Periodicals carried literary essays on civilized neutral topics, including literature
itself. The status of literature is shown also by the sums subscribed for editions of
Prior and Pope, and the authority accorded to Addison, Chesterfield, Johnson,
Burke, Gibbon. Johnson’s Dictionary was a monument to English letters, as were his
edition of Shakespeare and his Lives of the English Poets – in sixty-eight quarto
volumes. There were literary crazes, for Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Macpherson’s
‘Ossian’, and Gothic fiction. The neo-classicism prevailing until mid-century held
that Art should imitate Nature or reality; but the success of literature became such
that Nature began to imitate Art. Country estates were designed to look ‘natural’ or
pleasingly wild; owners put up picturesque hermitages and ruins in which to expe-
rience literary feelings.
Much 18th-century literature has a polite or aristocratic tone, but its authors were
largely middle-class, as were its readers. The art of letters had social prestige, and
poets found patrons among the nobility, who also wrote. Congreve, Prior and
Addison rose high in society, and so, despite his disadvantages, did Pope: ‘Above a
patron, though I condescend / Sometimes to call a minister my friend’. The book-
sellers who commissioned Johnson’s Lives of the Poets asked him to include several
noblemen alongside Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope. Fiction was less polite and
more commercial than poetry. In Johnson’s Dictionary the prose writer most cited is
Samuel Richardson, a joiner’s son who became a printer and finally a novelist.
Johnson himself was a bookseller’s son. The pioneer realist Daniel Defoe was a hack
journalist who lived by his pen. Defoe and Richardson had a concern with individ-
ual consciousness, which evolved out of the Protestant anxiety about personal salva-
tion, as seen in John Bunyan. Defoe and Richardson were Dissenters. Henry
Fielding, an Anglican, scorned Richardson’s concern with inwardness, and attacked
social abuses.The Enlightenment
The Enlightenmentis a name given by historians of ideas to a phase succeeding the
Renaissance and followed (though not ended) by Romanticism. The Enlightenment182 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790
Hanoverian England
(1714–1830) George I,
James I’s Protestant great-
grandson, was Elector of the
German state of Hanover, and
he and his successors,
George II, III and IV of
England, were Hanoverians.
So were their successors,
William IV and Victoria, but
‘Hanoverian England’ usually
refers to the reigns of the four
Georges.
Enlightenment(German:
Aufklärung) A period of
intellectual progress in the
18th century, when it was
hoped that Reason would
clear away the superstition of
darker ages.
Public events of the time of Pope
1702 William dies. Anne reigns (to 1714)
1704 Marlborough defeats the French and the Bavarians at Blenheim
1706 Marlborough defeats Louis XIV at Ramillies
1707 Union of the Scottish Parliament with that of England at Westminster
1710 Fall of the Whigs. Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral completed. Act of Copyright
1713 Treaty of Utrecht ends the War of Spanish Succession. British gains
1714 Anne dies. The Hanoverian succession: George I reigns (to 1727)
1715 Fall of the Tories. Jacobite rising defeated
1721 Walpole Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Treasury (to 1742)
1727 George I dies. George II reigns (to 1760)
1730 Methodist Society is begun in Oxford
1734 Lloyd’s List (of shipping) begins
1743 War of Austrian Succession: George II defeats the French at Dettingen
1745 Jacobite army reaches Derby, then withdraws