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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.