A History of English Literature

Overview

After the brilliant achievements of Pope, literary civilization broadened to

include more of the middle class and of women. The aristocratic patron gave

way to the bookseller. After mid-century, the Augustan ‘sense’ of Swift, Pope

and Johnson was increasingly supplemented by Sensibility, with ‘Ossian’, Gray

and Walpole. The novel flourished in the 1740s, with Richardson, Fielding and

Sterne. The latter part of the century saw major achievements in non-fictional

prose, with Johnson, Gibbon and Boswell, a brief revival of drama (Goldsmith,

Sheridan), and a retreat of poetry into privacy and eccentricity.

nThe eighteenth century

The course of the 18th century presents a broad contrast to the disruption and
change of the 17th.A desire for rational agreement, and an increasing confidence,
mark literary culture for a century after 1688. There were cross-currents, exclusions
and developments: the novel arrived in the 1740s, and Augustanism was increasingly
in dialogue with other modes.
England and her empire within the British Isles prospered by improvements in
agriculture and industry, and by trade with an overseas empire at first commercial,
then territorial. In 1740 the Scottish poet James Thomson exhorted Britannia to
rule, and especially to ‘rule the waves’. Having contained Louis XIV in Europe and
eclipsed Holland, Britannia defeated France in India and North America, and domi-
nated the far South Pacific. With more leisure at home, literature gained a reading
public,and through the book trade, periodicals, salons and libraries reached beyond
the Church, the gentry and the professions, and beyond London, Dublin and
Edinburgh. Yet most of the population – nine million, by the end of the century –
could not read.
Much of the religion of a rational Church of England settled into duties, social
and private, though there was the major evangelical revival known as Methodism.
Dissenters and Catholics had civil disabilities, but were tolerated: Dissenters with
condescension, Catholics with mistrust. Toleration was extended to Jews (expelled
from England in 1290) and atheists.

Contents

The eighteenth century 181

The Enlightenment 182

Sense and Sensibility 184

Alexander Pope

century civilization 184

Joseph Addison 184

Jonathan Swift 186

Alexander Pope 189

Translation as tradition 191

The Rape of the Lock 192

Mature verse 194

John Gay 196

Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu 197

The novel 198

Daniel Defoe 198

Cross-currents 200

Samuel Richardson 200

Henry Fielding 201

Tobias Smollett 203

Laurence Sterne 203

The emergence of

Sensibility 205

Thomas Gray 206

Pre-Romantic sensibility:

‘Ossian’ 208

Gothic fiction 210

The Age of Johnson 211

Dr Samuel Johnson 211

The Dictionary 213

Liter ary criticism 216

James Boswell 216

Non-fiction 218

Edward Gibbon 218

Edmund Burke 219

Olive r Goldsmith 220

Fr ances Burney 221

Richard Brinsley Sheridan 221

Christopher Smart 222

William Cowper 223

Robert Burns 224

Further reading 226

181

Augustan Literature:

to 1790

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CHAPTER