the relationship between Dennis’s account of the sublime in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry and Addison’s in The Pleasures of the Imagination. See Saunders “Other Pleasures of Imagination: Dennis, Addison, and Steele” in The Short Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 295–98. 40. Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 199. 41. Erin Mackie, “Introduction,” The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and Spectator (Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 1998), 5. 42. For more on this imitative process, see Edward A. Bloom, Lillian D. Bloom, and Edmund Leites, Educating the Audience: Addison, Steele & Eighteenth-Century Culture (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1984); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1991); Denise Gigante, “Introduction,” in The Great Age of the Great English Essay: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 43. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 1, Thursday, March 2, 1711, in The Spectator, vol. 1, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987), https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oseo/ instance.00045446 (accessed May 29, 2022). 44. Sir Richard Steele, The Spectator, no. 4, Monday, March 5, 1711, in The Spectator, vol. 1, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987), https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oseo/ instance.00045449 (accessed May 29, 2022). 45. Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, 572–73. 46. Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, 567. 47. See Mr. Spectator’s self-objectification when he exhorts the reader that “this Paper . . . be looked upon as a Part of the Tea Equipage.” The Spectator,

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no. 10, Monday, March 12, 1711, in The Spectator, vol. 1, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987),https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oseo/instance.00045455 (accessed May 29, 2022). 48. Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, 567. 49. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 635, Monday, December 20, 1714, in The Spectator, vol. 5, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987), https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ oseo/instance.00045445 50. Isaac Newton, Principia, I: 4. 51. Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, 588. 52. Addison, The Spectator:, no. 69, Saturday, May 19, 1711, in The Spectator, vol. 1, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987), https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oseo/instance.00045514 (accessed May 29, 2022). 53. Addison, The Spectator, no. 411, Saturday, June 21, 1712, in The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987),https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oseo/instance.00045859 (accessed May 29, 2022). 54. Both here and elsewhere, Addison’s writing has physico-theological resonances, most markedly in The Spectator nos. 420 and 519. Physico-theology is important, too, in connecting Dennis’s ideas about the relationship of man to God with those of Addison, Shaftesbury and eventually—via James Thomson—Pope. Stemming from Francis Bacon and a key component of Newton’s work, physico-theology has strong Whiggish connotations. See Philip Connell, Secular Chains, and “Newtonian Physico-Theology and the Varieties of Whiggism in James Thomson’s The Seasons,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72, 1 (2009): 1–28; Heather Keenleyside, “Personification for the People: On James Thomson’s the Seasons,” ELH 76, 2 (2009): 447–72, and forthcoming work by Joanna Picciotto. 55. Addison, The Spectator, no. 413, Tuesday, June 24, 1712, in The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987), https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oseo/instance.00045861 (accessed May 29, 2022). 56. If Dennis’s aesthetics can be roughly categorized as Platonic, Addison’s are fundamentally Aristotelian. “In the eighteenth century, however, an alternative response to Plato was introduced, namely, the idea that our response to beauty, whether in nature or in art, is a free play of our mental powers that is intrinsically pleasurable, and thus needs no epistemological or moral justification, although it may in fact have epistemological and moral benefits. This line of thought was introduced in Britain in Joseph Addison’s 1712 Spectator essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” Paul Goyer says in “18th Century German Aesthetics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/aesthetics-18th-german (accessed May 29, 2022). 57. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 415, Thursday, June 26, 1712, in The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987), https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oseo/ instance.00045863 (accessed May 29, 2022).

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58. See Pat Rogers, “Travels,” in “Joseph Addison,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed May 29, 2022). 59. In his Essay on Criticism, 247–52, Pope, too, praised the Pantheon as an exemplum of neoclassical aesthetics, attributing its uniformity of effect to the harmony of its parts. 60. Thorsten Opper, Hadrian: Conflict and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 109–10. 61. At the time of Addison’s text, Thornhill was still only a finalist in the competition to appoint a painter for the dome of St. Paul’s, along with Antonio Pellegrini. Thornhill won the commission in 1715. Thornhill and Wren also collaborated on the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, which contains a ceiling painting that occupies in Thornhill’s oeuvre the dominant place that St. Paul’s holds in Wren’s. 62. Wren, a former president of the Royal Society, had designed the cathedral while a member. He was a lifelong associate of Robert Hooke’s and Newton’s. 63. In his Soliloquy 2.3.1, 274, Shaftesbury reviles the “Gothick” as “Barbarous.” 64. See Addison, The Spectator, no. 415 (cited in n. 58 above): “Among all the figures in architecture, there are none that have a greater air than the concave and the convex; . . . The reason I take to be, because in these figures we generally see more of the body than in those of other kinds. There are, indeed, figures of bodies where the eye may take in two-thirds of the surface; but as in such bodies the sight must split upon several angles, it does not take in one uniform idea, but several ideas of the same kind. Look upon the outside of a dome, your eye half surrounds it; look up into the inside, and at one glance you have all the prospect of it; the entire concavity falls into your eye at once, the sight being as the centre that collects and gathers into it the lines of the whole circumference.” 65. See Hoppitt, Land of Liberty? 239–40. 66. In The Spectator, no. 415 (cited in n. 58 above), Addison attributes that greatness in St. Paul’s “to the bulk and body of the structure” and the (neoclassical) “manner in which it is built.” The cathedral dominated the London skyline until relatively late in the twentieth century. See also Kathleen Lubey, “Erotic Interiors in Addison’s Imagination,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, 3 (2008): 415–44. 67. Addison, The Spectator, no. 421, Thursday, July 3, 1712, in The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987), https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oseo/instance.00045869 (accessed May 29, 2022). 68. Addison, The Spectator, no. 420, Wednesday, July 2, 1712, in The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (1987), https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oseo/ instance.00045868 (accessed May 29, 2022). 69. Addison, Spectator, no. 411. 70. Addison, Spectator, no. 420. 71. Addison, Spectator, no. 420. 72. Connell, Secular Chains, 159, 163. 73. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3d earl of Shaftesbury, The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, in Characteristiks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed.

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Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003), 232. All quotations of Shaftesbury’s work are from this edition. 74. Jacob Sider Jost, “Party Politics in Characteristics,” in Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, ed. Patrick Müller (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), 140. 75. Shaftesbury to John Somers, March 30, 1711, Philosophical Regimen, in Characteristics, 430–32. 76. Jost, “Party Politics in Characteristics,” 141. 77. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, in Characteristics, 31. 78. Lawrence Klein, “Introduction” to Characteristics, xvi. 79. Jost, “Party Politics in Characteristics,” 147. 80. Sensus Communis, in Characteristics, 68. For an account of the planned invasion of Britain in 1708, see John S. Gibson, Playing the Scottish Card: The Franco-Jacobite invasion of 1708 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988). 81. “Shaftesbury’s moralism aimed to cultivate political subjectivities appropriate to civil society,” Klein writes (“Introduction,” ix). 82. Terence Bowers, “Universalizing Sociability: The Spectator, Civic Enfranchisement, and the Rule(s) of the Public Square,” in The Spectator: Emerging Discourses, ed. Newman, 155. 83. Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, in Characteristics, 168. 84. William Derham, Physico-Theology, or, a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from his Works of Creation (London, [1714]), ii. 85. Robert Boyle endowed a series of lectures considering the relationship between the new philosophy and science in his will. The first of these was given in 1692 by Richard Bentley. As Kevis Goodman notes, Bentley’s physicotheology was focused on finding analogues in the natural world for the social exchange on which Whiggish mercantile society was modeled. See Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48. On the composition of physico-theology and its role in complementary systems of knowledge, see Scott Mandelbrote, “What Was Physico-Theology For?” in Physico-Theology: Religion and Science in Europe 1650–1750, ed. Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020); “Early Modern Natural Theologies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, ed. Russell Re Manning, 75–99 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Peter Harrison, “Physico-Theology and the Mixed Sciences: The Role of Theology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, ed. John Andrew Schuster and Peter R. Anstey, 165–183 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005); and Brian W. Ogilvie, “Natural History, Ethics, and Physico-Theology,” 251

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in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata, 75–104 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 86. Derham, Astro-Theology, of, a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from a Survey of the Heavens (London, 1715). 87. Addison, The Spectator, no. 423. 88. Abigail Williams chronicles some of this lineage in “Whig Afterlives,” in Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 241–46.

Chapter 2 1. J. Paul Hunter, “Missing Years: On Casualties in English Literary History, Prior to Pope,” Common Knowledge 14, 3 (2008): 434–44. 2. The landmark study of Jacobite poetry is Murray Pittock’s Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Jacobite material culture is extensively addressed by Pittock in Material Culture and Sedition, 1688–1760: Treacherous Objects, Secret Places (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and by Neil Guthrie, in The Material Culture of the Jacobites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 3. Pope relied on techniques pioneered by the Jacobites not only to transmit his poetry, but to build a sense of readerly community and to talk about the state of the nation itself. Studies that interrogate the possibility of Pope’s own Jacobite sympathies miss the key point of Pope’s experience of Jacobitism; for Pope, the Jacobites offered not a set of viable political and religious beliefs, but a community of poetic practice. Joseph Hone’s Alexander Pope in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) is a rare and notable exception. 4. Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 67. 5. Even Harold Love contrasts “satire of the Popean kind” with manuscript poetry in Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in SeventeenthCentury England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 281. 6. See Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, and Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) on Pope’s scribal publication of his Pastorals. On Pope’s obsessive control over his letters in manuscript and print, see James McLaverty “The First Printing and Publication of Pope’s Letters,” The Library ser. 6, 2, no. 3 (September 1, 1980): 264–80, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s6-II.3.264 (accessed August 27, 2022), and Claude Willan, “‘Mr Pope’s Penmanship’: Edmund Curll, Alexander Pope, and Rawlinson Letters 90,” The Library 12, no. 3 (2011): 259–80, https:// doi.org/10.1093/library/12.3.259 (accessed June 9, 2022). James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) remains the landmark study of Pope as a bibliographer. 7. On Pope’s lettering see Harold Love, English Clandestine Satire, 1660– 1702 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 8. Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, 46. 252

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9. There are many deeply argued accounts of the Revolution of 1688, including Steven Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), Geoffrey Holmes’s The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660–1722 (London: Longman, 1993), Julian Hoppitt’s A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Tim Harris’s Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1727 (London: Penguin Books, 2007). Both Pincus and Harris consider the Revolution to have been far more violent than depiction of its “bloodlessness” implies. Of all these accounts, Pincus’s makes the strongest claims for an urge toward political centralization under James’s rule that his subjects resisted (in other words, toward a “surveillance state”). 10. Thomas Keymer’s Poetics of the Pillory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) is now the study of record on seditious libel. There is still value, however, in consulting Philip A. Hamburger’s “The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press,” Stanford Law Review 37 (1985): 661–775. 11. In fact, the only unusual characteristic of Monod’s remark is that it actually prefaces a chapter on Jacobite poetry. Monod, Jacobitism, 1688–1788, 45. 12. Monod, Jacobitism 1688–1788, 45. 13. The breadth of this historical scope diminishes the space available to Pittock for close analysis and much of the study is thematic summary. Pittock’s study is subject to two other factors that slightly inhibit its scope. The first is his emphasis on recuperating non-English cultures into the sphere of British culture; Pittock wants to combat the “imperial Protestant view” (1). The second is that Pittock was only able to access Scottish archives, so his study inevitably draws on a smaller pool of artifacts. 14. Osborn fc 58 f3v. 15. This pervasive sense of nostalgia and loss in Jacobite poetry is sensitively analyzed by Lawrence I. Lipking in “The Jacobite Plot,” ELH 64, 4 (1997): 843–55. Lipking puns on “plot” as both story and secret connivance, and finds in both historical Jacobitism and present-day scholarship an addiction to “a standard descending arc or archetype” (844). 16. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics, 9. 17. Howard Erskine-Hill, “Twofold Vision in Eighteenth-Century Writing,” ELH 64, no. 4 (1997): 903–24, 908. 18. Lipking “Jacobite Plot,” 846. 19. This plausible deniability is similar to the “functional ambiguity” described by Annabel Patterson in Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). 20. Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, 5–6. 21. To see detailed images of these network graphs, and to read more detailed analysis of them, please go to www.claudewillan.com/figures. These are contemporary spheres but historically separated. Osborn b. 111 and the manu253

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scripts surrounding it are by and large rather older, between 1688 and 1705. The manuscripts on the other “side” of this culture date from between 1700 up to about 1745 or so. The front endpaper for c. 570 reads “Satirical Poems written after the death of | Queen Anne, on the coming in of the House of Hanover”—I have been able to determine that c.570 was put together around or shortly after 1735, making it one of the latest-dated manuscripts in the community. BL Add. 29981 dates from about 1717. Bodley Rawlinson Poet 155 dates from around 1728–29, shortly after the accession of George II. 22. Love, English Clandestine Satire, 134. 23. For more details on graph construction and the specific details of this case, see Willan “Seeing the King over the Water, Two Ways”, English Studies 98, 5 (2017): 483–505. 24. Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013) offers a methodological synecdoche. My network graphs perform a distant reading of literary phenomena and their interactions with their material substrates. 25. Namely, MSS Osborn b. 111, c. 160, c. 570/1, fb. 207 fc. 24, fc. 58; Bodley Eng. Poet c. 18, e.87, Eng. Misc. c. 116, Rawlinson Poet 181, Rawlinson Poet 155, Pr. Bk. Firth 22; BL Lansdowne 852, Add.s 29981, 14854, 6416; Huntington EL 8770; Princeton MS Taylor 3, and U. Minnesota MS 690235. 26. The only mention of the poem in contemporary scholarship is in Kathleen Constable’s A Stranger within the Gates: Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Irishness (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000). She spuriously claims Padraic O’Pronntaigh as the author for this poem: “Thus O’Pronntaigh’s surviving manuscripts are, for the most part written in Irish and concern wholly Irish subjects, but . . . he was also fluent in English, as evidenced by the poem he penned in the MS which is included in Egerton 172 (British Library)” (29). The earliest form of the poem predates O’Pronntiagh by almost 100 years. The poem’s anonymity is what permitted it to become common cultural property in the way that I trace here. Although The Ambodexter has an ESTC number, that record has the poem handwritten in the back cover of a printed volume. I have found no printed copies of this poem, nor is any registered in D. F. Foxon’s 1701–1750, A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collection Editions (2 vols.; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2003,). 27. The poem Verses Found on the Queen’s Toilet (discussed below) also refers extensively to the civil wars. 28. Osborn b.52/2 fol. 178. This and all other transcriptions are as lightly modernized as possible. This is in part to preserve the time-specific flavor of each manuscript at the time of its transcription, and in part to capture the specific register of each manuscript. Another version of this civil war-era poem appears at Leeds Brotherton MS Lt 106 at fol. 144r with ‘Anabaptist’ in the place of ‘Independent’ at line two, and at Rosenbach 239/22 with “warring” for “Loyal.” 29. For other Jacobite artifacts that have a double meaning when looked at from a second perspective see Niall MacKenzie’s “Double-Edged Writing in the 254

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Eighteenth Century” in Literary Milieux: Essays in Text and Context presented to Howard Erskine-Hill, eds. David Norbrook and Richard McCabe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 140–68, and the glasses in Geoffrey B. Seddon’s The Jacobites and Their Drinking Glasses (Woodbridge, CT: Antique Collectors Club, 1995). 30. Osborn b. 111, 527. 31. Bod Rawlinson Poet 203. Text is in red where Rawlinson used red ink. This volume can be dated to after 1713 in part because this copy of The Ambodexter follows a transcription of Alexander Pope’s On a Lady who Pisst at the Tragedy of Cato. Addison’s Cato was not staged until 1713. Later poems in the manuscript, referring to a fire in London in 1715 while George was at the theater also date the volume. See full discussion of Pope’s poem below. 32. It can be found in Osborn c. 570/1, Bod Eng Misc c. 116, Osborn fc.58, BL Add. 6416, BL Lansdowne 852, BL Add. 29981 and Osborn c. 160. 33. Osborn c. 158 f. 4r. The slip has been inexpertly pasted in and so the rightmost letters of the separate have been lost. 34. As to the difficulty or otherwise of “deciphering” the poem, recall the flourish below it in Osborn b. 111, also present beneath the “When the Sea burns” ambodexter overleaf in that volume. The intertwined swash flourishes graphically describe the way that the two halves of the poem are to be interlinked rather than considered separately. 35. Erskine-Hill’s article “Twofold Vision in Eighteenth-Century Writing” suggests that seeing things in two ways at once was a key trope of Jacobitism. Erskine-Hill makes his case through a longer passage of literary history than is treated here, but argues convincingly both that the Jacobites’ imaginative world was a twofold one and that a degree of twofold vision is necessary now to supplement the Whiggish historical record with the Jacobite experience. 36. Osborn b. 111 p. 528. The second copy, in Bod Rawl Poet 155 p. 71, is eight lines long and begins “King George’s cause shall thrive When the Sea burns.” These two copies are not included in the count of the ambodexter copies beginning “I love with all my heart.” It is possible, of course, that the burning evoked by the poem is too inflammatory, in all senses, to be plausibly deniable. 37. W. J. Cameron, “Textual Notes,” in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 5: 531. 38. This transcription is taken from Osborn MSS File 17422. The poem also appears in: BL Lansdowne 852, Brotherton Lt 11, Brotherton Lt 13, BL Add. 23904, BL Add. 31152, BL Egerton 924, Bod Eng Poet c. 41, Bod Eng Poet f. 13, Bod Hearne’s Diaries 23, Bod pr. Bk. Firth b. 21, Bod Rawl D. 383, Bod Rawl Poet 173, Bod Rawl Poet 81, Osborn b. 382, Osborn b. 90, Osborn c.160, Osborn c.171, Osborn fc. 24, and Princeton Taylor 87. Some manuscripts appended other short poems after this, comparing the Parliament to the Rump. 39. Osborn b. 382. 40. Brotherton Lt 13, Lansdowne 852, BL Add. 31152. 255

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41. Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com (accessed March 4, 2021). The use of the spelling “twilight” in Osborn b. 90 implies the table or its covering specifically. 42. The variation in these dates is that the Nottingham library dates its copy of this poem to August 1708; the Sacheverell trial was finished in early 1710. 43. This text is taken from Osborn MSS File 17422. Other copies can be found in Bod Hearne’s Diaries 23, BL Lansdowne 852, BL Add. 72479, Osborn fc. 24, Osborn c.155, Osborn b. 204, Bod Eng Poet c. 41, BL Egerton 1717, BL Egerton 924, Brotherton Lt q 52, Osborn c. 171, and Osborn b. 90. 44. Steven N. Zwicker, Dryden’s Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1972), xiii. 45. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan (New York: Hackett, 2005), 12: 303. 46. Zwicker, Dryden’s Political Poetry, 120, 119. 47. As Zwicker remarks, “it is more than coincidence that Dryden’s political muse faltered at the moment the fortunes of the Stuarts were thrust on the unlikely heir of Charles II’s throne, James II” (Dryden’s Political Poetry, 120). 48. John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, in The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 2: 1031. 49. For further ramifications of the Christian typologies of Jacobite culture, see the following discussion of the culture’s object ontologies. 50. There is an unexpected facet to this typology. Because the Roman republic was replaced by emperors and then never restored, classical typologies were far less vulnerable to being co-opted by opposed political poets. 51. See Martin Greig, “Gilbert Burnet (1643—1715),” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed May 31, 2022). 52. This poem is found in MSS Bod Eng poet e. 87, BL Add. 29981, Bod Rawl Poet 155, Osborn c. 570/1, BL Add. 32463, Folger V. a. 399, Harvard MS Eng 586, Osborn fc. 58, Brotherton Lt 13, Osborn c. 233, Harvard MS Eng 629, Folger W.a.135, Folger V.a.260.2, Bod Rawl D. 169, Bod pr. Bk. Firth 22, Bod Hearne’s Diaries 53, Bod Eng poet f. 12, Bod Ballard 50, BL Add. 28253, BL Add. 78521, BL Add. 75381, and BL Add. 6416. 53. This poem appears in MSS Bod Eng. poet. e. 87, BL Add. 29981, Bod Rawl Poet 155, Osborn c. 570/1, BL Lansdowne 852, BL Add. 78669, Osborn fc. 58, Brotherton Lt q 6, Bod Hearne’s diaries 53, Bod pr. bk. Firth b. 22, Bod Rawl. D. 383, Bod Rawl. poet. 181, and BL Add. 32463. This transcription and following quotations are all taken from BL Add. 29981. 54. This transcription comes from Osborn b. 382. The poem is also found in BL Add. 29981, Bod Rawl Poet 155*165, BL Add. 78669, BL Add. 63776, BL Add. 70454, Osborn c. 570/2, and Bod Rawl Poet 203. The parallel of a Hanoverian monarch with a Roman emperor is a trope that Pope would recapitulate in his Epistle to Augustus. 256

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55. John B. Hattendorf, “John Churchill, (1650–1722),” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://oxforddnb.com (accessed May 31 2022). 56. Osborn fc 58 f3v. This poem also appears in MSS BL Add 14854, BL Add 29981, BL Add. 78669, Bod Eng. Misc c. 116, Bod Eng Poet e. 87, Bod Rawl Poet 155, Bod Rawl Poet 173, Harvard MS Eng 629, Yale Osborn fc. 58, Yale Poetry Box V/121, Yale Poetry Box X/39, and Leeds Brotherton Lt 7. 57. William Empson, The Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; New York: New Directions, 1961), xv. 58. This poem appears in BL Add. 29981, Bod Rawl Poet 181, Osborn b. 111, Bod Firth d. 13, and Bod Mus Sch. C. 95. 59. For a seminal exploration of functional ambiguity, see Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, esp. 18: “functional ambiguity, in which the indeterminacy inveterate to language was fully and knowingly exploited by authors and readers alike.” 60. See “In Eclipsem,” in Bodleian Rawlinson 155. 61. See “Ultime Scotorum” by Archibald Pitcairn, with trans. by Dryden, in Bodleian Rawlinson 181. 62. J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 33. Clark argues for the strongly Jacobite connotations of classicism at 32–41 and 59–66. 63. William Kupersmith in his English Versions of Roman Satire in the Earlier Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), however, can “offer but modest support for Clark’s thesis of an intrinsic connection between imitation of Roman satire and Jacobitism” (167). 64. Guthrie, Material Culture of the Jacobites, 81. 65. Clark, Samuel Johnson, 34. 66. Clark, Samuel Johnson:, 40. Translations from Latin are my own. 67. Love, Culture and Commerce of Texts, 47. 68. Love, Culture and Commerce of Texts, 81. 69. As Monod and Pittock have documented, Jacobitism became an increasingly nostalgic ideology with the passage of time and became almost wholly aestheticized in the later 1780s. Collections around or after this date are more likely to be connoisseurial. Collections from the first half of the eighteenth century are more likely to be politically charged documents. With the passage of time and the dimming of Jacobite prospects, user publication became less common and entrepreneurial publication commoner. Jacobite poetry became more a peccadillo than serious political commitment. See Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, and Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad, ed. Paul Monod, Murray Pittock, and Daniel Szechi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 70. Poetry also circulated in small booklets, but this was less common. Two examples are Bod Rawlinson Poet 203 fol. 109 and Rawlinson Poet 181 fols. 33r–45r.

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71. See, e.g., Bod Eng misc c. 116, a commonplace book with poems written in around accounts, geometric proofs, receipts, and lists and schedules of messengers in London. The owner of this commonplace book could reliably predict which messengers would travel on what days between specific locations both in and out of London and could therefore use that established network to distribute material as he or she saw fit. 72. It is an unfortunate irony of studying scribal publication that our best evidence of the circulation of poems comes from the participants in scribal publication who took manuscripts out of circulation. By definition we have no record of the circulation of manuscripts that were not collected. The result is that circulation itself remains invisible. We can only infer what circulation looked like by taking the collections in single volumes. 73. Throughout I have identified Richard Rawlinson’s hand by comparison with his signed letter in Bod Hearne’s Diaries 53. 74. Bod Rawlinson Poet 181 87v. 75. “Signs of Old London,” London Topographical Record (London: Chiswick Press, London Topographical Society, 1907), 4: 59. 76. Love’s study of the transmission of Rochester’s poems and Cameron’s work in Poems on Affairs of State are exemplary studies of the changes that occur in a text over many repeated copyings. In tracing these changes and in laying bare their subtleties, Love and Cameron each reveal the changes wrought by transmission in their chosen cultures. See Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Love, and Poems on Affairs of State, ed. Cameron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), esp. “Textual Note,” vol. 5. 77. This may be in the tradition of the earlier “The religious turncoat; or, a late Jacobite divine turn’d Williamite. Licensed according to order” (London, 1694). Otherwise I have been unable to establish a concrete referent. It is possible that the poem refers to George Stanhope, a member of the radical October Club and clergyman with affiliations to High Churchmen like Sacheverell, who nonetheless managed to become a royal chaplain to George I. It might also refer to Samuel Wesley (1662–1735), who supported James II but converted to support William III and George I. A point in favor of identifying the target of this poem as Stanhope is that Stanhope is named in the much-circulated “A Letter from the maypole in the Strand to the maypole at Farnham” and lampooned as a godless traitor. 78. Osborn b.382, fol. 4br. 79. Osborn b.382, fol. 4br. Whether the note and the poem that it is appended to are in the same hand or not, the superposed “e” of “ye” is characteristic of manuscripts up to the earlier eighteenth century, indicating that this is likely not to be the note of a later collector anxious about the textual purity of their collection on antiquarian grounds. 80. “I hope [these papers] are sufficient to establish the throne of our great restorer, our present King William; to make good his title, in the consent of the 258

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people, which being the only one of all lawful governments, he has more fully and clearly, than any prince in Christendom; and to justify to the world the people of England, whose love of their just and natural rights, with their resolution to preserve them, saved the nation when it was on the very brink of slavery and ruin,” Locke writes in the “Preface” to his Second Treatise on Government (1690; ed. C. B. Macpherson [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980], 5). The issue of consent that Locke raises is key. Supporters of William and Mary dreamed, perhaps, of a new constitution predicated at least in part on a new theory of the proper and consensual circulation of objects, as subjects of scientific enquiry, commerce— even as monarchy. These objects were valued precisely because everyone agreed to value them by common consent. 81. Locke, Second Treatise, par. 48. 82. Alexander Pope, Windsor-Forest, ll. 29–32, in Alexander Pope: Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), and Rape of the Lock, 1.133–36, in The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (1940; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955). All citations of Pope come from the Yale edition. See Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002) 178–200. 83. John Rogers, Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 11. 84. Rogers, Matter of Revolution, 13, 12. 85. See Melinda Zook, “Turn-Coats and Double-Agents in Restoration & Revolution England: The Case of Robert Ferguson, The Plotter,” EighteenthCentury Studies 42, 3 (2009): 363–78. 86. Pittock, Material Culture and Sedition; Guthrie, Material Culture of the Jacobites. 87. See Howard Erskine-Hill, “Alexander Pope at Fifteen: A New Manuscript,” Review of English Studies 17, 67 (August 1966): 268–77, doi:10.1093/ res/xvii.67.268, www.jstor.org/stable/511984 (accessed June 2, 2022). 88. Royal Archives at Windsor, Stuart Papers, MS 64/33, cited in Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, 191. 89. Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, 40. 90. Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, 190. 91. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 49. 92. Clark, Samuel Johnson, 60. 93. Cato’s Ghost appears in these MSS: British Library Add. 29981, Bod Rawl Poet 155, Osborn c. 570/1, British Library Add. 14854, British Library Add. 30162, British Library Add. 32463, Bod Eng Misc c. 116, Bod Eng Poet e. 87, Bod Rawl D. 383, Bod Rawl Poet 203, and British Library Add. 78669. Its Foxon number is M209. 94. William Meston, Cato’s Ghost (Dublin, 1715), ll. 73–78. 95. Ironically enough, this is precisely what John Dennis argued Addison

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had done with his source material. “Cato is remarkable for the manner in which both Whigs and Tories embraced it as sympathetic to their causes; leaders of both parties were present at the opening performance, and Alexander Pope’s account of the premiere describes Whigs and Tories competing to appropriate the play to their own causes,” Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin write in Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), xiii. 96. For the only other discussion of Cato, Cato’s Ghost, and On a Lady who Pisst, see Jorge Bastos da Silva, “Cato’s Ghosts: Pope, Addison, and Opposition Cultural Politics,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38, 1 (2005): 95–115. Da Silva also details some of the political controversy surrounding the interpretation of Cato. 97. Copies of On a Lady who Pisst appear in Bod Rawlinson Poet 203, Brotherton Lt 11, Bod Ballard 50, and Osborn fc. 60. The Union First Line Index of English Verse mistakenly attributes the poem to Nicholas Rowe. http://firstlines. folger.edu (accessed June 2, 2022). 98. Of course, it is possible that Curll passed it to Rawlinson and that Curll was a source of verse for Rawlinson, though evidence in previous cases of the Curll/Rawlinson relationship suggests that this is unlikely. See Pat Rogers and Paul Baines, Edmund Curll: Bookseller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Willan, “Mr. Pope’s Penmanship.” 99. Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8. 100. I deliberately avoid mentioning the “Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns.” The “Quarrel” or “Battle” is simply too complex to be justly addressed in the space of this study. The subtlety of an account like Larry F. Norman’s The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) reveals even the most tempting mappings to be the oversimplifications they are. Norman shows how, far from monolithic warring blocs of cultural practice, “Ancient” and “Modern” were mutually productive and responsive positions. 101. Other predominantly Jacobite manuscripts that include poems by Pope are Folger W.a.135, BL Add. 31152, Bod Eng Poet e. 87, Osborn c. 570/4, BL Add. 32463, and Brotherton Lt 11. Pope is mentioned as a significant figure in Jacobite manuscripts including Bod Ballard 47, BL Add. 32463, Bod Rawlinson Poet 207, Bod Ballard 50, and Brotherton Lt 45. 102. See David Stokes, “Edward Harley, Second Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1689–1741),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed May 31, 2022). . 103. See, e.g., Pope, letter to Edward Harley, August 1, 1735, www.e-enlightenment.com (accessed May 31, 2022). 104. The first broadsides pasted into BL Add. 31152 date from 1719. The poems continue up to 1740, where the volume ends. See Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, “Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford (1672–1729),” 260

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Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed May 31, 2022). 105. Since the volume was for Anne Wentworth’s private enjoyment, and not for circulation, she did not bother to obscure the postal endorsements, as shown earlier. 106. Christine Gerrard, headnote to “Advice to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” in Blackwell Anthology of Eighteenth Century Poetry, ed. Gerrard and David Fairer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 188.

Chapter 3 1. Pope, “Epitaph. For One Who Would Not Be Buried in Westminster Abbey,” in The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 6: Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965) 827. 2. For a fuller treatment of the notion of literary lineages, see Jonathan Kramnick’s Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Richard Terry’s Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3. Pope, “Peri Bathous, or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” 407. 4. John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe; or, A satyr upon the True-Blue-Protestant Poet, T.S., in Works, 48. 5. James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 56. For another excellent account of Pope’s Preface, see Maynard Mack, Collected in Himself (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), 159–79. 6. Pope, “Preface” to Works, in Alexander Pope: Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), xxv. 7. The MS of this letter is in the Longleat Portland Papers. The letter is collected in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–56), 1: 216–17, and the poem is recorded in Pope’s Poems, ed. Ault and Butt, 287. The surviving autograph of the letter is, according to Sherburn, “in Parnell’s hand,” which makes Pope’s sole authorship at best questionable. “Arma virumque” (“Of arms and the man”) opens The Aeneid. “Qui primus ab oris” (“who first from the shores”) and “Haec olim meminisse juvabit” (“A joy it will be to remember even this”) are discussed below. 8. See, e.g., Joseph Addison’s The Campaign (London, 1710) and Richard Blackmore’s Advice to the Poets (London, 1706). 9. At this point in time, Harley was no longer the powerful figure that he had been for the first eight years of Anne’s reign. Between 1702 and 1710, he did wield the level of authority implied by this poem, but by 1714 that was no longer the case—as signified by Hanmer’s refusal of office from him, which this poem alludes to in “all his old Friends would rebuke.” 10. Dryden translates the line, “Forsan et haec olim miminisse juvabit” (Ae261

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neid1.203), as “An hour will come, with pleasure to relate / Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate.” Virgil’s Æneid, trans. John Dryden with Introduction and Notes (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1909). Robert Fagles’s translation reads, “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.” Virgil: The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 2006), 1.239 11. Pope, Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Peter Ackroyd (London: Hesperus Press, 2002), 4–5. The Memoirs was written by the Scriblerians from about 1713 to 1721, but not published until 1741. 12. This method of distribution recalls the ruse that Swift would use ten years later to deliver his manuscript to bookseller Benjamin Motte. Stephen Karian recounts: “Late at night on 8 August 1726, someone from a hackney-coach dropped a mysterious packet at the home of the London bookseller Benjamin Motte. The packet contained a manuscript and a curious letter from a stranger named Richard Sympson. Sympson stated that his cousin, Lemuel Gulliver, had written an account of travels that Sympson had edited and was offering to Motte for publication. Though admitting that the enclosed manuscript ‘may be thought in one or two places to be a little Satyrical,’ Sympson hoped Motte would agree to publish it. The letter specified strict conditions about how to proceed. Motte was not to let the manuscript out of his sight and he had only three days to respond to the offer.” Karian, “The Texts of Gulliver’s Travels,” in « Les voyages de Gulliver »: Mondes lointains ou mondes proches, ed. François Boulaire and Daniel Carey (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2002), 35–50, http://books. openedition.org/puc/356 (accessed March 15, 2022). 13. That the author immediately penetrates the gentleman’s disguise prompts us to ask how the author knew that the gentleman was disguised, rather than appearing as himself. It is possible that this immediately transparent subterfuge refers to Jacobite poetry’s transparency. 14. Martinus’s name is itself ironic: after Luther, no name was less Catholic than “Martin.” 15. Joseph Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), esp. 41–68, exhaustively reviews Pope’s early familiarity with, and subsequent formation by, manuscript circulation. 16. Margaret J. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 61. Some important examples of scholarship on Pope’s familiarity with and manipulation of print and print culture include D. F. Foxon’s Pope and the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. J. McLaverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning. Ezell’s chapter on “The Very Early Career of Alexander Pope” gives a very good outline of the different kinds of manuscript circulation practiced by Pope, as do James McLaverty “The First Printing and Publication of Pope’s Letters,” The Library ser. 6, 2, no. 3 (September 1, 1980): 264–80, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s6-II.3.264 (accessed August 27, 2022), George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1943), 262

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and Joseph Spence’s Anecdotes, Observations and Characters of Books and Men (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1964). 17. Jacob Tonson to Pope, April 20, 1706, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (5 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1: 18. 18. Maynard Mack, The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984). 19. Mack, Last and Greatest Art, 20. “Pope’s adherence to the practices of manuscript circulation may explain in part the degree to which he felt free to alter, combine, and expand his verses throughout his career” (Ezell, Social Authorship, 81. 20. Pope, Pastorals MS 1v, in Mack, Last and Greatest Art, 24. 21. Horace was the classical poet most imitated by Jacobite poets. 22. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis in Characteristics, ed. Lawrence Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31. 23. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 10, in The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1998), 89. 24. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, 725–26. 25. The exception is the duke of Buckingham, and it was something of a coup for Pope that Buckingham wrote one of the commendatory poems to Pope’s 1717 Works. 26. John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenborg Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 2: 8. 27. See Blair Hoxby on “the mismanagement of the Second Anglo-Dutch War,” in Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 129–32 and 194–95. 28. For work on the possible actual Jacobite sympathies of the Essay on Criticism, see Howard Erskine-Hill, “Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in His Time,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 15, no. 2 (1981): 123–48, and Joseph Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 29. Pope, “To Belinda on the Rape of the Lock,” in The Rape of the Lock, ed. Cynthia Wall (Boston: Bedford Press, 1998), 175, 1–4. 30. Pope, Dedicatory Epistle, in The Rape of the Lock, ed. Tillotson, 51. 31. I use the phrase “double vision” to evoke Howard Erskine-Hill’s “Twofold Vision in Eighteenth-Century Writing,” ELH 64, 4 (1997): 903–24, and Niall Mackenzie’s essay in homage to it, “Double Edged Writing,” in Literary Milieux: Essays in Text and Context presented to Howard Erskine Hill, ed. David Womersley and Richard McCabe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). 32. Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712), in The Rape of the Lock, ed. Tillotson, 147. In 1714, these lines were repositioned to open canto 3. 33. In “The Rape of the Lock: From Miscellany Endpiece to Illustrated Independence,” chapter 2 of Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University 263

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Press, 2001), James McLaverty tracks the difference between the 1712 and 1714 versions of the poem with a greater thoroughness than is possible here . 34. McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning, 34. 35. See, e.g., Howard Erskine-Hill, “Literature and the Jacobite Cause: Was There a Rhetoric of Jacobitism?” in Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759, ed. Eveline Cruikshanks (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 49–69; “The Satirical Game at Cards in Pope and Wordsworth,” in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition, ed. Claude Rawson and Jenny Mezciems (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 183–95; and Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 72–93. Erskine-Hill argues powerfully that the rape itself is a metaphor for William III’s seizure of the kingdom, and that “Pam” represents the duke of Marlborough, while the Queen of Hearts corresponds to Queen Anne. 36. Pope went on in The Dunciad to develop the connection between morally and financially bankrupt poets and a morally and financially bankrupt state, to the point where the existence of the former became a litmus test for (and implicit cause of) the latter. 37. James Turner, “Pope’s Libertine Self-fashioning,” Eighteenth Century 29, 2 (1988): 123–44, 129. 38. Turner, “Pope’s Libertine Self-fashioning,” 127. 39. Turner, “Pope’s Libertine Self-fashioning,” 137. 40. Ian Jack, The Poet and His Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–59. 41. McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning, 18. 42. McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning, 24. 43. McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning, 36. Pope refers to the second of the three Barrier Treaties; the third was not signed until 1715. 44. Alexander Pope, A Key to the Lock (London, 1715), iv. This is a particularly revealing moment: Barnivelt’s prose elsewhere is formal, almost strained. Nowhere else but in this mention of The Rape of the Lock’s sales figures does his tone slip into informality. That “’em” is a crack in Pope’s voice. 45. Barnivelt worries further that Pope has “[raised] ill Humours in the Body Politick” (iii). 46. Similar poems were written on Burnet and Wharton and addressed to Anne, countess of Strafford. 47. See Mark Knights, Representation and Mis-representation in Later Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 48. Sophie Gee’s novel The Scandal of the Season (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007) centers on and dramatizes the same material. 49. Brendan O’Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s “Coopers Hill” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Earl Wasserman broke ground on contemporary comparisons of the two works in The Subtler Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 264

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89–168. Robert Cummings expanded on the correspondences between the two in “Windsor-Forest as a Silvan Poem,” ELH 54, 1 (1987): 63–79. 50. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 78. 51. Pat Rogers, Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics, and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 2. Rogers’s companion work, The Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), explores “the workings of the poem, especially as they draw on Classical and Renaissance modes such as the court masque, history painting, panegyric and river poetry” (Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts, 1). 52. Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, 127. 53. “While by our oaks the precious loads are born” can be taken to refer to the story that the future Charles II hid in an oak tree during a battle in the Civil War, thus evading capture. The oak tree was subsequently adopted as a Jacobite symbol. 54. Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 193–99. 55. John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 48. 56. On the relationship between force and commerce from Denham through Waller, Dryden, and Pope, see Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 129–203. 57. Pope’s revised conclusion to Windsor-Forest takes out the egregious and disingenuous “Where I obscurely pass my careless days” and inserts a couplet about the Treaty of Utrecht whose effect is that “Ev’n I more sweetly pass my careless Days” (431). “Ev’n” doubles down on his claim to political abstraction. If the Treaty of Utrecht sweetened even Pope’s days, then all the more so would the triumph of the Stuarts, and the greater Pope’s soi-disant removal from the sphere of politics and the gauche world of confessedly political poetry would be. 58. Ann Baynes Coiro, “The Personal Rule of Poets,” in The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 215. 59. Hone, Alexander Pope in the Making, 192. 60. See, for examples of general assertions about Pope’s emulation of the Virgilian model, Michael O’Neill, The Cambridge History of English Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 335, 340; Leopold Damrosch, The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 32, and Michael C. J. Putnam, “Some Virgilian Unities,” in Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception, ed. Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 19. 61. Pope, The Preface of 1717, xxvi–xxvii. 62. Raymond Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” European Journal of Philosophy (1994): 274–94, 283. 265

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63. Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” 287. 64. Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” 288. 65. Martin Saar, “Understanding Genealogy: History, Power and the Self,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2008): 295–314, 311. 66. Saar, “Understanding Genealogy,” 314. 67. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 68. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). The epigraph is taken from the “Gospel of Truth” in the Nag Hammadi Gospels, codices 1 and 12. 69. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983). 70. Saar, “Understanding Genealogy,” 314. 71. The notion that all was lost for the Jacobite cause in 1717 would not have been shared by many Jacobites at the time, such as Francis Atterbury, involved in a failed Jacobite coup in 1723. Nor is it a doctrinaire perspective in contemporary scholarship. For an exemplary counter-case, illustrating the opportunities open to Jacobites from 1715 on, see Daniel Szechi, “Jacobitism and the Whig Ascendancy, 1715–66,” in The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). I speak of the perception of Jacobite failure on the part of Whigs and moderate Tories, even those with Jacobite sympathies. The Jacobite cause lost a tremendous degree of mainstream sympathy following 1715. And although isolated groups filled with Jacobite sentiment continued in passionate commitment to the cause, its window as a political cause with appeal to moderates and opportunists had closed.

Chapter 4 1. See Heather Keenleyside’s magisterial essay “Personification for the People: On James Thomson’s The Seasons,” ELH 76, 2 (2009): 447–72. 2. Thomson’s The Seasons, published as a full four-poem cycle in 1730, was extensively revised in 1746. I contend not only that Pope seeks to wrest the momentum of physico-theological poetry from Thomson in An Essay on Man, but that Thomson sought to recover that momentum in his revised edition, published two years after Pope’s death in 1746. Throughout this chapter I refer to Thomson’s 1730 edition. Since no scholarly text of the 1730 edition exists, I refer to the original printed text (Dublin, 1730). 3. Ralph Cohen’s intricate account of the structural logic of Thomson’s poem in The Unfolding of “The Seasons” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970) remains unsurpassed. Although my own account is what Cohen called “product criticism” in The Art of Discrimination: Thomson’s “The Seasons” and the Language of Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), I am nonetheless deeply indebted to Cohen’s work of “process criticism,” which so compellingly argues for the philosophical cohesion of The Seasons. 266

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4. By contrast, anthropocentrism was less a fully-developed system of thought than a commitment position that man is the measure of all things. 5. Samuel Johnson, Pope, in The Lives of the Poets, vol. 23 of The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. John H. Mittendorf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 1219, http://yalejohnson.com (accessed June 7, 2022). 6. “[M]aterialists . . . tended to move in one of two other directions: either consciousness is intrinsic to matter, or consciousness emerges from matter. According to the first view, individual atoms are really not ‘devoid of sense’ after all; rather, they have some sort of consciousness on their own. According to the second view, consciousness is a higher-order property that somehow emerges out of the activity of lower-order, senseless atoms,” Jonathan Kramnick elaborates in Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 67. Roughly speaking, the first view corresponds to Thomson and “panpsychism,” the second to Pope and “emergence.” Heather Keenleyside helpfully reframes these contrasts through Bruno Latour as respectively “translation or mediation,” which mixes “humans and nonhuman things” together, and “purification,” which fixes them as “distinct ontological kinds” (Keenleyside, “Personification for the People,” 447). 7. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). All citations of Pope are from this edition. “For Cartesians . . . our brains have a physical substance and our souls an immaterial substance. The soul can think because that is what it does” (Kramnick, Actions and Objects, 66). 8. On Thomson’s theodical structure, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Varied God: A Critical Study of Thomson’s “The Seasons” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); Cohen, Unfolding of “The Seasons”; Keenleyside, “Personification for the People”; John Sitter, “Eighteenth-Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheology,” Religion and Literature 40 (2008): 11–37; and Philip Connell, “Newtonian Physico-Theology and the Varieties of Whiggism in James Thomson’s The Seasons,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009): 1–28. 9. Most “criticism of the Essay on Man has tended ever since to be Crousazian [i.e., following the Swiss theologian Jean-Pierre de Crousaz] or Warbutonian” (A. D. Nuttall, Pope’s “Essay on Man” [London: George Allen & Unwin], 184). 10. Thomson, Summer (Dublin, 1730), l. 1178. 11. Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation in Two Parts (London, 1692), hereafter abbreviated WG, and Three Physico-Theological Discourses (London, 1693). Ray “adduced the human hand and eye as the best proofs of design in the world. . . . His argument is sustained by the welter of detail from natural history that he offered,” Brian Ogilvie writes in “Natural History, Ethics, and Physico-Theology,” in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi, 75–103 (Boston: MIT Press, 2005), 95. 12. “I found my self in many things to have been anticipated by some of

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other them, especially by my Friend, the late great Mr. Ray. And therefore in some Places I shortened my Discourse, and referred to them; and in a few others, where the Thread of my Discourse would have been interrupted, I have made use of their Authority, as the best Judges,” Derham writes in Physico-Theology: Or, a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation (London, 1713) (henceforth PT), A5. See also Scott Mandelbrote, “The Uses of Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England,” Science in Context 20 (2007): 451–80, 462, 468, and Lisa M. Zeitz, “Natural Theology, Rhetoric, and Revolution: John Ray’s The Wisdom of God, 1691–1704,” Eighteenth-Century Life 18, 1 (1994): 120–33, 121. 13. See Sitter, “Eighteenth-Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheology,” 11–12. 14. Pope, Epitaph. Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, In Westminster Abbey, in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt. 15. Thomson’s indebtedness to physico-theology and allegiance to Newtonianism is evidenced by the fact that while writing Winter in 1726, he was also teaching at “an academy for the dissemination of Newtonian philosophy” (Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 41). 16. On the discourse of patriotism in 1730s Britain, see esp. Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Dustin Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 17. The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1908), 190, 201–9. 18. Sir Isaac Newton, Four Letters from Isaac Newton to Dr. Bentley (London, 1756), 1. 19. Christine Gerrard, “James Thomson, The Seasons,” in Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 197. 20. Sandro Jung, “Epic, Ode, or Something New: The Blending of Genres in Thomson’s Spring,” Papers on Language & Literature 43 (2007): 146–65, and David Fairer, “‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’: The World of EcoGeorgic,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 40 (2011): 201–18. 21. Kramnick, Actions and Objects, 67. 22. See, e.g., Derham’s references to “tribes” (PT, 6) and Ray’s at WG 1: 23. Ray writes simply at the beginning of his discussion of fauna, “I proceed now to the consideration of Animate Bodies endowed with a Sensitive Soul, called Animals” (WG 1: 104). 23. “Thomson also follows Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury . . . to connect . . . self to society. Shaftesbury writes; a creature therefore [is] “otherwise good and useful to himself than as he contributes good to society and to that whole of which he himself is a part” (Keenleyside, “Personification for the People,” 459). 24. Thomson, Spring, .27.

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25. Sitter, “Eighteenth-Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheology,” and Philip Connell, “Newtonian Physico-Theology and the Varieties of Whiggism in James Thomson’s The Seasons,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009): 1–28. 26.Thomson’s anthropomorphism emphasizes “the communal existence of swarms of insects or flocks of birds or schools of fish,” highlighting “shared characteristics” (Sitter, “Eighteenth-Century Ecological Poetry and Ecotheology,” 17, 18). The “basic unit of Thomson’s ontology is not the unique individual, and it is not necessarily human” (Keenleyside, “Personification for the People,” 453). 27. Thomson is certainly drawing on Addison, who writes in the Spectator, no. 519: “If we consider those parts of the Material World which lie the nearest to us, and are therefore subject to our Observations and Enquiries, it is amazing to consider the Infinity of Animals with which it is stocked. Every part of Matter is peopled: Every green Leaf swarms with Inhabitants. There is scarce a single Humour in the Body of a Man, or of any other Animal, in which our Glasses do not discover Myriads of living Creatures.” The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 4: 346. 28. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 60, uses “the nameless Nations” to access the effaced labor relations “behind, or in this case within” The Seasons. 29. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.3.1, 3.2.2, cited in Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 52–53. It is important to note that the key issue is proportionality. Locke and Pope inveigh against a disproportion in sensory acuity so as to maintain a strict order. Thomson warns against constant and involuntarily heightened sensory perception (“for if at once / The Worlds in Worlds enclos’d were push’d to Light / . . . He’d turn abhorrent” (Spring, 10) but encourages selectively enhanced single senses, particularly sight, to aid the understanding. 30. See Gerrard, “Pope, Politics and Genre,” in Patriot Opposition to Walpole. 31. See Douglas Canfield, “The Fate of the Fall in Pope’s “Essay on Man,” Eighteenth Century 23 (1982): 134–50. 32. Oxford English Dictionary, “scan, v.,” www.oed.com (accessed June 9, 2022). 33. Andrew Marvell, “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost,” ll. 53–54, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Longman, 2007). 34. John Milton, “Introduction” to Paradise Lost (London, 1674). 35. Smith, headnote to “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost,” in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 181. 36. Joseph Addison, An Account of the Greatest English Poets, in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, (London: Bell, 1914), 138–39. 37. Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681—1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6. 38. Pope, “On Two Young Lovers Struck Dead by Lightning,” in The Poems of Alexander Pope, l.17, and Thomson, Summer, 937. 39. Keenleyside, “Personification for the People,” 460.

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40. For the definitive study of the subject, see Gerrard, Patriot Opposition to Walpole. 41. Pope to Swift, February 16, 1733, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 3: 348. 42. Pope to Swift, November 28, 1729, in Correspondence, 3: 81. 43. See Gerrard, Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 68–95. 44. However, Burlington’s commitment to Jonesian architectural styles has prompted suggestions of an underlying Jacobite loyalty. See Lord Burlington: Architecture, Art and Life, ed. T. C. Barnard and J. Clark (London: Hambledon Continuum, 1994). 45. Leslie Stephen, Alexander Pope (New York, Harper, 1880), 184, deprecated Pope’s closing gesture and found his overall attempt at a system unconvincing, saying: “But the arrangement of his portrait gallery is really unsystematic; the affectation of system is rather in the way.” 46. Pope, Epistle to Cobham, 262–65. 47. Pope, “Epitaph for Dr. Francis Atterbury,” 6–9. 48. Gerrard, Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 69. 49. See Sitter, “The Argument of Pope’s Epistle to Cobham,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 17, 3 (1977): 435–49. 50. Pope, An Essay on Man, 2.1. 51. Pope, Epistle to Cobham, ll. 15–18. 52. Pope often stayed with Cobham at Stowe, particularly between 1731 and 1735. 53. See also Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English art of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 54. Gerrard, Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 68. 55. In “To the Letter: The Material Text as Space of Adjudication in Pope’s First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” Comparative Literature Studies 43, 1–2 (2006): 1–18, Katherine Mannheimer details the many ways in which The First Satire defends Pope and itself from criticism. 56. See Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture. Joshua Scodel’s Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) offers an earlier overview of the political, philosophical, and religious values associated with ataraxia, moderation, and the via media. 57. The precise nature of Pope’s “moderation,” like that of his “glory,” is hard to pin down. Mannheimer argues that moderation is a tool with which Pope works to position his satire as an extra-legal force in “To the Letter,” 14–17. 58. Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 291. 59. Walter Jackson Bate, “Johnson and Satire Manqué,” in Eighteenth-Cen270

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tury Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. W. H. Bond (New York: Grolier Club, 1970), 145–60. 60. Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 201, 210. 61. See Pat Rogers and Paul Baines, Edmund Curll: Bookseller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 62. Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 380, 375, 97, 98, 378, 100. Among the reasons that these writers are scorned, beyond their professional status as writers, is that some are poets laureate: professionals and politically orthodox ones at that. 63. Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 111. Pope complains that some writers will “from all Grubstreet my name defend,” reluctant even to admit that he exists in the same literary or public sphere as Grub Street. 64. For more on the two portraits, see Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: Hackney for Bread (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. “And hate for arts that caus’d himself to rise.” 65. Pope’s choice of “Atticus” to represent Addison is rather poignant. The most likely classical foundation is one of Cicero’s dearest friends, Quintus Caecilius Pomponianus Atticus. Atticus encouraged Cicero in his literary efforts and even assisted him in circulating copies, just as Addison encouraged Pope early in his career and gave him the Prologue to Cato. 66. Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 337. On Pope’s physiological and psychosexual pathologies, see Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1996). 67. See Lucy Moore, Amphibious Thing: The Life of Lord Hervey (New York: Viking, 2000), and Bill Overton’s “Lord Hervey, Poetic Voice and Gender,” Review of English Studies 62 (2011): 594–617. 68. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Countess Peterborough, August 1740, in The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), vol. 2. The label was repeated by Joseph Warton in An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London, 1756, 1782). 69. See my untangling of an early skirmish with Edmund Curll in “‘Mr Pope’s Penmanship’: Edmund Curll, Alexander Pope, and Rawlinson Letters 90,” The Library 12, no. 3 (2011): 259–80, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/12.3.259 (accessed June 9, 2022). 70. See Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, Edmund Curll: Bookseller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 71. Maynard Mack’s Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988) contains a succinct overview of the Wycherley-Pope relationship (88–119). 72. See Brean Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study of Friendship and Influence (St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 1984), and Professional Imaginative Writing in England. 271

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73. See James McLaverty “The First Printing and Publication of Pope’s Letters,” The Library ser. 6, 2, no. 3 (September 1, 1980): 264–80, https://doi. org/10.1093/library/s6-II.3.264 (accessed August 27, 2022), and Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Sören C. Hammerschmidt, ”Pope, Curll, and the intermediality of eighteenth-century character”, Word & Image, 28:3 (2012): 273–286. 74. See, e.g., Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, “Pope’s First Horatian Imitation? Ben Jonson’s Crispinus and the Poisoning of Edmund Curll,” Review of English Studies 60, 243 (2009): 78–95; cf. Pope’s issuing an emetic to Curll as detailed in Pat Rogers, The Poet and the Publisher The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street, (New York: Reaktion Books, 2021). 75. Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3. 76. Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, 4. 77. See Alexander Pope, Epistle to Burlington, in Epistles to Several Person (Moral Essays), ed. F. W. Bateson, vol. 3.2 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, ll. 99–172 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961). 78. Alexander Pope to Jonathan Swift, Letters of Alexander Pope, 3: 249. 79. I would err grossly to characterize the relationship between Pope and Swift as merely “close friendship”. Dustin Griffin’s Swift and Pope: Satirists in Dialogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) offers a sensitive and acute account of the complex and shifting relationship between the two men. I must also note that Pope did on occasion mend fences with former foes, as was the case with John Dennis. 80. Nor is Pope alone in his vulnerability to charges of instrumentalizing enmity. As James Sutherland puts it, “the reason for attacking Pope was often no more than the fact that it paid to do so.” “Review of Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711–44,” The Library, 5th ser., 26, 1 (1971): 81–82 . 81. The shelf mark of the collection is British Library L C.116.b.1–4. 82. Cited in John Mullan, “Clubs of Quidnuncs: Review of Valerie Rumbold (ed.), The Dunciad in Four Books,” London Review of Books, 22, 4 (2000). 83. James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 177. 84. James McLaverty, “Warburton’s False Comma: Reason and Virtue in Pope’s “Essay on Man,” Modern Philology, 99, 3 (2002): 379–92.

Chapter 5 1.“For more than two centuries, the image of Samuel Johnson has been so closely intertwined with a certain idea of mastery, and of the overmastering, that the phrase ‘Johnsonian authority’ is nearly a redundancy. What does ‘Johnsonian’ mean if not ‘authoritative’?” Frederic Bogel asks in The Dream of My Brother: 272

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An Essay on Johnson’s Authority, English Literary Studies 47 (Victoria, British Colombia: University of Victoria, 1990), 7. 2. His work on the historiography of the English language and its literatures was especially suited to the construction of an utterly authoritative poetics of impermanence, failure, and mortality. 3. I borrow the term “metempsychosis” from Richard Terry’s Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 143, to evoke Terry’s argument that poets sought to inhabit the souls of their antecedents. See also Terry’s chapter “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets” on Johnson’s work of metempsychotic literary criticism. 4. Jody Green, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 7. 5. William Wordsworth, Prose, ed. Grosart (London, 1876), 2: 106–30, 125. 6. Johnson, The Adventurer, no. 115, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Walter Jackson Bate, J. M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 11: 224. 7. Gillian Paku, “The Age of Anon: Johnson Rewrites the Name of the Author,” Eighteenth-Century Life 32, 2 (2008): 98–109, 100. 8. William Hazlitt, “On the Periodical Essayists,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-One Volumes, ed. P. P. Howe (Toronto: Dent and Sons, 1931), 6: 102. 9. Hazlitt, “On the Periodical Essayists,” in Works, 6: 102; Bate, Samuel Johnson, 207; Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone, “Johnson’s Pendulum: Introduction,” in Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, ed. Johnston and Mugglestone, 1–10, 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 10. Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 161. 11. John Richetti, “Johnson’s Assertions and Concessions,” in Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, ed. Johnston and Mugglestone, 37–48, 47. 12. Richetti, “Johnson’s Assertions and Concessions,” 41. 13. On the identification of Pope with the height of the couplet, see J. Paul Hunter, “Form as Meaning: Pope and the Ideology of the Couplet,” Eighteenth Century 37, 3 (1996): 257–70, and “Formalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet,” Modern Language Quarterly, 61, 1 (2000): 109–29. 14. William K. Wimsatt, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941), 25, 27. 15. Johnson, “An Account of the Life of Richard Savage,” in The Lives of the Poets, vol. 23 of The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. John H. Mittendorf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 16. Johnson, “John Milton,” Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (2014), www.yalejohnson.com (accessed June 10, 2022). 17. See Alvin B. Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princ273

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eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 175: “What Johnson primarily took from those writers and made his own was . . . a rhythmic sentence structure, referred to in its different aspects as cadenced, balanced, melodic, periodic and rounded.” And see also, e.g., William Henry Crashaw, Making of English Literature (London: Heath, 1907), 243; Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 78; and Philip Davies, “Johnson: Sanity and Syntax,” in Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, ed. Johnston and Mugglestone, 49–61, 52, asserting that “[w]hat Johnson brings to culmination in his work is the applied use of the humanist periodic sentence.” 18. Johnson, The Idler, no. 94, www.yalejohnson.com (accessed June 10, 2022). 19. Johnson, The Idler, no. 1, www.yalejohnson.com (accessed June 10, 2022). 20. Johnson, Life of Pope, ed. Mittendorf, 1171. 21. Johnson, “Richard Savage.” 22. Richard Savage claimed that his mother was Anne, countess of Macclesfield. She denied it throughout his life and never acknowledged him as her son. He wrote about his situation extensively in his poetry, most notably in The Bastard and The Wanderer. See Clarence Tracy, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). 23. Boswell reports that the two poems were published on the same day. Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), and James McLaverty, “Fixity and Instability in the Text of Johnson’s Poems,” in Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, ed. Johnston and Mugglestone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), have since argued that there was a lag of a few days between the two. 24. Robert De Maria Jr. The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), 48. 25. De Maria, Life of Samuel Johnson, 48. 26. Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 88. 27. Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 163. 28. Howard Weinbrot, Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1982), 182. 29. Alexander Pope, “Epilogue to the Satires,” in The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 1: 19–20. All citations of Pope come from this edition. 30. Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 95. 31. Johnson, London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal, 51–52, Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (accessed June 10, 2022). All references to London and The Vanity of Human Wishes here refer to this edition. 32. By having Thales refer to the “laureate tribe,” Johnson was position274

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ing Thales in the line of Dryden and Pope. See Valerie Rumbold, “Plotting Parallel Lives: Pope’s ‘A Parallel of the Characters of Mr. Dryden and Mr. Pope,” in John Dryden (1631–1700): His Politics, His Plays, and His Poets, ed. Claude Rawson and Aaron Santesso (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 235–62. 33. See Vincent Carretta, The Snarling Muse: Verbal and Visual Political Satire from Pope to Churchill (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 131–32. 34. De Maria, Life of Samuel Johnson, 129. 35. Walter Jackson Bate, “Johnson and Satire Manqué,” in EighteenthCentury Studies: Essays in Honor of Donald Hyde (New York: Grolier Club, 1970, 145–60. 36. Bate, “Johnson and Satire Manqué,” 155. 37. Howard Erskine-Hill, The Poetry of Opposition from Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 139–66. 38. Helen Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 79. 39. This moralizing work is also a classical function of satire, in particular Juvenalian satire, as befits the fact that Vanity is itself an imitation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire. I would suggest, however, that simply in choosing to imitate Juvenal, Johnson is modeling his literary ambitions on Pope’s 1738 Epilogue to the Satires. For full examinations of the legacy of classical verse models in eighteenth-century poetry, see Weinbrot, Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire, and Kupersmith, English Versions of Roman Satire in the Earlier Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007). Kupersmith’s chapter 8, “The Imitation from 1740 to 1750,” treats Vanity as a capstone of eighteenthcentury Roman satire and a response to Pope’s earlier classical imitations. 40. I.e., Charles XII of Sweden (1682–1718), who despite his dazzling victories was in the end defeated in his bid to conquer Russia. Johnson, Vanity, 192. 41. See also Howard Weinbrot, Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), chaps. 11 and 12. 42. Alexander Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 255–58 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). 43. Erskine-Hill finds in the Laud reference a crypto-Catholic or cryptoJacobite resonance in his chapter “The Vanity of Human Wishes in Context” in Poetry of Opposition and Revolution. 44. Richard Feingold, Moralized Song: The Character of Augustan Lyricism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 108. 45. Johnson, “Plan of a Dictionary,” in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 18: 38. 46. Johnson, “Plan,” in Works, ed. Kolb and De Maria, 18: 38. Lynda Mugglestone, “Johnson’s Dictionary and the Journey into Words,” in Samuel John-

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son: New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Howard Weinbrot (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2013), 134. 47. Johnson, “Plan,” in Works, ed. Kolb and De Maria, 18: 109. De Maria, Life of Samuel Johnson, 119, describes this process as one in which “the philosopher of language . . . gives way to the historical lexicographe.” 48. Weinbrot, Aspects of Samuel Johnson, 45. 49. Lisa Berglund, “Life,” in Samuel Johnson in Context, ed. Jack Lynch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5. 50. De Maria, Life of Samuel Johnson, 113. Building on Jack Lynch’s “Johnson’s Encyclopedia,” in Anniversary Essays on Johnson’s Dictionary, ed. Lynch and Anne McDermott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Seth Rudy, Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chap. 4, argues that Johnson’s Dictionary was an attempted encapsulation of all knowledge. 51. De Maria, Life of Samuel Johnson, 134. 52. Johnson, “Preface,” Dictionary, in Works, 18: 110. 53. Johnson, “Plan,” in Works, ed. Kolb and De Maria, 18: 113. 54. “Mundane,” adj., “belonging to the world,” A Dictionary of the English Language: A Digital Edition of the 1755 Classic by Samuel Johnson, ed. Brandi Besalke, https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=Mundane (accessed June 11, 2022). 55. “To take in,” verb, “to comprise; to comprehend,” Dictionary . . . by Samuel Johnson, ed. Besalke, https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search. php?term=take%20in (accessed June 11, 2022). 56. De Maria, Life of Samuel Johnson, 124. 57. “Another,” adj., Dictionary . . . by Samuel Johnson, ed. Besalke, https:// johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=another (accessed June 11, 2022). 58. Weinbrot, “What Johnson’s Illustrative Quotations Illustrate: Language and Viewpoint in the Dictionary,” in Aspects of Samuel Johnson, 53. 59. MS Bodleian 1012 f. 208, cited by De Maria, “The Politics of Johnson’s Dictionary,” PMLA 104 (1989), 65. 60. Weinbrot, “What Johnson’s Illustrative Quotations Illustrate,” in Aspects of Samuel Johnson, 54. 61. Cited by Bate, Samuel Johnson, 256. 62. Johnson, “Plan of an English Dictionary,” in Works, 18: 52. 63. On the uses to which Shakespeare was put in the construction of canonicity in the eighteenth century, see Jonathan Kramnick, Making of the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. chaps. 3 and 5. For an overview of editors of Shakespeare from Pope to Johnson, and an analysis of the political and cultural significance of their work in the formation of British public literary culture, see Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Tex276

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tual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 64.Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare (London, 1765), 92, www.yalejohnson. com/frontend/sda_viewer?n=108482 (accessed June 11, 2022). All future citations of the Preface to Shakespeare are from this source. 65. Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, 94–95. 66. Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, 95–96. It is remarkable to see the extent to which Johnson’s criticisms of Theobald echo William Warburton’s in his own 1747 edition of Shakespeare. Pope and Warburton were close enough that Pope gave Warburton the copyrights to his works in his will; it is possible to trace these remarks about Theobald directly from Pope (who cast Theobald as King of the Dunces in the Dunciads of 1728 and 1729) to Warburton to Johnson. 67. Marcus Walsh, “Fragments and Disquisitions: Johnson’s Shakespeare in Context,” in Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Weinbrot, 157. 68. See John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 112–32. 69. Walsh, “Fragments and Disquisitions,” 172. 70. De Maria, Life of Samuel Johnson, 228–29. 71. Johnson, Henry V, in Yale Edition of the Works, ed. Bate et al., 7–8: 542. 72. De Maria, Life of Samuel Johnson, 280. 73. Jack Lynch, “The Life of Johnson, the Life of Johnson, the Lives of Johnson,” in Samuel Johnson after 300 Years, ed. Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 131–44, 131–32. 74. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck, Norman Hill, and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936–64), 4: 136. Bate suggests that this was in response to the publishers’ efforts to capitalize on Johnson’s name by calling the complete edition “Johnson’s Poets” (Bate, Samuel Johnson, 539). 75. Plutarch, “Life of Alexander,” trans. John Dryden, in Plutarch’s Lives, rev. Arthur Hugh Clough (Boston: Little, Brown, 1906), 159. 76. This strongly recalls Johnson’s remark at the end of his “Richard Savage” that the “relation will not have been wholly without its use if those who languish . . . shall be enabled to fortify their patience. . . .” 77. Following Spence’s 1726 criticism of Pope’s translations of the Iliad, Pope befriended him, and Spence became Pope’s amanuensis until his death in 1744. Spence also recorded the anecdotes of many other figures of early eighteenth-century England. The full manuscript was circulated for some time in two different copies following Spence’s death in 1766, and first published in two competing editions—one of each version of the manuscript—on the same day in 1820. 78. Howard Erskine-Hill, “Fire under the Ashes: Johnson’s Lives as Narratives of History,” in The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson, ed. Erskine-Hill and J. C. D. Clark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 120–64, 122. 79. Spence’s Anecdotes are the oral corollary to the effects of copyright on author’s utterances. As a documentarian of the oral culture of lettered London, 277

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Spence offered a counterweight to the increasingly proprietary nature of written utterances by those same men and women. While Spence was compiling the Anecdotes, Pope was working to consolidate copyright law to protect authors’ rights in a landmark case in the House of Lords. For the fullest legal exegeses of this case, see Pat Rogers, “The Case of Pope v. Curll,” The Library 5, 27 (1972): 326–31, and The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street (Edinburgh: Reaktion Books, 2021); Ronan Deazley, “Commentary on Pope v. Curl (1741),” in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), ed. L. Bently and M. Kretschmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University, Faculty of Law, 2008); James McLaverty “The First Printing and Publication of Pope’s Letters,” The Library ser. 6, 2, no. 3 (September 1, 1980): 264–80, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s6-II.3.264 (accessed August 27, 2022); and Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993). 80. “Advertisement” to Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Men (London: Murray, 1820), iii–vii. 81. I use the phrase “structuring structures” to allude to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. See Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), and “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 14–25. 82. As Johnson remarked to Thomas Warton, “They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination” (Boswell, Life, ed. Birkbeck, Hill, and Powell, 2: 446). 83. Johnson wrote of Lycidas that “the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. . . . In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting: whatever images it can supply, are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.” “John Milton,” in The Lives of the Poets, vol. 22 of The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. John H. Mittendorf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 175–76, http://yalejohnson.com (accessed June 7, 2022). 84. John Mullan, “Fault Finding in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,” in Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, ed. Johnston and Mugglestone, 72. 85. Johnson, “Alexander Pope,” in The Lives of the Poets, vol. 23 of The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. John H. Mittendorf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 1219, http://yalejohnson.com (accessed June 7, 2022). 86. Johnson, “Alexander Pope,” in Lives of the Poets, ed. Mittendorf , 23: 1219–20. 87. Johnson, “Alexander Pope,” in Lives of the Poets, ed. Mittendorf , 23: 1222. 88. Johnson, “Alexander Pope,” in Lives of the Poets, ed. Mittendorf, 23: 1200. 89. Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, in Yale Edition of the Works, 7: 71, and Mullan, “Fault Finding in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,” 73.

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90. Johnson, “Thomas Gray,” in Lives of the Poets, ed. Mittendorf , 23: 1470–71, http://yalejohnson.com (accessed June 7, 2022).

Coda 1. A compelling case for the role of anonymity in facilitating the creation of a mediascape remotely resembling our own is made by Mark Vareschi in Everywhere and Nowhere: Anonymity and Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 2. And yet . . . it is difficult to imagine that the Exclusion Crisis, the Rye House plot, and coordinated political opposition would not have prompted separate discursive realms within the larger public; that James II’s rule would not have prompted those fields to burgeon and thrive; that allowing pre-publication licensing to lapse in 1695 would not have helped political heterodoxies flourish. It would not have been enough for these things not to have happened. Charles II would have had to introduce stringent censorship as soon as possible, so as to render meaningful public opposition to his brother’s conversion to Catholicism in 1672 as difficult as possible. And James II would have had to have completed his transformation of the public into something like that presided over by Louis XIV. And even this is implausible, because of the role print had already played in the fostering and conduct of the Civil War. I’m not saying that Pope’s career is a logical conclusion to the general history of printing and politics in England, but that the seventeenth-century embeddedness of printing meant that any observable rift in public opinion would have led to discursive structures that Pope—or someone else—could happen upon and exploit. 3. Aaron Hill, The progress of wit: a caveat. For the use of an eminent writer. By a fellow of All-Souls. To which is prefix’d, an explanatory discourse to the reader. By Gamaliel Gunson ([London], 1730), 17–18.

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Bibliography

Manuscripts Consulted and Cited Beinecke Library, Yale University Osborn b. 52/1, b. 52/2, b. 63, b. 90, b. 104, b. 111, b. 115, b. 154, b. 204, b. 371,b. 382; c. 58, c. 111, c. 150, c. 155, c. 158, c. 160, c. 170, c. 171, c. 188, c. 189, c. 223, c. 233, c. 259, c. 360/3, c. 570/1, c. 570/2, c. 570/3; fb. 7, fb. 66/12, fb. 66/7, fb. 68, fb. 70, fb. 108, fb140, fb. 207/1, fb. 207/2, fb. 207/3, fb. 207/4; fc. 24, fc. 58, fc. 73; files 4629, 17395, 17422; poetry boxes IV/54, IV/64, V/121, VI/2, VII/5, VII/28, VII/39, VII/40, VII/41, VII/45, VII/53, VII/63, VII/87, VIII/7, X/37, X/39; X/168, XIII/38, XIII/82, XIII/87; Spence Papers 113 Yale accessions 97.7.40, 97.7.40; Yale file 17395; Yale poetry boxes IV/ 54, IV/64, V/121, VII/5, VII/41, VII/63, X/39; Yale Trumbull poetry box XIII/82

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British Library Add. A 301, Add. 5822, Add. 5832, Add. 6416, Add. 7315, Add. 11723, Add. 11811, Add. 14854, Add. 14874, Add. 14936, Add. 21544, Add. 22603, Add. 22629, Add. 23722, Add. 23904, Add. 25490, Add. 27408, Add. 27879, Add. 28095, Add. 28101, Add. 28253, Add. 29479, Add. 29497, Add. 29981, Add. 30012, Add. 30162, Add. 31152, Add. 32463, Add. 37728, Add. 38175, Add. 40060, Add. 42612, Add. 47126, Add. 47127, Add. 61688, Add. 61842, Add. 63648, Add. 63776, Add. 64060, Add. 69968, Add. 70087, Add. 70369, Add. 70454, Add. 72479, Add. 73540, Add. 75381, Add. 75500, Add. 78233, Add. 78456, Add. 78521, Add. 78522, Add. 78552 Add. 78669; Egerton 924, Egerton 1162, Egerton 1717; Harley 2315, Harley 6914, Harley 6918, Harley 6947, Harley 7135, Harley 7137, Harley 7316, Harley 7319, Harley 7332; Lansdowne 852; Sloane 655; Sloane 1371A, Sloane 1454, Sloane 1731A, Sloane 179A, Sloane 1858B, Sloane 2717, Sloane 3769

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Online Sources C18Connect. www.18thconnect.org A Dictionary of the English Language: A Digital Edition of the 1755 Classic by Samuel Johnson, edited by Brandi Besalke. http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com Early English Books Online. http://eebo.chadwyck.com Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/e/ecco Electronic Enlightenment. www.e-enlightenment.com English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. www.oxforddnb.com The Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com The Spectator. Edited by Donald F. Bond. www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/ actrade/9780198186106.book.1/actrade-9780198186106-div1-21. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu The Union First Line Index of English Verse. www.firstlines.folger.edu Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (2014). www.yalejohnson. com

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Imagination, 46–52; political engagement and, 64, 234; preceptualTory heritage of, 117; usefulness vs. beauty, 24 agnotology, 22–23 ambiguity, 87, 123, 124, 129, 136, 214, 239; decoding, 69, 80, 127, 184, functional, 18, 21, 87–88, 93, 253n18, 257n59; grammatical, 89 Anne, Queen, 3, 32, 80–81, 85, 97, 105, 110, 111, 116, 125, 133, 143, 253n21, 261n9, 264n35 Arbuthnot, John, 178, 233; and the Scriblerus Club, 110–111. See also Pope, Alexander, works by: Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot Ariosto, Ludovico, 6 Aristotle, 168 Arnold, Matthew, 185 Atterbury, Francis (Bishop of Rochester), 63, 79, 90, 173, 266n71; Pope and, 173, 178, 182 audiences and readers, 1, 50, 82, 119, 170, 195, 199, 203, 214; authors’ concern for, 191, 214; critical lectio of suspicion, 132, 191; enciphering and decoding, 21, 77, 88, 114, 178, 183, 239; instilling virtue or civic values, 42–43, 56; Jacobite exclusivity, 69, 150; reader’s work contingent, 141;

Académie française, 28, 218 Act of Settlement (1701), 75–77, 107, 143, 236 Addison, Joseph, 17, 48, 135; An Account of the Greatest English Poets, 164; architecture and national greatness, 48–50; Aristotelian aesthetics, 249n56, 259n95; Cato, 40–43, 43, 183; Cato’s Ghost, 103–104, 259n95; and Dennis, 248n39, 249n56, 259n95; and Jacobite satire, 103; and Locke’s theory of exchange, 87–98; On a Lady who Pisst at the Tragedy of Cato, 104; and physico-theology, 249n54; politeness and sociability, 42; Pope and, 183–183, 271n65; and the Royal Exchange, 97–98; and the Royal Society, 50–51; The Tatler, 43; Whiggism of, 27, 31, 42–51, 62, 117. See also Spectator, The Adorno, Theodor, 10–11, 242n16 aesthetics, 10, 235; Aristotelian, 249n56; art purposive for itself, 10; beauty and instrumentality, 235; literariness, 2, 4, 15, 65; literary aesthetics, 4, 8–9, 12; moral responsibility of art, 41; neoclassical, 250n59; Platonic, 249n56; The Pleasures of the 301

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Burlington, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of, 172 Burnet, Gilbert, 82–85 Burrow, Colin, 6, 8, 9 Byng, Admiral George, 54

reforming the reader, 34, 184; regulating the reader, 43, 109, 132, 173, 182, 195 Bacon, Sir Francis, 50, 175, 218, 248nn36–37, 249n54 Baines, Paul, 185 Bate, Walter Jackson, 180, 197, 209, 277n74 Bateson, F. W. 185 Bathurst, Allen Bathurst, 1st Earl, 172, 207 Bentley, Richard, 16, 154, 186, 188, 218, 251n85 Berglund, Lisa, 217 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 16, 62, 109, 131, 186; Advice to the Poets, 261n8; The Creation, 27; Prince Arthur, 37–39, 248n35; A Satyr Against Wit, 130 Bloom, Harold, 141 Blount, Martha, 127, 172 Blount, Teresa, 127 Bogel, 272n1 Boileau, Nicolas, 204, 206 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, 79, 151, 172, 178, 186, 190 Borelli, Giovanni, 58 Boswell, James, 203224, 227, 274n23 Bourdieu, Pierre, 242n18, 243n22, 276n81 Boyle Lectures, 58, 251n85 Boyle, Robert, 22, 58, 218 Bricker, Andrew, 244n34 Bridgeman, Charles, 171 Brower, Reuben, 187 Browne, Joseph, 66 Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of, 207 Buckingham and Normanby, John Sheffield, 1st Duke of, 101, 102, 115, 117–118, 182, 263n25

Caesar, 103, 183 Calvert, Ian, 133 Cameron, W. J., 78, 258n76 canon, 12, 109, 129, 193; construction of, 20, 276n63, 277n68; and cultural politics, 15, 243n31; of Jacobite poetry, 72, 88; and literary lineages, 261n2 Caroline, Queen, 175, 184, 186; “Of George and Caroline,” 76 Carryl, John (the younger), 101, 102 Carryl, John (senior), 102 Catholics: anti-Protestant satire, 14; Catholic Emancipation bill (1829), 144; Jacobitism and, 36, 122; persecution of, 79, 102; Whig anti-Catholicism, 144 Cavaliers, 73; Cavalier verse, 63, 69, 142 Cavendish, Margaret, 154–155 Caxton, William, 7 Chandos, James Brydges, 1st Duke of, 187–188 Charles I, King, 63, 73–75, 80–81, 85, 102, 175 Charles II, King, 35, 63, 73–75, 122, 175, 176, 206, 256n47, 265n53, 279n2; Monck’s invitation to, 140 “Charles III.” See Stuart, James Francis Edward Charles XII, King of Sweden, 211, 275n40 Charleton, Walter, 142 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6, 7, 142 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of, 216–217, 220, 221

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Chiang, Ted, 13 Chico, Tita, 17, 27–28 Church of England, 37, 156; highchurch, 82; latitudinarian, 82; low church, 32, 82; non-juring, 37 Churchill, Charles, 235 Cicero, 58, 88, 271n65 Civil Wars and the Protectorate. See Interregnum Cixin Liu, 13 Clare, John, 217 Clark, J. C. D., 88–89, 102, 257nn62–63 Clarke, Samuel, 175 Cobham, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount, 171; Pope and, 19, 148, 172, 174–176, 270n52; Stowe gardens, 174–175; Temples of Ancient and Modern Virtue, 175; Temple of British Worthies, 175–176; Whig opposition to Walpole, 172 Cohen, Ralph, 266n3 Congreve, William, 109, 115, 178, 181 Connell, Philip, 32, 52, 157, 244n5, 245n11 Constable, Kathleen, 254n26 Cowley, Abraham, 135–136 Cromwell, Oliver, 86, 102, 103, 116 Crousaz, J. P. de, 190–191, 268n9 cultural capital, 5, 180 Curll, Edmund, 16, 180, 188, 224; Pope and, 104, 180–181, 186, 188, 224, 272n74, 277n79; Rawlinson and, 104, 260n98, 271n69 Cynewulf, 6

De Maria, Robert, Jr., 204, 209, 218, 223 Democritus, 212 Denham, Sir John, 265n56; Cooper’s Hill, 133, 135, 136 Dennis, John, 13, 16, 17, 26, 27, 31–42, 118, 126, 235, 244n5, 246n21; Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, 39, 248n36; An Essay on the Navy, 36; The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 36, 39–40; influence of Ramus, 13, 33; and Milton, 36; Platonic aesthetics, 249n56; poetry, religion, and civil order, 39–40; preceptualism of, 32, 34, 42; prescriptivism of, 27, 42, 53, 57, 117; public vs. private, 41–42; Protestant Williamite settlement, 33, 38; quasi-Newtonian critical system, 34, 36–37, 39; Reflections Critical and Satirical on . . . An Essay on Criticism, 33–35; Remarks Concerning Prince Arthur, 37–39; Remarks upon Cato, 40–43, 248n39, 259n95; and the sublime, 248n39; vs. Pope, 32–35, 39, 118, 159, 186, 145, 272n79; Whiggism of, 27, 31–34, 42, 61–62, 108 Derham, William, 13, 26, 157; Astro-Theology, 58; influence of Addison, 61; influence of Newton, 58–61; influence of Ramus, 13; influence of Ray, 152; influence of Shaftesbury; Physico-Theology, 57–61, 152, 218, 267n12; prescriptivism of, 27; Whiggism of, 17, 27, 31, 42, 57–62, 152 Derwentwater, James Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of ,114

Dante Alighieri, 137 Da Silva, Jorge Bastos, 104, 260n96 Defoe, Daniel, 109

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Desaguliers, John Theophilus, 30, 245n16 Deutsch, Helen, 187, 210, 246n25, 271n66 Dodsley, Robert, 203, 220 Donne, John, 6 Doody, Margaret Anne, 206 Dorchester, Evelyn Pierrepont, marquess of, 115 Duck, Stephen, 16, 62, 186 Dryden, John, 7, 83, 116, 122, 178, 181, 225, 233, 256n47, 265n56; Absalom and Achitophel, 16; Annus Mirabilis, 134; influence on Jacobite typology, 83; and Juvenal, 204; Johnson and, 204, 206, 225; Mac Flecknoe, 109, 126; and Persius, 204; Pope and, 122, 134, 165, 204, 204, 209; use of scriptural typology, 83

Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, 101 Fish, Stanley, 140 Fortescue, Sir William, 177 Foucault, Michel, 10, 11, 242n21 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 172, 205 freedom of speech, 7 Fussell, Paul, 197 Galen, 58 Galileo Galilei, 214 Garrick, David, 227 Garth, Samuel, 115, 130, 181 Gay, John, 105, 110, 111, 178, 215, 233 genealogy. See under historiography genius loci, 10, 135 genres and forms, 5, 12, 22, 63, 68; antithesis and parallelism, 196, 202; couplets, 19, 129, 162, 154, 195, 197, 198, 210, 242n19, 273n13; eco-georgic, 154; epic, 132, 137, 149, 154, 156; georgic, 133, 137, 154; mock-epic, 114; ode, 89, 154; pastoral, 22, 115, 137, 278n83; prose couplets, 19, 142, 195–197, 202–203, 221, 230–231; transformation of forms, 12, 13, 20, 196, 233 George I, King, 3, 17, 25, 72, 75, 76, 77, 87, 111, 112, 116, 133, 143, 145, 159, 190, 244n3, 255n36, 258n77; satirized, 84–86, 102, 103, 255n31 George II, King, 72, 76, 177; Pope’s First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, dedicated to, 177; satirized, 208; Walpole and, 205 George III, 144 Gerrard, Christine, 172, 173, 270n40 Geuss, Raymond, 139–140

Edwards, Thomas, 220 Empson, William, 87–88 Epaminondas, 175 Erasmus, Desiderius, 179 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 68, 100, 133, 179, 210–212, 227, 255n35, 263n31, 264n35, 275n43 ethics, 55, 225; ethical sociability, 62; Johnson and, 209, 225; Pope and, 18, 172–174, 180, 239; Shaftesbury and, 55–57; Whiggish, 57 Eusden, Laurence, 109 Ezell, Margaret, 115, 262n16, 263n19 Feingold, Richard, 216 Ferguson, Robert, 98 Fermor, Arabella, 16, 123–128, 132, 191 Fielding, Henry, 234 Filmer, Robert, 219

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“Glorious Revolution.” See Revolution of 1688–89, the Goldsmith, Oliver, 190 Goodman, Kevis, 159, 251n85, 269n28 Gower, John, 142 Granville, George, 101, 102, 110, 115, 116, 117, 133, 135–136, 181, 182; as Lord Lansdowne, 133 Gray, Thomas, 225 Greenblatt, Stephen, 5 Greene, Donald, 204 Gresham, Sir Thomas, 175 Griffin, Dustin, 272n79 Grub Street, 15, 181, 234, 271n63 Guillory, John, 5, 222 Guthrie, Neil, 88, 89, 99, 252n2

Hervey, John Hervey, 2nd Baron, 106, 184; Pope on, 16, 106, 182, 184, 186, 191, 206. See also Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley Hill, Aaron, 16, 62; and Pope’s machinery, 236–237; The progress of wit, 236–240 historiography: contingency, 141; fiction of disinterest, 141; genealogy and, 10, 11–12, 14, 15, 16, 22–23, 139–143, 145, 204, 242n21; historicism, 21, 141; history of reason, 11; literary, 15, 135–136, 233– 234; literary lineages, 261n2; natural history of language, 218; ontological stability, 141; secret histories, 113–114; sociology of texts, 21; Whig history, 10, 38 Hoadly, Benjamin, 82, 123 Hobbes, Thomas, 98, 170, 219 Holderness, Graham, 241n8 Holyday, Barten, 204 Homer, 6, 125, 175; Pope’s translations, 147, 160, 176 Hone, Joseph, 14, 22, 36, 65, 69, 101–102, 110, 115, 113, 203, 252n3, 262n15 Hooke, Robert, 51, 58, 159, 250n62 Hooker, Richard, 218 Horace, 2, 6, 46, 83, 89, 109, 121, 176, 190, 204; imitations of, 117, 147–148, 177–179, 184, 204–205, 230, 263n21; Jacobite imitations of, 65, 88, 89, 106, 263n21; Pope’s imitations of, 65, 105, 117, 147, 177, 179, 187, 205, 207, 209 Hoxby, Blair, 134, 263n27, 265n56 Hume, David, 13 Hunter, J. Paul, 64, 242n19 Hutcheson, Francis, 62

Halifax, Earl of. See Montagu, Charles Hammond, Brean, 142, 186, Hampden, John, 175 Hampton Court Palace, 125–126, 134 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 112, 261n9 Hannam, John, 93 Hanover, house of, 160, 111, 145–146, 156; anti-Hanoverian writing, 204, 212; Hanoverian policies, 32, 144; Hanoverian succession, 75, 98, 102, 136, 143, 160, 212; Hanoverian Tories, 112; Jacobite verse, 131; satire, 86, 204, 253n21, 256n54 Harley, Edward, 2nd earl of Oxford, 105, 112 Harley, Robert, 1st earl of Oxford and Mortimer, 105, 112–113, 261n9 Harris, Tim, 253n9 Haywood, Eliza, 16, 186 Hazlitt, William, 196–198, 214 Helgerson, Richard, 5

305

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Interregnum, the, 14, 63

03, 123, 182, 253n18, 257n59; imitation of classical writers, 88– 89; innuendo, 3, 69; inversion, 21, 83; Latinity of, 88–89 Jacobite writing, 4, 17, 64, 67–68, 88; Cavalier tropes, 142; covert network of sympathizers, 5, 93, 20, 70–72, 91, 100, 101, 110, 258n71; Divine Right a priori, 67, 122; literary vs. political authority, 106, 144; literary Jacobitism, 88, 92, 93, 100; nostalgia and loss, 253n15, 257n69; parallel between civil wars and Hanoverian succession, 133 Pope and, 18, 21, 64, 100–106, 123, 144; pseudoaristocratic exclusivity, 136; secrecy, 95; scribal publication, 5, 12, 14, 17, 18, 64–66, 68, 89–95, 97, 144, 258n72, 258n76; “separates,” 89, 71, 91–95, 99, 100, 105 Jacobite typologies, 18, 21, 69, 80, 81–85, 89, 150; typological use of history, 104, 133; the world upside-down, 81 James I, King, 80 James II, King, 36, 54, 63, 67, 76, 86, 88, 95–98, 102, 156, 205, 253n9, 256n47, 258n77, 279n2; Catholicism of, 66, 139; and Charles I, 86–87; Exclusion Crisis, 244n3, 279n2; as “James Stuart,” 4, 54, 63, 103; as the Pretender, 86, 112; overthrow and exile, 25, 32, 63, 66, 70, 78, 85, 86, 90, 98, 102; scriptural typology, 83–84. See also Jacobite manuscript poetry “James III.” See Stuart, James Francis Edward Jarvis, Simon, 222, 276n63

Jack, Ian, 128 Jacobean lyric, 142 Jacobitism, 25, 79, 266n71; aestheticization of insurrection, 100; inheritors of Civil War Royalism, 74, 77; loyalty, 18, 64, 74, 82, 90, 99; material culture, 99–100; opposition to tyranny, 99; plots, threats, and invasions, 54, 68, 103, 144, 266n71; surveillance of, 69, Jacobite manuscript poetry, 70– 71, 90–93, 101, 106, 110; The Ambodexter, 71–79, 81, 83, 91, 93, 178, 254n26, 255n31, 255n34; “An encomium on the happy revolution by the coherence of the years 1648 1688 and 1715,” 102; An Epitaph on the Bishop of Addlebury, 84–85; “Fixed on King James’s Statue in the Privy Council,” 97; “Found in” poems, 97; “A Health to the King in dialogue,” 88; “Hor: Imitated,” 89; On a Lady Who Pisst at the Tragedy of Cato, 104; Nero the Second, 85; “A Parallel between two noses,” 86; “The Parallel,” 86; The Three Olivers, 102; “Upon Seeing King James’s Picture, By a Lady,” 67, 86–87, 93, 95; “Verses found on the Queen’s Toilet,” 80–81, 93, 97 Jacobite verse techniques: acrostics, 105, 110; allusion, 92; anonymity, 90, 93, 235; apostrophe, 93; ciphering, 14, 17, 182; doubling, 80, 81, 83, 127, 254n29, 255n35, 263n31; “found” poems, 97, functional ambiguity, 18, 21, 69, 80, 87–88, 306

inde x

Johnson, Samuel, 4, 7, 8, 12, 272n1, 273n17; The Adventurer, 194; the “Age of Johnson,” 194; construction of literary-historical values, 65, 194, 203, 224, 225; creation of literary authority, 19, 193–195, 202, 216, 220, 221, 222, 224, 231; creation of moral authority, 195, 213, 224, 226, 231; exceptionalism, literary and moral, 203, 215; and genealogy, 142; The Idler, 200, 226; and Jacobitism, 210–212 and Juvenal, 204; and Milton, 199; and Pope, 19, 142, 194–201, 204–210, 215–216, 221, 222, 229–230; and Savage, 198–199, 201–203; and Swift, 210 Johnson, Samuel, Dictionary of the English Language, 19, 195, 216– 221; and Chesterfield, 216–217, 220–221; mutability of language, 217’ political cast in quotations, 219–220; Pope’s recommended corpus, 221; synthesis of Whig and Jacobite tendencies, 220

226; happiness and virtue, 226; Milton, 229; Pope, 229–230; Spence and, 227–228 Johnson, Samuel, London, 19, 203– 209, 216; financial and moral decay, 207; imitation of Juvenal, 204, 205; and Pope, 195, 204, 205–209, 222 Johnson, Samuel, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 19, 221–224; against alteration, 221; editorial method, 222; focus on elements of his own inner life, 223; past editors, 221–222; Preface, 195, 222, 230 Johnson, Samuel, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 19, 202, 209– 216, 275n39; ambition, power, wealth, 211; challenges Pope, 210; diminution of all things, 210; referential exclusivity, 215; rhetoric of cultural decline, 216; as satire manqué, 180, 195, 209; virtue has no political corollary, 212 Johnston, Freya, 197 Jones, Inigo, 270n44 Jonson, Ben, 6, 7, 109 Jost, Jacob Sider, 19, 52, 53 Juvenal, 204, 205, 210, 275n39

Johnson, Samuel, prose techniques, 194, 199–200, 203, 216; antitheses and parallelisms, 195–198, 202, 203, 223; dialectic form, 197; inclusion and exclusion, 198; irony, 195, 196, 199, 211; prose couplets, 195–199, 202, 230–231; readerimplication, 141, 195, 199; satire, 2, 204–206; satire manqué, 180, 193, 195, 201–202, 216, 231; self-memorialization, 195, 213 Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 19, 195, 216, 224–231; Addison, 229; biography as criticism, 224–

Kant, Immanuel, 10 Karian, Stephen, 262n12 Keenleyside, Heather, 157, 167, 266n1, 267n6, 268n23, 269n26 Kennet, White, 82–83 Kent, William, 171 Kernan, Alvin B., 273n17 Keymer, Thomas, 6, 244n36, 253n10 King, Rachael Scarborough, 12, 244n1 King, William, 89 Kit-Kat Club, 113, 116 307

inde x

Knights, Mark, 245n15 Kramnick, Jonathan, 154, 222, 261n2, 267nn6–7, 276n63 Kupersmith, William, 257n63, 275n39

Mainwaring, Arthur, 115–116 Malone, Edmund, 227 Mandeville, Bernard, 47, 131 Manley, Delariviere, 126 Mannheimer, Katherine, 270n55, 250n57 Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of, 84, 112, 132, 171, 186, 207, 264n35; “Pam” in Jacobite verse, 126; target of Jacobite satire, 86, 126 Marlborough, Sarah Jennings Churchill, Duchess of, 84, 112, 186, 207 Martial, 88, 89 Marvell, Andrew, 83, 164 Mary, Queen. See William and Mary, reign of Maty, Matthew, 220 McGann, Jerome, 141 McLaverty, James, 109, 126, 128, 132, 189, 190, 252n6, 262n16, 263n33 Meston, William, 103–104 metaphysics: anthropocentrism, 149, 152, 155, 161–162, 167, 171, 267n4; Cartesianism, 267n7; materialism, 267n6; mechanism, 30–31, 98, 155; panpsychism, 155, 156–159, 165, 170, 171, 267n6; quasi-anthropocentrism, 152, 171; vitalism, 98, 99, 100 Milton, John, 7, 118, 125, 140–141, 164, 175, 176, 225; blank verse, 164, 165, 199; Dennis and, 36; Eikonoklastes, 139; imitation of, 164; Johnson and, 199, 218; Lycidas, 229, 278n83; Milton’s Epistle to Pollio, 89; Paradise Lost, 6, 140, 154, 164, 184; Pope and, 122, 125, 134, 165, 184, 204, 204, 209; scriptural typology, 83; Thomson and, 164

Laud, Archbishop William, 80–81, 85, 102, 214–216, 275n43 Le Guin, Ursula K., 13, 143 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 151 Lintot, Bernard, 123, 137 Lipking, Lawrence, 69, 253n15 literary authority, 5, 6, 20, 32, 145, 241n3; construction of, 12, 19, 70, 107; control of literary judgment, 15; poetic authority and, 5; political authority and, 64, 70, 106. See also under Pope, Alexander; Johnson, Samuel Locke, John, 38, 62, 97, 176, 269n29; Addison and, 98–98; Johnson and, 219–220; Pope and, 159, 160; Shaftesbury and, 26; Thomson and, 160 Longinus. See sublime, the Louis XIV, King, 63, 206, 279n2 Love, Harold, 14, 66, 70, 71, 89–91, 122, 252n5, 252n7, 258n76 Lowthorp, John, 58 “Loyalists.” See Jacobites and Jacobitism Lucan, 6 Lucretius, 88, 89 Lycurgus, 175 Lydiat, Thomas, 214 Lynch, Jack, 224–22 Macclesfield, Anne (née Mason) Gerard, Countess of, 202–203, 274n22 Mack, Maynard, 22, 115–116, 186– 187 MacKenzie, Niall, 254n29

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monarchy: constitutional, 57, 245n16, 258n80; Divine Right, 67, 73, 86, 97, 98, 122, 135, 149; elective, 1, 3, 68, 97; monarchical authority, 2, 140, 149, 160; monarchical succession, 98, 219; regicide, 102, 103 Monck, George, 140 Monod, Paul, 65, 66, 102, 253n11, 257n69 Monmouth Rebellion, 16, 86 Montagu, Charles (1st Earl of Halifax), 62, 115–116, 135; unreined enjambment, 164; regent for George I, 116 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (“Sappho”): Pope and, 16, 106, 177, 180, 184–186, 189; Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, 106, 184, 205, 246n26. See also Hervey, John Hervey, 2nd Baron More, Sir Thomas, 142 Moretti, Franco, 254n24 Mugglestone, Lynda, 217 Mulgrave, John Sheffield, 3rd Earl of, 39 Mullan, John, 229, 230 Murray, John, 227 Murray, William, 207

See also Bacon, Sir Francis; Hooke, Robert; Newton, Sir Isaac; physico-theology; Royal Society, the Newton, Sir Isaac, 37, 45, 153, 16; gravity as Whig metaphor, 59; influence of Ramus, 13; influence on Derham, 58–59; Opticks, 153; Pope and Thomson on, 153, 159–160; Principia, 27, 29–30, 45, 51, 53, 58–59, 153; Whiggism and, 29, 245n12 Nichols, John, 225 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 139–149 Novak, Max, 247n32 Oath of Allegiance, 74, 79, 157; nonjurors, 37, 75, 220 Ogilby, John, 109 Oldham, John, 204 Ong, Walter J., 28, 33 Opper, Thorsten, 48 Oxford, earls of. See Harley, Robert and Edward Ovid, 6 Paku, Gillian, 194 Panovsky, Erwin, 246n19 Pantheon, the, 47–49, 250n59 Parnell, Thomas, 105, 110–111, 147, 178, 234, 261n7 Patriot Opposition, the, 172–174, 205–206, 211, 213, 268n16 Patterson, Annabel, 21, 253n18, 257n59 Persius, 204 Petrarch, 137 Petre, Robert Petre, 7th Baron, 123, 128, 132 Philips, Ambrose, 181, 200 physico-theology, 16, 58–62, 149, 152, 156, 244n5, 249n54, 251n84; apologist principle of

Nassau. See William III natural philosophy. See new science, the Newcastle upon Tyne, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of, 227 new science, the, 28, 29, 46, 50–51, 57, 168; Catholic vs. Protestant science, 165–166; collaborative and polyphonic culture, 158; empirical enquiry, 150, 167; and Whiggism, 63, 218, 220, 245n12.

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reconciliation, 157; and the Great Chain of Being, 154, 161; Johnson and, 218–219; and panpsychism, 155, 159, 165, 171; and theodicy, 151; and Whiggism, 149, 152, 156, 251n84. See also Derham, William; Pope, Alexander; Ray, John; Thomson, James Piccioto, Joanna, 44, 46, 245n16, 248n37 Pincus, Steven, 253n9 Pittock, Murray, 66, 68, 99, 247n28, 252n2, 253n13, 257n69 Plato, 41–42, 249n56 Plutarch, 225–226 poet laureateship: byword for bad poetry, 145; Dryden and, 126; Johnson and, 274n32; Pope as potential Jacobite laureate, 36, 101, 122; satirized, 109, 148, 207, 271n62 political theory, 55–56, 156; British liberty, 40–41, 54; constitutionalism, 37–38, 54, 57; liberty to argue, 54; mixedgovernment state, 27, 32, 46, 61, 98, 245n16; monarchical hierarchy, 162; passive obedience, 38; political authority, 2–3, 63, 64, 70, 106, 144, 145; social contract, 38; Whiggish participatory politics, 156. See also Jacobitism; sociability; Whiggism Pope, Alexander, 3–4, 6–9, 11, 22, 148, 170, 252n6; ambition, 191, 230; and Atterbury, 173, 178, 182; Augustan, 190; becoming an author, 136, 138, 181–182; becoming pre-eminent, 143, 145–146, 177, 182, 186, 190– 191; Catholicism of, 36, 102,

122, 144, 179; compels readers toward right reading, 11, 18, 79, 109, 130–132, 179; cultivates a cognoscenti, 203; construction of literary-historical values, 65, 106, 109, 186; copyright, 224; editing Prior, Parnell, and Wycherly, 147–148; failure of every political cause endorsed, 14; friendship, 185, 188, 215; generates forms of subjectivity, 140; Hill and, 236– 240; and Horace, 131, 205, 207, 208, Horatian aequabilitas, 150, 179–180, 181, 188, 195, 203, 231, 238; Horatian imitations, 65, 117, 147, 150, 173, 177, 180, 205; Jacobite culture, 18, 35–36, 65, 101–104, 106, 108, 110, 126, 145, 166, 203, 247n28; libertinism of, 127; literary authority, 145–147, 184, 190– 191, 197; malice, malignancy, and enmity, 16–17, 148, 180, 184–185, 188, 200, 148; malice vs. expedient enmity, 186, 187, 189, 191, 272n80; and Locke, 169; manuscript circulation, 65, 79–80, 110, 115–117, 143, 187, 252n6, 262n16, 263n19; and “moderation,” 150, 179– 181, 188, 191, 270nn56–57; moral epistles, 147; moral and literary exceptionalism, 150; on Newton, 153–154, 160; and physico-theology, 148, 151– 152, 168; poems in Jacobite collections, 104–106; potential Jacobite laureate, 36, 101, 122; physical deformity of, 34, 39, 185, 246n25, 271nn66–67, 284; recuperation of poetry from politics, 142, 145; referential exclusivity, 215; rhetoric of 310

inde x

Pope, Alexander, Epilogue to the Satires, 205 Pope, Alexander, The Episode of Sarpedon, 13 Pope, Alexander, Epistle to a Lady, 172 Pope, Alexander, Epistle to Augustus, 256n54 Pope, Alexander, Epistle to Bathurst, 172, 207 Pope, Alexander, Epistle to Burlington, 172, 187; caricature of tastelessness, 187–188, 208 Pope, Alexander, Epistle to Cobham, 19, 148, 171–173; and Pope’s system of ethics, 172, 174; the ruling passion, 173, 174. See Cobham, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Pope, Alexander, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 19, 147, 148, 150, 180–188, 191, 199, 206, 208, 215; defense of satire, 188; scorn for various writers, 271n62; self-fashioning, 107–109, 177, 180; poetry, virtue, and Pope, 184; ventriloquizing Arbuthnot, 180–181 Pope, Alexander, Epistle to Murray, 207 Pope, Alexander, Essay on Criticism, 33, 117–122, 214, 247n27; claims to authorial power, 117–118, 121; closed, exclusive, declarative mode, 121–122; conformity to innate natural rules, 168; as crypto-Jacobite text, 145; as georgic, 137; Johnson and, 230; literature and national prowess, 122; mastery of poetic effects, 120–121, 128, 203; preceptual instruction, 117; Whig and Jacobite techniques combined, , 177117, 122–123

cultural decline, 216; satire, 150, 177, 178, 180, 182–184, 187, 188, 203, 204; savage personal satire, 180, 185, 188; and the Scriblerians, 110; and Shaftesbury, 160, 169, 184; and Shakespeare, 147; and Swift, 188; supposed transcendence of party, 179; taste, 138–139; translation of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, 147, 160, 176; Virgil, 176; the Virgilian Wheel, 137–138; and Warburton, 189– 190 Pope, Alexander, adversaries and targets, 179, 203; Addison, 182– 183, 186, 187, 191; Blackmore, 16, 106, 131, 186; Bentley, 16, 186, 188; Budgell, 181; Cibber, 177, 181, 186; Curll, 16, 171, 180, 181, 186, 188, 224; Dennis, 32–36, 39, 122, 131, 145, 159, 186, 272n79; Duck, 16, 186; Grub Street, 181, 271n63; Haywood, Eliza, 16, 186; Henley, 181, 186, 206; Hervey, 16, 106, 182, 184, 186, 191, 206; Hill, 16; Marlborough, Duke and Duchess of, 126, 132, 186, 207, 264n35; Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 16, 177–178, 180, 184, 186; Philips, 181, 200; Queen Caroline, 186; Settle, 16, 186; Theobald, 16, 147, 186, 188, 222, 277n66; Walpole, 172, 186, 188 Pope, Alexander, The Dunciads, 15, 16, 147, 148–149, 159, 181, 194, 204, 264n36; claim exclusive authorial power, 117; responses to Shakespeare edition, 148; trivializing, misrepresenting, silencing, 148 311

inde x

Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight,” 204 Pope, Alexander, “On Two Lovers,” 166–167 Pope, Alexander, Pastorals, 22, 115– 117, 137, 143, 172; circulated in manuscript, 115; Walsh’s contributions, 115, 116 Pope, Alexander, “Peri Bathous, or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” 109 Pope, Alexander, poetic techniques: allegory, 133; antithesis, 196; ciphers, 127–128, 147, 177, 178, 181; couplet structure, 19, 128–129, 164, 196–197, 199; doubling, 125, 127–129, 203; Jacobite poetics repurposed, 174; Jacobite rhetoric, 170; penetrable disguise, 182, 184, 188; political and affective rhetoric, 146; prosody, 119–121, 164, 195; pseudonyms, 17; typology, 83, 102, 125, 132, 150, 177, 178, 181–183; Whig and Jacobite techniques combined, 19, 114, 117, 121–123, 126–127, 133, 148, 180 Pope, Alexander, The Rape of the Lock, The, 15, 16, 98, 123– 132, 134, 145, 148, 191, 236; “To Belinda on the Rape of the Lock,” 124; biographical and intentionalist control, 132; circulated in manuscript, 110, 116; cultural phenomena and national effects, 126; doubleness in, 127–128; as epic, 137; first published anonymously, 123; portrait and referent, 123–125; public vs. private, 126–129; Whig and Jacobite techniques combined, 123, 126

Pope, Alexander, Essay on Man, 18, 116, 147, 148, 159, 172, 181, 189, 200; anthropocentrism, 152, 161–162; conformity to innate natural rules, 168; conservative political economy, 150; Crousaz and, 190; desacralized classical typologies, 150; empirical enquiry presumptuous, 161, 163, 165; and the Great Chain of Being, 151; Jacobite exceptionalism and Whig universalism, 171; Johnson on, 229–230; physico-theology, 149– 165, 171; and Pope’s system of ethics, 173; Protestant vs Catholic view of science, 165; reason and virtue, 190; and Thomson’s The Seasons, 150–152, 154–165, 169– 170; theodicy, 151 Pope, Alexander, The Fable of Vertumnus and Pomona, 137 Pope, Alexander, The First Book of Statius His Thebais, 137 Pope, Alexander, The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, 177 Pope, Alexander, The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, 19, 148, 150, 177 Pope, Alexander, “For One Who Would Not Be Buried in Westminster Abbey,” 108–109, 205 Pope, Alexander, Guardian prose articles, 137 Pope, Alexander, A Key to the Lock, 130, 137, 148, 264n44; burlesque voices, 131; writing-as-physic, 130 Pope, Alexander, On a Lady who Pisst at the Tragedy of Cato, 104, 255n31 Pope, Alexander, One Thousand 312

inde x

Pope, Alexander, Windsor Forest, 98, 133–136, 265n57; and Cowley, 135–136; cryptoJacobite, 133; genius loci, 135; and Denham, 133, 135, 136; and Dryden, 134; and Granville, 133, 135, 136; literary historiography, 135; Pope’s own poetic history, 136; Stuart reign and economic bounty, 134–135; Whig and Jacobite techniques combined, 133 Pope, Alexander, Works (1717), 107, 109–110, 136–139, 145; revolution in literary authority, 145 Pope, Alexander, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 19, 147– 149, 221–222, 276n63

readers. See audience and readers Restoration of 1660, the, 28, 20, 139, 204 Revolution of 1688–89, the, 17, 26, 37l, 52–53, 58 102, 122, 140, 253n9; Whig vs. Jacobite versions of, 27, 140 Richetti, John, 197 Rochester, “mitred.”. See Atterbury, Bishop Francis Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of, 90, 258n76 Rogers, John, 98 Rogers, Pat, 132, 133, 185, 247n30, 265n51 Romantic poets, 141, 193–194 Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon, 4th earl of, 117, 118 Rowe, Nicholas, 221, 260n97 Royal Society, 23, 27–28, 48, 50–51, 58, 161, 168, 250n62; bringing reason to the public, 50; and Whiggism, 27, 58, 166; Ruffhead, Owen, 228 Rumbold, Valerie, 274n32

print culture, 14, 234; Pope and, 65, 234, 262n16; pre-publication licensing, 8, 279n2. See also manuscript culture Prior, Matthew, 82–83, 105, 147, 178, 234 public sphere, 41–42, 121, 77, 233, 271n63; dialogic, polyvocal, 145; literary, 8 Pye, Sir John, 73 Pym, John, 140

Saar, Martin, 139, 140 Sacheverell, Henry, 80–83, 85, 102, 256n42, 258n77 “Sappho.” See Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley Savage, Richard: Johnson’s “Richard Savage,” 201–203. See also Macclesfield, Countess of scribal circulation. See manuscript culture Scriblerus Club, 110 –113, 233– 234; classical literary authority, 111, 113; and literary play, 111, 112; Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, 113. See also Arbuthnot, John; Gay, John; Harley, Robertl Parnell,

Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, 260n100 Ramus, Petrus, 13, 28, 33, 245n9; influence on Whiggism, 13, 31, 33, 63, 142 Rawlinson, Richard, 93; and Curll, 104, 260n98, 271n69; and Hannan, 93 Ray, John, 152, 155, 157, 169, 218, 267nn11–12, 268n22

313

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Thomas; Pope, Alexander; Swift, Jonathan seditious libel, 6–7, 17, 66, 253n10 Seneca, 58 Settle, Elkanah, 16, 186 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 26– 27, 61, 126, 160, 249n54; Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 32, 52, 117, 247n33; Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, 56; Moralists, The, 52; ordered universe, 56, 61; Pope and, 160, 169, 184; Sensus Communis, 53– 55; sociability and, 52–57, 118, 162, 251n81; Soliloquy, 250n63; Thomson and, 160, 169, 268n23; Whiggism of, 17, 27, 31, 32, 42, 52–57, 61, 62, 117, 162, 244n5, 245n16 Shagan, Ethan. 179 Shakespeare, William, 7, 125, 176; editors of, 276n63; Johnson and, 19, 195, 216, 221–224, 230, 277n66; Pope and, 147– 149, 221–222; Rowe and, 221; Theobald and, 147, 222, 277n66; Warburton and, 277n66 Sheffield. See Buckingham and Normanby, Duke of Sheres, Sir Henry, 115–116 Sidney, Sir Philip, 142 Siskin, Clifford, 244n6, 245n13 Sitter, John, 157, 174, 269n26 Skinner, Quentin, 11 Smith, Courtney Weiss, 30 sociability, 42, 46, 47, 55, 58, 162, 245n16; systematic, 53, 56–57, 59; Whiggism and, 59, 61–62. See also Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Socrates, 175

Somers, John Somers, Baron, 182 Sophia, Electress of Hanover, 111, 143 Southcott, Thomas, 101 Southerne, Thomas, 115–116 Spectator, The, 31, 32, 43–44, 118; emulation of new science, 46–47, 61; Mr. Spectator as heuristic device, 46, 51; Newtonian systems, 45, 46; Pleasures of the Imagination, 46–51; shaping civil behavior, 43, 46 Spence, Joseph, 227–228, 230, 277n77, 277n79 Spenser, Edmund, 6, 137, 236 Sprat, Thomas, 13, 27–29, 142, 218; History of the Royal Society, 27–29; plain style, 27–29; and Ramus, 13, 28; and Whig authors, 142 Stanhope, George, 258n77 Star Trek, 13 Statius, 6, 137 St. Clair, William, 14, 242n21 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 49, 250n61 Steele, Richard, 43–44. See also Spectator, The Stephen, Leslie, 270n45 Strachey, Lytton, 185 Strafford, Ann Wentworth (née Campbell), Countess of, 93, 99– 100, 105, 106 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford, 105 Stuart, House of, 81, 100, 106, 140, 143; Catholic line, 66; literature and fall of, 234; legitimacy of Stuart rule, 63, 98 Stuart, James. See under James II, King Stuart, James Francis Edward (“James III”), 36, 66, 81, 89, 101 sublime, the, 10, 26, 51. See also Dennis, John

314

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Sutherland, James, 272n80 Swift, Jonathan, 105, 147, 178, 247n32, 262n12; Johnson and, 209–210; and Pope, 181, 188, 272n79; and the Scriblerians, 110–111, 233

Turner, James Grantham, 127 Trumbull, Sir William, 115 typologies, 141; classical, 84–86, 102, 150, 256n50; historical, 102, 85; scriptural, 83, 102, 256n50; desacralized, 21, 150; Jacobite, 87; Pope and, 21, 102, 125, 150, 178

Talbot, Charles, Duke of Shrewsbury, 182 Tate, Nahum, 109 Tatler, The, 43, 117 Taylor, John, 109 Tenison, Archbishop Thomas, 57 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 145 Terry, Richard, 204, 273n3 Theobald, Lewis: Johnson and, 222, 277n66; Pope and, 16, 147, 186– 188, 222, 277n66 Thomson, James, 17; To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, 153–154, 160 Thomson, James, The Seasons, 18, 27, 235; and Addison, 269n27; and Locke, 160, 169; epic, ode, eco-georgic, 154; lovers killed by lightning, 166–167; Miltonic imitation, 164; panpsychism, 156–159, 170, 267n6; participatory political philosophy, 156; prosody, 164; and physico-theology, 149– 157, 235; and Pope’s Essay on Man, 148–151, 158–169; and Shaftesbury, 160, 169; theodicy, 166; and Whiggish political thought, 27, 62, 149–150, 156 Thornhill, Sir James, 49, 250n61 Tonson, Jacob, 115, 137 Tories, 52–53, 75, 80, 84, 131; fall of the Tory Party, 143–144, 266n71; Hanoverian Tories, 75, 112; Pope and, 102, 143, 150, 179; Shaftesbury and, 53

Vanbrugh, Sir John. 171 Varen, Bernhard, 58 Vareschi, Mark, 279n1 Virgil, 2, 6, 83, 109, 112, 205; Aeneid, 112–13, 261n7, 261n10; and the myth of Pope’s career, 137, 265n60; Scriblerian quotation, 111–112; translation, 176 Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto, 12–13, 143 Walpole, Sir Robert, 172, 174, 175, 186, 188, 204, 205 Warburton, William, 189–190, 277n66 Ward, Edward, 109 Walsh, Marcus, 222 Walsh, William, 115–116, 121, 137, 178, 181–182 Warton, Joseph, 185, 227, 228, 271n68 Warton, Thomas, 220, 278n82 Weinbrot, Howard, 205, 217, 220, 272n39 Wesley, Samuel, 258n258 Wharton, Thomas Wharton, 1st marquess, 115–116 Whiggism, 25–30; belletristic, 42; constitutionalist, 98; didactic, 32, 42; discursive, 42, 62, 68; Junto Whiggism, 29; mixedgovernment state, 27, 46, 61–62, 98, 245n16; and moderation,

315

inde x

William III, King (William of Orange), 3, 4, 25, 26, 35, 38–39, 72, 78, 81, 87, 122, 126, 149, 156, 176, 258n80; compared to Cromwell, 102, 103; legitimacy of accession to throne, 80, 258n80; Letter of Invitation, 61, 66, 107, 139–140; target of Jacobite satire, 86, 102 Williams, Abigail, 26, 43, 104, 164, 179, 243n31, 244n2, 245n12, 252n88 Wimsatt, W. H., 198 Wise, Francis, 220 wit, 28, 138, 200, 201, 236, 239; as civilizing tool, 54; as epidemical disease, 130; to chastise vice, 176 Withers, George, 109 Wordsworth, William, 145, 194 Wray, Daniel, 220 Wren, Sir Christopher, 49–50, 250n61 Wycherly, William, 109, 148, 178, 186, 271n71

150, 179, 191, 270n56; opposition “patriot” whigs, 172; physico-theology, 149, 156, 218; preceptual, 31–34, 42, 43, 122, 247n27; the Protestant succession, 26, 52; scientific, 57– 62; sociability and, 52, 59–61; virtue and just society, 52; the Whig ascendancy, 144, 146 Whig writers, 4, 12, 18, 31, 245nn12–13; enumerative prose, 13; eschew classical and historical models, 104; Ramist influence, 31; public-spirited nationalism, 136; syllogism, 31, 38, 245n19; systemization, 13, 30–31, 42, 57, 63, 64 Whitehall Palace, 126 Wilde, Oscar, 185 William and Mary, reign of, 25, 63, 58, 83, 157; Lockean ontology of exchange, 98; mercantile prosperity, 60; rule of law, 60; Whig ascendancy, 68; Williamite state, 25, 31, 32, 38–39, 60, 66, 107. See also Oath of Allegiance

Zwicker, Steven, 83, 256n47

316