David Womersley
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263518
- eISBN:
- 9780191734021
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263518.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This lecture discusses the dividedness shown by Pope in The Dunciad and attempts to offer a new explanation of that dividedness. It seeks the reasons for that dividedness and also dwells on Pope's ...
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This lecture discusses the dividedness shown by Pope in The Dunciad and attempts to offer a new explanation of that dividedness. It seeks the reasons for that dividedness and also dwells on Pope's relationship with the man he identified as a very dull poet, Sir Richard Blackmore. The lecture also argues that Pope acknowledged a kind of precedency in Dulness, and that The Dunciad pays an implicit tribute to the priority of dull poets in general.Less
This lecture discusses the dividedness shown by Pope in The Dunciad and attempts to offer a new explanation of that dividedness. It seeks the reasons for that dividedness and also dwells on Pope's relationship with the man he identified as a very dull poet, Sir Richard Blackmore. The lecture also argues that Pope acknowledged a kind of precedency in Dulness, and that The Dunciad pays an implicit tribute to the priority of dull poets in general.
Jane Spencer
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199262960
- eISBN:
- 9780191718731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262960.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter argues that while literary paternity has been understood in historical terms as set of relationships between real men, literary maternity has been imagined in mythical terms, its common ...
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This chapter argues that while literary paternity has been understood in historical terms as set of relationships between real men, literary maternity has been imagined in mythical terms, its common tropes being that of the male poet as metaphorical mother to his poems, and the poet as son to a maternal goddess. However, a few cases in the 18th and early 19th centuries of female writers who were in real life the mothers of writers began to alter cultural representations of literary maternity. The chapter examines both the negative picture of the mother-goddess presented by Pope in The Dunciad, and the more positive attitude of the later 1700s to poetic inheritance from mother Nature. Cases of mother-son and mother-daughter relationships between writers are examined, including those between Frances and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.Less
This chapter argues that while literary paternity has been understood in historical terms as set of relationships between real men, literary maternity has been imagined in mythical terms, its common tropes being that of the male poet as metaphorical mother to his poems, and the poet as son to a maternal goddess. However, a few cases in the 18th and early 19th centuries of female writers who were in real life the mothers of writers began to alter cultural representations of literary maternity. The chapter examines both the negative picture of the mother-goddess presented by Pope in The Dunciad, and the more positive attitude of the later 1700s to poetic inheritance from mother Nature. Cases of mother-son and mother-daughter relationships between writers are examined, including those between Frances and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.
Freya Johnston
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199251827
- eISBN:
- 9780191719080
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199251827.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter interprets some of Johnson's Lives of the Poets as non-satirical, corrective responses to Pope's Peri Bathous and The Dunciad. Richard Blackmore, for instance, ‘Father of the Bathos’ and ...
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This chapter interprets some of Johnson's Lives of the Poets as non-satirical, corrective responses to Pope's Peri Bathous and The Dunciad. Richard Blackmore, for instance, ‘Father of the Bathos’ and loudest of the braying dunces, gains a moral advantage over the author who had ridiculed him. In the Lives, it is shown that Johnson articulated his preference for a Christian scale of values. Also elicited are the competing senses of 18th-century ‘condescension’ as a good and as a bad quality, dependent on whether the writer has Christian or classical precedents in mind. It teases out the motives behind Johnson's solicitous reactions to Blackmore and to Isaac Watts. The chapter concludes by discussing his commemoration of a semi-literate, indigent physician, ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’: an example of his distinctive art of sinking.Less
This chapter interprets some of Johnson's Lives of the Poets as non-satirical, corrective responses to Pope's Peri Bathous and The Dunciad. Richard Blackmore, for instance, ‘Father of the Bathos’ and loudest of the braying dunces, gains a moral advantage over the author who had ridiculed him. In the Lives, it is shown that Johnson articulated his preference for a Christian scale of values. Also elicited are the competing senses of 18th-century ‘condescension’ as a good and as a bad quality, dependent on whether the writer has Christian or classical precedents in mind. It teases out the motives behind Johnson's solicitous reactions to Blackmore and to Isaac Watts. The chapter concludes by discussing his commemoration of a semi-literate, indigent physician, ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’: an example of his distinctive art of sinking.
Ritchie Robertson
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199571581
- eISBN:
- 9780191722356
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199571581.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 18th-century Literature
Beginning as a mock‐heroic parody of the Aeneid, Pope's Dunciad opens out into a much wider, mock‐epic critique of contemporary culture. The chapter argues that Pope's critique is ambivalent, ...
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Beginning as a mock‐heroic parody of the Aeneid, Pope's Dunciad opens out into a much wider, mock‐epic critique of contemporary culture. The chapter argues that Pope's critique is ambivalent, absorbing the vulgar energies of the popular literary and theatrical forms that it ostensibly rejects. The chapter then explores the vast number of mock epics, mostly with titles ending ‘‐iad’, produced in eighteenth‐century Britain, showing how some develop Pope's satire on science and ‘virtuosos’ (amateur scientists and antiquarians), while others use the genre to dramatize various national stereotypes. The final text discussed, Hayley's The Triumphs of Temper (1781), shows the mock epic approaching the novel.Less
Beginning as a mock‐heroic parody of the Aeneid, Pope's Dunciad opens out into a much wider, mock‐epic critique of contemporary culture. The chapter argues that Pope's critique is ambivalent, absorbing the vulgar energies of the popular literary and theatrical forms that it ostensibly rejects. The chapter then explores the vast number of mock epics, mostly with titles ending ‘‐iad’, produced in eighteenth‐century Britain, showing how some develop Pope's satire on science and ‘virtuosos’ (amateur scientists and antiquarians), while others use the genre to dramatize various national stereotypes. The final text discussed, Hayley's The Triumphs of Temper (1781), shows the mock epic approaching the novel.
Valerie Rumbold
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264775
- eISBN:
- 9780191734984
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264775.003.0013
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter presents the text of a lecture on Alexander Pope's literary satire Dunciad given at the British Academy's 2010 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. This text discusses the difficulty of ...
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This chapter presents the text of a lecture on Alexander Pope's literary satire Dunciad given at the British Academy's 2010 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. This text discusses the difficulty of Samuel Johnson in interpreting Pope's couplet in the Dunciad which depicts the Sea of Azov and the river that flows into it. It suggests that analysing the process through which Pope shaped this couplet can help provide a better understanding of the wider significance of the couplet's structure and Pope's work more generally.Less
This chapter presents the text of a lecture on Alexander Pope's literary satire Dunciad given at the British Academy's 2010 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. This text discusses the difficulty of Samuel Johnson in interpreting Pope's couplet in the Dunciad which depicts the Sea of Azov and the river that flows into it. It suggests that analysing the process through which Pope shaped this couplet can help provide a better understanding of the wider significance of the couplet's structure and Pope's work more generally.
Brean S. Hammond
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112990
- eISBN:
- 9780191670909
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112990.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter comments further on the various contradictions and perplexes embodied in the person and career of Alexander Pope, which have been the genesis of the entire book. It revisits the ...
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This chapter comments further on the various contradictions and perplexes embodied in the person and career of Alexander Pope, which have been the genesis of the entire book. It revisits the paradoxes and complexities of Pope's ideology, concentrating on the elusive nature of the ‘country’ ideology embodied in some of his most significant poetry.Less
This chapter comments further on the various contradictions and perplexes embodied in the person and career of Alexander Pope, which have been the genesis of the entire book. It revisits the paradoxes and complexities of Pope's ideology, concentrating on the elusive nature of the ‘country’ ideology embodied in some of his most significant poetry.
Howard Erskine-Hill
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121770
- eISBN:
- 9780191671296
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121770.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Seen in their political aspect, Pope's works may be divided into two parts, before and after what was for him the most dangerous political crisis of his life: the Atterbury Plot of 1722. Before and ...
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Seen in their political aspect, Pope's works may be divided into two parts, before and after what was for him the most dangerous political crisis of his life: the Atterbury Plot of 1722. Before and after this divide Pope deploys a poetry of obliquity and innuendo which he inherited from the last twelve years of Dryden, but in the transitional 1729 Dunciad, still more so in the Epistles and Imitations of Horace that follow, he blends with his more personal tones a national and oratorical manner. He then becomes one of the strongest voices to articulate a nation-wide campaign of opposition to Britain under the Hanoverian establishment. Pope's earlier work, by comparison, notably The Rape of the Lock, is circumspect, exploratory, delicate, yet wide in implication. This chapter discusses something of these two areas of Pope's work.Less
Seen in their political aspect, Pope's works may be divided into two parts, before and after what was for him the most dangerous political crisis of his life: the Atterbury Plot of 1722. Before and after this divide Pope deploys a poetry of obliquity and innuendo which he inherited from the last twelve years of Dryden, but in the transitional 1729 Dunciad, still more so in the Epistles and Imitations of Horace that follow, he blends with his more personal tones a national and oratorical manner. He then becomes one of the strongest voices to articulate a nation-wide campaign of opposition to Britain under the Hanoverian establishment. Pope's earlier work, by comparison, notably The Rape of the Lock, is circumspect, exploratory, delicate, yet wide in implication. This chapter discusses something of these two areas of Pope's work.
Howard Erskine-Hill
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121770
- eISBN:
- 9780191671296
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121770.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
When Pope published the five-canto version of The Rape of the Lock, on 4 March 1714, a reader who remembered the Miscellany poem would at once have noted three changes. A system of spirits had been ...
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When Pope published the five-canto version of The Rape of the Lock, on 4 March 1714, a reader who remembered the Miscellany poem would at once have noted three changes. A system of spirits had been added to the fable, apparent as early as Canto I, line 2.0. In keeping with this metaphysical expansion an underworld sequence, the visit to the Cave of Spleen, now dominated the aftermath of the rape with some ninety-three lines of further narrative. And now, immediately before the rape, another new narrative sequence, the card-game at Hampton Court, casts its own new light on the central act of the poem. The card-game repeatedly incites to political identification. Pope uses the contemporary pack in the style of Rouen, to suggest different monarchs and monarchies. Pope's Dunciad of 1728 and 1729 are visionary dream-poems, partly in that they are filled with the idea and rituals of royalty. Three levels of royalty, however, mingle entrancingly in Pope's dream-world.Less
When Pope published the five-canto version of The Rape of the Lock, on 4 March 1714, a reader who remembered the Miscellany poem would at once have noted three changes. A system of spirits had been added to the fable, apparent as early as Canto I, line 2.0. In keeping with this metaphysical expansion an underworld sequence, the visit to the Cave of Spleen, now dominated the aftermath of the rape with some ninety-three lines of further narrative. And now, immediately before the rape, another new narrative sequence, the card-game at Hampton Court, casts its own new light on the central act of the poem. The card-game repeatedly incites to political identification. Pope uses the contemporary pack in the style of Rouen, to suggest different monarchs and monarchies. Pope's Dunciad of 1728 and 1729 are visionary dream-poems, partly in that they are filled with the idea and rituals of royalty. Three levels of royalty, however, mingle entrancingly in Pope's dream-world.
Simon Jarvis
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182955
- eISBN:
- 9780191673924
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182955.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
The principal textual-critical responses to Alexander Pope's editorial work were prompted by a desire to contest the view that the disinterested gentleman of letters was the best custodian of William ...
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The principal textual-critical responses to Alexander Pope's editorial work were prompted by a desire to contest the view that the disinterested gentleman of letters was the best custodian of William Shakespeare's text. This disagreement with the presuppositions of Pope's work had important consequences for the project of using critical editing to help polish and refine the English language. It also prompted in part the Dunciad's new and more complex representation of minute criticism. In Pope's later satire on excessively minute criticism both the interested specialist and the leisured dilettante are taken as potential corruptors of the text. Moreover, excessively minute scholarship is taken, both in the Dunciad and in a number of other works of the 1730s, not only as low and interested, but as complicit with, and akin to, arbitrary government.Less
The principal textual-critical responses to Alexander Pope's editorial work were prompted by a desire to contest the view that the disinterested gentleman of letters was the best custodian of William Shakespeare's text. This disagreement with the presuppositions of Pope's work had important consequences for the project of using critical editing to help polish and refine the English language. It also prompted in part the Dunciad's new and more complex representation of minute criticism. In Pope's later satire on excessively minute criticism both the interested specialist and the leisured dilettante are taken as potential corruptors of the text. Moreover, excessively minute scholarship is taken, both in the Dunciad and in a number of other works of the 1730s, not only as low and interested, but as complicit with, and akin to, arbitrary government.
Simon Jarvis
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182955
- eISBN:
- 9780191673924
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182955.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
Few eighteenth-century editions of William Shakespeare can have been so little illuminated by chroniclers of the subject as William Warburton's. It is not the purpose of this discussion to right an ...
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Few eighteenth-century editions of William Shakespeare can have been so little illuminated by chroniclers of the subject as William Warburton's. It is not the purpose of this discussion to right an imaginary wrong, but to suggest that Warburton's supposed vanity and ignorance do not of themselves explain either the claims made in his preface or the character of his edition. Warburton's edition represents an attempt to go beyond the complementary inadequacies of the two kinds of verbal criticism satirised in the fourth book of the Dunciad and criticised in Warburton's own preface. Warburton wishes to display his command both of the attention to literal detail and bibliographical learning of the merely professional critic, and of the taste and more discriminating learning which the gentleman of letters may possess.Less
Few eighteenth-century editions of William Shakespeare can have been so little illuminated by chroniclers of the subject as William Warburton's. It is not the purpose of this discussion to right an imaginary wrong, but to suggest that Warburton's supposed vanity and ignorance do not of themselves explain either the claims made in his preface or the character of his edition. Warburton's edition represents an attempt to go beyond the complementary inadequacies of the two kinds of verbal criticism satirised in the fourth book of the Dunciad and criticised in Warburton's own preface. Warburton wishes to display his command both of the attention to literal detail and bibliographical learning of the merely professional critic, and of the taste and more discriminating learning which the gentleman of letters may possess.
Paul Baines and Pat Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199278985
- eISBN:
- 9780191700002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278985.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter discusses how Curll's annus horribilis of 1728 changed his image as an outright scoundrel to a figure of major public importance. It details that within weeks of his descent from the ...
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This chapter discusses how Curll's annus horribilis of 1728 changed his image as an outright scoundrel to a figure of major public importance. It details that within weeks of his descent from the ‘rostrum’ at Charing Cross, he was pilloried more cruelly in The Dunciad. Moreover, it explains the nature of Pope's dealings with Curll in The Dunciad. It also notes that Pope enlisted his knowledge of the book trade when he set the scene for the booksellers' games at a very particular location and that the locale chosen releases one more satiric charge, that the site was used when criminals stood in the pillory. It presents a list of several items in reply to The Dunciad which Curll certainly wrote himself.Less
This chapter discusses how Curll's annus horribilis of 1728 changed his image as an outright scoundrel to a figure of major public importance. It details that within weeks of his descent from the ‘rostrum’ at Charing Cross, he was pilloried more cruelly in The Dunciad. Moreover, it explains the nature of Pope's dealings with Curll in The Dunciad. It also notes that Pope enlisted his knowledge of the book trade when he set the scene for the booksellers' games at a very particular location and that the locale chosen releases one more satiric charge, that the site was used when criminals stood in the pillory. It presents a list of several items in reply to The Dunciad which Curll certainly wrote himself.
Paul Baines and Pat Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199278985
- eISBN:
- 9780191700002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278985.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter discusses how during the end of the 1720s, Curll engaged in fewer co-publishing ventures. Many of his earlier partners in the book trade had gone out of business. It explains that some ...
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This chapter discusses how during the end of the 1720s, Curll engaged in fewer co-publishing ventures. Many of his earlier partners in the book trade had gone out of business. It explains that some of the reasons for this isolation went back to Curll's business practices and personal life. It mentions Curll's advertisement of a new translation of a book, dating from 1692, by the ever-willing Thomas Foxton, Thomas Burnet, and a widely read author who had died in 1715. It discusses how The Dunciad caused Curll's publishing output to drop to a lower tally in 1729 than in most previous years. It then mentions the Grub-street Journal, which was described as a kind of serialized Dunciad. It details Curll's efforts to crawl his way back into official favour, which started when he wrote his letter to Lord Townshend.Less
This chapter discusses how during the end of the 1720s, Curll engaged in fewer co-publishing ventures. Many of his earlier partners in the book trade had gone out of business. It explains that some of the reasons for this isolation went back to Curll's business practices and personal life. It mentions Curll's advertisement of a new translation of a book, dating from 1692, by the ever-willing Thomas Foxton, Thomas Burnet, and a widely read author who had died in 1715. It discusses how The Dunciad caused Curll's publishing output to drop to a lower tally in 1729 than in most previous years. It then mentions the Grub-street Journal, which was described as a kind of serialized Dunciad. It details Curll's efforts to crawl his way back into official favour, which started when he wrote his letter to Lord Townshend.
Christine Gerrard
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198183884
- eISBN:
- 9780191714122
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183884.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
During his lifetime Aaron Hill was one of the most lively cultural patrons and brokers on the London literary scene — an image hard to square with the company of undistinguished scribblers to which ...
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During his lifetime Aaron Hill was one of the most lively cultural patrons and brokers on the London literary scene — an image hard to square with the company of undistinguished scribblers to which Pope relegated him in the Dunciad. This book aims to correct the distorted picture of the Augustan cultural scene which Pope passed down to posterity. Hill deliberately confronted Pope in his attempt to free poetry's sublime and visionary potential from the stale platitudes of neo-classical convention. An early champion of women poets, he also enjoyed close relationships with Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke, and brought his three writing daughters Urania, Astrea, and Minerva into close contact with his lifelong friend the novelist Samuel Richardson. In 1711 Hill, as stage manager and librettist, introduced Handel to the English stage, as well as lobbying tirelessly for innovation in the 18th-century theatre. His entrepreneurial energies, directed at both commercial and cultural projects, mirror the zeitgeist of early Hanoverian Britain.Less
During his lifetime Aaron Hill was one of the most lively cultural patrons and brokers on the London literary scene — an image hard to square with the company of undistinguished scribblers to which Pope relegated him in the Dunciad. This book aims to correct the distorted picture of the Augustan cultural scene which Pope passed down to posterity. Hill deliberately confronted Pope in his attempt to free poetry's sublime and visionary potential from the stale platitudes of neo-classical convention. An early champion of women poets, he also enjoyed close relationships with Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke, and brought his three writing daughters Urania, Astrea, and Minerva into close contact with his lifelong friend the novelist Samuel Richardson. In 1711 Hill, as stage manager and librettist, introduced Handel to the English stage, as well as lobbying tirelessly for innovation in the 18th-century theatre. His entrepreneurial energies, directed at both commercial and cultural projects, mirror the zeitgeist of early Hanoverian Britain.
CHRISTINE GERRARD
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198183884
- eISBN:
- 9780191714122
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183884.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter discusses Hill's schemes and projects from 1712 to 1721. Hill, like another of The Dunciad's victims, Daniel Defoe, devoted much of his early maturity to the obsessive pursuit of ...
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This chapter discusses Hill's schemes and projects from 1712 to 1721. Hill, like another of The Dunciad's victims, Daniel Defoe, devoted much of his early maturity to the obsessive pursuit of ‘projects.’ Hill's subsequent notoriety as a failed beech-oil projector was harder to shake off than Defoe, but the drive which led them to pursue the application of scientific process to commercial venturism makes them in some sense more characteristic of the age than the satirist who targeted them as ‘dunces.’ He produced two volumes of essays to air the numerous schemes and projects teeming in his fertile brain, from the establishment of chinaware manufacture and vineyards in Britain, through to techniques to repair Dragenham Breech, and the foundation of engineering and agricultural colleges. Hill and Defoe were products of the enterprise culture which reached its apotheosis and its nadir in 1720, the year of the South Sea Bubble disaster.Less
This chapter discusses Hill's schemes and projects from 1712 to 1721. Hill, like another of The Dunciad's victims, Daniel Defoe, devoted much of his early maturity to the obsessive pursuit of ‘projects.’ Hill's subsequent notoriety as a failed beech-oil projector was harder to shake off than Defoe, but the drive which led them to pursue the application of scientific process to commercial venturism makes them in some sense more characteristic of the age than the satirist who targeted them as ‘dunces.’ He produced two volumes of essays to air the numerous schemes and projects teeming in his fertile brain, from the establishment of chinaware manufacture and vineyards in Britain, through to techniques to repair Dragenham Breech, and the foundation of engineering and agricultural colleges. Hill and Defoe were products of the enterprise culture which reached its apotheosis and its nadir in 1720, the year of the South Sea Bubble disaster.
CHRISTINE GERRARD
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198183884
- eISBN:
- 9780191714122
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183884.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
One side of Aaron Hill's character — the entrepreneur, man of action, and practical improver — was left unsatisfied by the cloying intensity of the Hillarian Circle with its hidden intimacies and ...
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One side of Aaron Hill's character — the entrepreneur, man of action, and practical improver — was left unsatisfied by the cloying intensity of the Hillarian Circle with its hidden intimacies and literary rivalries. Hill's financial fortunes became bound up with the Yorks Building Company, which was originally founded as a waterworks in 1675 on the London site now occupied by Charing Cross Station. Hill's Scottish activities in 1727-1728 absented him from London literary life at the very point that Pope chose to immortalise him as a Dunce. Though critical of the poem's ‘lowness,’ Hill shared The Dunciad's underlying vision of a nation in cultural decline. Like Pope, he too came to identify the Walpole oligarchy with the forces of dullness. Hill's intensely personal castigation of Pope's moral failings throws into focus the almost sado-masochistic nature of the relationship between the two writers.Less
One side of Aaron Hill's character — the entrepreneur, man of action, and practical improver — was left unsatisfied by the cloying intensity of the Hillarian Circle with its hidden intimacies and literary rivalries. Hill's financial fortunes became bound up with the Yorks Building Company, which was originally founded as a waterworks in 1675 on the London site now occupied by Charing Cross Station. Hill's Scottish activities in 1727-1728 absented him from London literary life at the very point that Pope chose to immortalise him as a Dunce. Though critical of the poem's ‘lowness,’ Hill shared The Dunciad's underlying vision of a nation in cultural decline. Like Pope, he too came to identify the Walpole oligarchy with the forces of dullness. Hill's intensely personal castigation of Pope's moral failings throws into focus the almost sado-masochistic nature of the relationship between the two writers.
Paula McDowell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226456966
- eISBN:
- 9780226457017
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457017.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter is the first detailed analysis of the topos of “Billingsgate eloquence” in Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry, periodical essays, novels, rhetorical discourse, and satiric prints. ...
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This chapter is the first detailed analysis of the topos of “Billingsgate eloquence” in Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry, periodical essays, novels, rhetorical discourse, and satiric prints. Billingsgate was a fish market, and Billingsgate fishwives were street vendors who relied on their voices to sell their goods. After providing historical background on these working women, this chapter scrutinizes representations of fishwives' voices in verbal and visual texts. In eighteenth-century Britain, "Billingsgate" came to signify a type of discourse, and this chapter argues that authors and artists used the trope of Billingsgate eloquence to work through growing anxieties pertaining to print commerce and to politeness. Critics used representations of oral discourse to comment on the expanding world of print. A surprising number of depictions of fishwives suggest concerns regarding the consequences of literacy: particularly, traditionally elite oratorical skills supposedly being surrendered through negligence to “vulgar” (sometimes threatening) social groups. Fishwives are often depicted as shaming literate gentlemen. Meanwhile, elocutionists argued that "bookish gentlemen's" reliance on texts was undermining their speaking skills. Examining the relationship between the trope of Billingsgate rhetoric and the oral practices of fishwives can help explain the use of this trope by rhetoricians such as Adam Smith.Less
This chapter is the first detailed analysis of the topos of “Billingsgate eloquence” in Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry, periodical essays, novels, rhetorical discourse, and satiric prints. Billingsgate was a fish market, and Billingsgate fishwives were street vendors who relied on their voices to sell their goods. After providing historical background on these working women, this chapter scrutinizes representations of fishwives' voices in verbal and visual texts. In eighteenth-century Britain, "Billingsgate" came to signify a type of discourse, and this chapter argues that authors and artists used the trope of Billingsgate eloquence to work through growing anxieties pertaining to print commerce and to politeness. Critics used representations of oral discourse to comment on the expanding world of print. A surprising number of depictions of fishwives suggest concerns regarding the consequences of literacy: particularly, traditionally elite oratorical skills supposedly being surrendered through negligence to “vulgar” (sometimes threatening) social groups. Fishwives are often depicted as shaming literate gentlemen. Meanwhile, elocutionists argued that "bookish gentlemen's" reliance on texts was undermining their speaking skills. Examining the relationship between the trope of Billingsgate rhetoric and the oral practices of fishwives can help explain the use of this trope by rhetoricians such as Adam Smith.
Philip Connell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199269587
- eISBN:
- 9780191820496
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199269587.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
The book’s final chapter surveys the career of Alexander Pope, with a particular emphasis on his religious beliefs and their complex relation to his developing identity as a poet of political ...
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The book’s final chapter surveys the career of Alexander Pope, with a particular emphasis on his religious beliefs and their complex relation to his developing identity as a poet of political opposition. An introductory section on the Essay on Man demonstrates the subtlety with which Pope negotiated questions of political and confessional allegiance in verse; similar claims are subsequently extended to his early poems An Essay on Criticism and Windsor Forest. The poet’s relationship with the opposition leader, Lord Bolingbroke, provides a vital context for reading the Horatian satires of the 1730s and, more particularly, their increasingly anti-clerical tendency. Pope’s withdrawal from such political engagements played an important part in his late friendship with William Warburton, and the critique of whig free-thinking in the four book Dunciad of 1743.Less
The book’s final chapter surveys the career of Alexander Pope, with a particular emphasis on his religious beliefs and their complex relation to his developing identity as a poet of political opposition. An introductory section on the Essay on Man demonstrates the subtlety with which Pope negotiated questions of political and confessional allegiance in verse; similar claims are subsequently extended to his early poems An Essay on Criticism and Windsor Forest. The poet’s relationship with the opposition leader, Lord Bolingbroke, provides a vital context for reading the Horatian satires of the 1730s and, more particularly, their increasingly anti-clerical tendency. Pope’s withdrawal from such political engagements played an important part in his late friendship with William Warburton, and the critique of whig free-thinking in the four book Dunciad of 1743.
