Introduction

This introduction outlines the historical, theoretical, and critical basis for the chapters to follow. It emphasizes the significance of the shift from pre-publication licensing in the seventeenth century to post-publication retribution in the eighteenth, and calls for greater attention to censorship, broadly understood, in our thinking about literature after 1695. The cases of William Prynne (1637) and Daniel Isaac Eaton (1812) are used to investigate the semiotics of the pillory as the period’s most conspicuous sanction against seditious and related forms of libel, and the shifting roles of authors, printers, and booksellers as targets of official attention are also considered. Prosecution or the threat of it was not only a constraint on expression, however. It may also be seen as a powerful stimulus to literary creativity and rhetorical complexity, and in particular to strategies of indirection designed to render seditious meaning deniable.

1780–1820 Southey’s New Star Chamber: Literature, Revolution, and Romantic-Era Libel

Phases of high political tension during the Romantic period, notably under Pitt after the French Revolution and under Liverpool following the Napoleonic Wars, indicate the ongoing importance, and sometimes the severity, of press control between 1780 and 1820. But control was becoming more difficult in practice, and the consequences for poetry and other literary genres are sometimes overstated at a time when the overwhelming priority for the authorities was cheap (or worse, free) radical print. This chapter surveys key cases of prosecution and/or pillorying across the period (Daniel Isaac Eaton, Walter Cox, William Hone, William Cobbett), and argues that the writers now central to the Romantic canon were relatively unaffected. The striking exception is Robert Southey, whose incendiary Wat Tyler, which embarrassingly emerged at the height of Southey’s Tory pomp two decades later, is newly contextualized and interpreted.

Conclusion: England in 1820

The startling frankness of Percy Shelley’s poetic response to the Peterloo massacre of 1819, and the relative ease with which it could find its way into print, indicates a major ongoing shift in the boundaries of permissible literary utterance. The shift coincides with a new sense that works written under greater conditions of expressive constraint—Byron’s example is Fielding’s Jonathan Wild—had special kinds of resonance or power not found in present-day political writing. Byron’s comments on Fielding bear witness to the creative stimulus, as much as the constraining power, of literary censorship, and to the rich achievements of the poets, satirists and others who, across the long eighteenth century, danced on the brink of seditious libel.

1730–1780 The Trade of Libelling: Fielding, Johnson

Eighteenth-century cases from Nathaniel Mist and Edmund Curll to John Shebbeare and a printer of Wilkes’s North Briton gave rise to a new satirical trope, frequently found in the 1730–80 period, in which the pillory becomes a tool of self-promotion. The marketability of seditious libel is further illustrated by the aftermath of the Stage Licensing Act (1737), which muted opposition drama but in so doing also boosted opposition print. The Champion, Henry Fielding’s first political journal, is a peculiarly powerful instance of this phenomenon, and highlights the ingenuity of Fielding’s play with codes, disguises, and interpretative cues throughout his literary career. Samuel Johnson, another writer who cut his teeth in the satirical campaign against Walpole after the Stage Licensing Act, was still reflecting, as late as the Lives of the Poets (1779–81), on questions arising from that campaign about censorship, authorship, and the book trade.

1700–1740 Libels in Hieroglyphics: Pope, Defoe

This chapter approaches the 1700–40 period through close study of Defoe and Pope, and focuses especially, for context, on press control under Harley and others during the reign of Queen Anne and under Walpole in the 1720s and 1730s. Early eighteenth-century cases like that of Joseph Browne (which opened up the prosecution of ironic discourse) gave Pope a larger context in which to frame his mockery of Defoe in The Dunciad; they also informed, more broadly, his satirical exploration of the pillory and its meanings throughout the body of his work. New interpretations are offered of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters and the much-mythologized pillorying that ensued. The provocativeness of Defoe’s pamphleteering is contrasted with Pope’s virtuosity, from Windsor Forest to the Epilogue to the Satires, in insinuating seditious hints while remaining within the parameters of acceptable utterance in verse.

1660–1700 Faint Meaning: Dryden and Restoration Censorship

This chapter uses Dryden’s poetry as a case study through which to explore the practical dynamics and literary consequences of censorship across the Restoration period (1660–1700). Though normally seen as a securely established Stuart loyalist—the right place to start, though too crude a category for a poet of his agility, complexity, and irony—Dryden had to navigate political conditions of great instability throughout his career, and was in opposition at key points. Genres considered include elegy, panegyric, mock panegyric, topical application tragedy, fable, and classical translation; texts considered include Heroic Stanzas, Astraea Redux, Mac Flecknoe, The Duke of Guise, The Hind and the Panther, and Dryden’s translation of Juvenal with his discourse on satire. Contexts include the operation of Restoration censorship under Roger L’Estrange, clandestine printing and scribal publication, the significance of the 1679–85 licensing lapse, and the emergence of Jacobite satire from 1689.