The Eighteenth Century British Literature

H i s t o r i c a l  B a c k g r o u n d

1702 - 14: Reign of Queen Anne

1707: Act of Union unites Scotland and England, which thus become Great Britain

1714 - 60: Rule by House of Hanover: George I (reign 1714 - 27) and George II (reign 1727 - 60)

- neither of the German kings took interest in British affairs, the ministers gain more importance

1721 - 42: Prime Minister Robert Walpole

> John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728), Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild (1743) and Alexander Pope's Dunciad (1728) criticize the Prime Minister's controlling of the House of Commons by buying off its members

1745: The Jacobite Rising, an unsuccessful campaign attempting to restore the Stuart kings to the throne

1760 - 1820: Reign of George II

S o c i e t y  a n d  P h i l o s o p h y

- the nation grew increasingly prosperous through an aggressive marked economy, newly annexed colonies, a lucrative slave trade, the beginnings of industrialism etc.

> common interests linked the British Isles: Ireland produced Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Richard Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, Scotland produced James Thomson, David Hume and James Boswell

- Scepticism: pessimistic view of human nature

> Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) emphasizes the predatory passions in human nature and society

- Empiricism: all knowledge derives from experience, but our senses do not report the world accurately, therefore it is impossible to achieve a reliable knowledge

> Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), John Locke (1632 - 1704), George Berkeley (1685 - 1753), David Hume (1711 - 1776)

> Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man (1734) warns among others against human presumption

- Sentimentalism: the doctrine of natural goodness of man produced a cult of sensibility and rise of philanthropy

> Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)

- Methodism: an evangelical revival brining the gospel to common people, warning them they were all sinners and damned, unless they accepted the amazing grace of salvation through faith

> John Wesley (1703 - 1791), Charles Wesley (1707 - 1788), George Whitefield (1714 - 1770)

L i t e r a t u r e

- Augustan: an analogy of post-civil war England to Augustan Rome, the age of stability after the civil war that followed the assassination of Caesar

- Neoclassical: re-creations and translations of classical Greek and Roman literature; holding to the tradition of the classical literary principles, e.g. the genres of epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral, satire or ode

< influenced by French literature as well as French fashions which were brought over to England by Charles II

- emergence of a new reading public, including upper-class women and the prosperous middle-class of both sexes

- rise of popular periodical essays, miscellaneous collections of verse and prose, newspapers and later magazines

> demands of popular taste, seen as a coarsening and corruption of the arts, are balanced by attempts to make classical literature available in translations: e.g. Alexander Pope's translations of Homer

- codification of the English language: Samuel Johnson's influential Dictionary (1755)

- faith in common sense: the conservative Edmund Burke, the radical Thomas Paine, Samuel Johnson's faith in the common reader
 

S a t i r e

- the dominant mode, modern times are often satirized by the use of classical forms and myths

> Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714) exposes the frivolity of fashionable London by rendering the idle upper-class characters as epic heroes

> Jonathan Swift's The Battle of the Books (1704) mocks the moderns by using epic similes

> John Gay's Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) describes his tour of the city in the form of mock georgics

 

P r o s e

- attempts to achieve the ideal style with the ease and poise of well-bred urbane conversation

> dominated by essayists: Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele

- replaces poetry as the dominating genre to set the standards of literature

> intellectual prose: Samuel Johnson's literary criticism, David Hume's philosophy, Edmund Burke's politics

> informal prose: Frances Burney's memories

> letters: Horace Walpole, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, Frances Burney

N o v e l

- for the first time develops as a major genre on its own

- the earliest types of prose fiction include courtly romance (Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, 1590), Christian allegory (John Bunyan's The Pilgrim Progress, 1678), or fictional history (Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, 1688)

- Daniel Defoe: shows his readers a world they know and introduces the characters of unheroic people who try to cope with practical problems

- Samuel Richardson: perfects the technique of a minute analysis of his characters' mind (Pamela, 1740)

- Henry Fielding: seeks to compose a comic epic-poem in prose (The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, 1749)

- Tobias Smollett: produces picaresque novels full of coarse practical jokes (Roderick Random, 1748)

- Laurence Sterne: experiments with temporal and narrative perspectives (Tristram Shandy, 1760 - 1767)

- sentimental novel: demanded by the popular taste

> Jean Jacques Rousseau's The New Heloise (1761)

- Gothic romance: emerges as a new genre in response to the medieval revival in poetry

> Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796)

D r a m a

- the Restoration comedy of manners is replaced by sentimental comedy, dealing with high moral sentiments, making the goodness triumph over vice and moving the audience to tears rather than laughter

> e.g. Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722) features a man who would rather accept dishonour than to fight a duel with a friend

> in contrast John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728) resists the sentimental mode in favour of a cynical tone

P o e t r y

E a r l i e r  E i g h t e e n t h  C e n t u r y

- the courtly sonnets and lyrics are out of fashion, replaced by descriptive and didactic verse, along with the popular genres of the ballad, hymn and burlesque

- an elegant simplicity: a new restraint, clarity, regularity and good sense contrasting to John Donne's metaphysical poetry or John Milton's bold storming of heaven

> John Dryden's search to create love poetry that engages the hearts of readers instead of perplexing them with philosophical speculation as John Donne's love poetry did

- nature: represented as the universal and permanent element in human experience, while human nature was held to be uniform, human beings were known to be infinitely varied

> Alexander Pope's praise of Shakespeare's characters as 'Nature herself', each of his characters being 'as much an individual as those in life itself', so that it is 'impossible to find any two alike'

- poetic diction: personification ('Ace of Hearts steps forth'), periphrasis (a roundabout way of avoiding homely words, e.g. 'finny tribes' for fish), stock phrases ('shining sword'), forcing English sentences into Latin syntax

- heroic couplet: typically a complete statement in rhymed iambic pentameter closed by a punctuation mark, often with a caesura enforced by the length of the pentameter line

> Alexander Pope brought the heroic couplet to perfection

- blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter not closed in couplets, typically used for philosophical, descriptive, meditative poems, for epics and for drama

> James Thomson's Seasons (1726 - 1730) use blank verse for poetry of natural description

L a t e r  E i g h t e e n t h  C e n t u r y

- develops in several different genres parallelly

- the Graveyard School: preoccupied with images of decay, with medieval ruins and tombs

> Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770)

- medieval revival: cultivates archaic language and antique forms

> Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), James McPherson's Ossianic poems (1760s), Thomas Chatterton's Rowley poems (1770s)

- personal poetry: uses a down-to-earth, humble and intimate tone

> William Cowper's poetry resembles the accents of friendly conversation

> George Crabbe's The Village (1783) seeks to make poetry from and for the lives of common people