The Invention of Dryden as Satirist

John Dryden has long been central to accounts of eighteenth-century satire. This chapter asks how such accounts have come to be written, and whether there may be new ways of mapping this aspect of the poet, critic, translator, and controversialist. Indeed, one of the chapter’s aims is to question the inevitability of Dryden’s acquiring a reputation as a satirist, both in his own time and in the centuries following. Though we associate the Stuart laureate most closely with the imperial coolness of Absalom and Achitophel, such mastery and control was gained through countless literary skirmishes over the previous two decades. Before we can understand Dryden as satire’s master, this chapter proposes, we must understand him first as its victim.

Augustan Romantics

This chapter examines the influence and persistence of the Augustan tradition upon Romanticism. The role of Horace as an occasionally rather vexed model for both movements is used as a lens to view their complex interrelations. It begins with an account of the role of Horatian satire in framing the Romantic critique of imperialism, before moving on to discuss the Romantic pastoral tradition and its debt to Augustanism. The essay ends with an account of the satirical tradition in the Romantic period, focusing in particular on the writers in the Shelley circle and finding, in the later work of Lord Byron, the quintessential Romantic Augustan.

Satire in the Age of the French Revolution

The idea of a British ‘debate’ on the French Revolution inadequately describes the culture wars of the 1790s, where satire remained a key weapon. Scurrilous works such as Charles Pigott’s Jockey Club (1792) harnessed libellous newspaper innuendo to republican politics. Many who agreed with its politics blanched at its method, but attacks on the royal family and William Pitt abounded, especially in the crisis year of 1795. Prosecutions for libel rose sharply in the decade, but it was an inefficient instrument of repression. Pensions were tried on Peter Pindar and James Gillray, but the policing of culture was also conducted in a series of verse satires that followed William Gifford’s Baviad (1791). Ideological agreement did not stop conservative satirists having their own squabbles about method, especially when it came to questions of ‘personality’. William Boscawen’s Progress of Satire (1798), for instance, suggested that satire in its rough Juvenalian mode might have become inappropriate to modern manners, but any downgrading of satire as a genre scarcely brought a diminution in practice.

‘Little Snarling Lapdogs’

The domestic sphere increases as a subject for satire in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Literary histories assert satire’s decline after 1750 when creative energy shifts towards home, family, nature, individual subjectivity, and private feelings. But the apparent shift towards representations of domesticity does not simply displace but rather offers new opportunities to satire which insinuates itself into modes of writing almost as soon as they are formed and changes the shape they ultimately assume. In contrast to earlier satires on public figures, from royalty and ministers to prostitutes and Grub Street hacks, domestic satire often focuses on families and households, and on the precarious lives of dependants, servants, spinsters, illegitimate offspring, and other persons of socially ambiguous standing. Satire in an age of rising colonialism, economic competition, class struggle, and industrialization, must look beyond court and coffee-house into the parlour where satire has made itself at home.

Against the Experts

This chapter looks at Jonathan Swift’s political satire, focusing on a crucial, seldom-discussed and newly relevant theme: his deep hostility towards specialists and experts. It argues that Swift and his allies understood expertise in terms of a broader anti-technical idea of statesmanship, one that also advocated ‘common sense’ as a positive model for political deliberation, and ‘wit’ as a model for discourse. Satire was a common medium for articulating this programme, often in terms that were themselves doubled and ironized. Swift and many of his associates deplored secrecy and innuendo in political life and, at the same time, appropriated them as modes for oppositional satire. They painted modern instrumental thinking and modern technocratic politics as dull and clumsy, while adopting the discourses of those experts parodically as ‘mock-arts’. It was the interrelations between this group of satirical themes and political topoi that gave them power and significance at the start of the eighteenth century.

Pamela and the Satirists

Reading the Pamela controversy through Eliza Haywood’s still frequently overlooked Anti-Pamela (1741), this chapter demonstrates the failure and undesirability of Samuel Richardson’s efforts to supplant the satirical mode with the sentimental in his first novel. Much of the critical conversation about satire and sentiment in the mid-to-late eighteenth century has, with notable exceptions, positioned these as antagonistic modes. Moreover, the (exaggerated) demise of satire in the face of the tidal wave of sentiment has been often heralded as opening up new possibilities for the articulation of female subjectivity. Anti-Pamela, this chapter argues, undermines such claims. In a satirical novel that would mark a turning point in her career as a sceptical writer of sentimental fiction, Haywood revealed that ‘true’ satire, as opposed to the ‘scurrilous’ satire of which she accused her fellow interlocutor Henry Fielding, was the best antidote to the cultural fictions of gender promoted by the novel.

Believing and Unbelieving in the Dunciad

In The Dunciad in Four Books Pope aimed his satire at the literary and intellectual world of eighteenth-century London, and especially its scholars, editors, and publishers. But Pope’s satire is also directed against contemporary developments in religion and theology. This chapter argues that Pope attacks fashionable ideas about the nature of God and the material world in The Dunciad as a way to explore his own ideas about the complex, often-paradoxical nature of imaginative fiction. Through allusions to the religious debates of his day, Pope encourages readers to link theological anxieties about the individual’s relationship to unseen truth with conceptual uncertainties about the power of literary fictions; to see that fiction, like religion, mediated between unknowable human interiority and the visible external world, and thus occupied an ambiguous, unstable position in relation to empirical phenomena.

The Female Wits

Taking as its focus the satirical play The Female Wits: or, the Triumvirate of Poets at Rehearsal (1696) this chapter reconstructs the satirical milieu around female dramatists at the turn of the eighteenth century. The leading playwright Susannah Centlivre repeatedly claimed that female dramatists only found success where they obscured their gender, with discriminatory attitudes laying them open to ‘the carping Malice of the Vulgar World’. This chapter explores the extent to which this was true, examining whether we should read The Female Wits as a misogynistic silencing of women playwrights, or rather as a work that speaks to their commercial popularity. By contextualizing this analysis through the writings of Centlivre and her contemporaries Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, and Catharine Trotter, as well as considering their treatment in the stage reform debates, the chapter argues that scholars may have overestimated the power of satire to curtail the careers of female dramatists.

Describing Eighteenth-Century British Satire

This introductory chapter looks at the problem of how we should describe eighteenth-century satire, and considers how to place it historically in the British eighteenth century. It gathers key literary extracts and anecdotes from the period, statements in which different discussions of satire intersect with larger ideas about the period’s culture and society. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first looks at satirical commonalities, including the uses of satire in associational life, the body of commonplace critical opinion about its function, and its connection with emerging constructions of British nationhood. The second turns to literary satire’s material forms, looking for patterns in the way it was consumed by readers of printed books. The third moves on from these generalized contexts to examine some of satire’s personal, particular implications, including the question of whether satire should always be general, whether it could avoid referring to individuals.

Thinking about Satire

What did eighteenth-century writers and critics have to say about satire? The relevant primary material is voluminous, including Dryden’s Discourse, Pope’s Epilogue to the Satires, essays and sermons on ridicule, authorial prefaces, and passing strictures upon particular satires. The commentary is often occasional, subjective, and partisan, usually either focusing on single works or operating in the realm of abstraction. Satire was a contentious subject for many readers and writers. It produced anxiety, because of its socio-moral consequences and because of the uncertainties of the form. No consensus existed in the realms of definition, terminology, objective, method, or target. Contemporary attitudes towards satire were decidedly mixed; few in the eighteenth century would consider satire the achievement of the age. But 1660–1745 was the aetas mirabilis of English satire, marked by rich debates about ethics and efficacy, about the aesthetics and humanity of humorous judgement—and a time of satiric production that is, quantitatively and qualitatively, astonishing.