English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century

English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century

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Return to Book Page. These were the Ford Lectures at Oxford University in Leslie Stephen was the first serious critic of the novel, and he was also editor of the great Dictionary of National Biography from its beginning in until In he was ordained a minister. As a tutor at Cambridge his philosophical readings led him to skepticism, and later he relinquished his holy order These were the Ford Lectures at Oxford University in As a tutor at Cambridge his philosophical readings led him to skepticism, and later he relinquished his holy orders.

He wrote several essays defending his agnostic position. Throughout his life Stephen was a prominent athlete and mountaineer. Virginia Woolf was the younger of his two daughters by his second wife. His first wife was Harriet Marian Thackeray, daughter of the novelist.

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Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Ellie Kidger rated it it was ok Oct 05, Christopher Donut rated it really liked it Jan 05, Rick Vetrone rated it really liked it Mar 25, Shanon Queen rated it liked it Aug 30, Britney rated it really liked it Feb 02, Maren rated it it was amazing Mar 10, Em added it Feb 09, Richard marked it as to-read Nov 09, Fevzi Kalem added it Mar 27, Minne marked it as to-read Oct 07, A Tory and nonjuror, Collier targeted his attacks on Whig dramatists like Vanbrugh and Congreve, whose alleged sins were in fact inherited from the tradition of Tory dramatists like Dryden, Etherege, and Behn.

Now, however, there was little disagreement between the political parties about the need for drama to school the elite into morality.

In The History of his Own Time — , Burnet launched a harsh attack on the aristocracy of the Stuart era, presenting the City as the steady bastion of morality and decency. Vanbrugh, Congreve, and other Whig authors replied to Collier by arguing that modern comedies simply mirrored the real state of a lewd and profane aristocracy, which should recognize their need for reform. Collier nonetheless found wide agreement with his case that drama should not just reflect society but rather represent the elite in ways that were appropriately exemplary and edifying.

Literary representation was increasingly acknowledged as having a significant impact on social attitudes. Moreover, the belief that noble or even royal birth carried with it a set of inherent virtues, along with indefeasible prerogatives, could not easily survive the accession of William III, who possessed neither hereditary claims to the throne nor regal graces, even in the eyes of his supporters. This was an audience more likely to be critical of the traditional elite, as well as receptive to the promotion of virtues that flattered its own claims to respect.

The play thus underwrites the beneficial cooperation between commerce and the landed elite rather than their opposition. Nevertheless, these characters all have in common a desire not to take power but rather to thwart the designs of self-interested villains in order to promote the virtuous interests of their landed betters. Merchants cede final authority, for the Financial Revolution by no means effaced traditional suspicions concerning the deleterious effects of a life spent pursuing wealth. Suspicions of commercial greed were intensified by the premiership of Sir Robert Walpole from to In the face of this chaos of social order, in which bad men like Walpole rose from modest origins to positions to power, the theoretical ideal in both the nation and its literary imagination remained the virtuous landed gentleman.

Revisionist historians who insist only on political and social continuities between the Restoration and the late eighteenth century, dwelling solely on the persistence of a royalist and aristocratic ideology, nonetheless underrate the profound effects of the Financial Revolution and the challenge to inherited authority reaffirmed by the Hanoverian Succession in These opposite demands for continuity and change placed authors under pressure to adapt traditional genres to new social realities, generating experimentation and the creation of new literary forms.

Money and commerce, in particular, were regarded as ignoble subjects suitable to comedy and satire. Rather than the mere alternation between tragedy and comedy in a double-plot, dramatists sought to meld these genres into unified forms.

Congreve tried to achieve such a unity in his comedies, particularly The Double Dealer and The Way of the World , where he obeyed the classical unities and introduced serious forms of villainy into a comic plot. For this combination, Congreve was praised by Dryden as his natural successor, a sign of how far this now-prestigious writer had moved from his previously class-based demotion of comedy beneath tragedy. Comedy became more serious and moral.

English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century by Leslie Stephen

But Samuel Johnson, writing in , noted the failure of Rowe to inspire the Aristotelian effects of fear and pity for characters not endowed with royalty and high rank , 2: The dilemma of making tragedy appealing to a broad audience that included both the upper gentry and middle ranks was most successfully resolved by Shakespeare, who underwent a historical revival led by David Garrick, actor and manager of Drury Lane Theatre after the s.

According to this perception, Shakespeare bridged the social and political divisions of the age, for he dramatized human realities shared down the ranks from kings to commoners. Heroic poetry suffered from the same difficulties as tragedy. For example, the Whig and City-based physician Sir Richard Blackmore attempted to revive an English form of the classical epic beginning with Prince Arthur , part of the campaign he shared with Jeremy Collier to reform the representation of the English nobility and gentry.

This satire combined the affectedly high language typical of his epics with bold metaphors drawn from finance and the City. As one of the contributors observed: Although he had some early admirers, Blackmore generally became a laughing-stock of pretentious City-based vulgarity and was later satirized among other poets connected with the City by Pope in The Dunciad — The attempt to lionize the world of trade and commerce was similarly attempted by Edward Young in Imperium Pelagi , better known during the century by the title of its pirated Dublin edition, The Merchant: These attacks were not directed against commerce itself but against the laughable incongruity of combining a noble style with a traditionally plebeian subject.

To the ears of many readers, Blackmore and Young had unintentionally written mock-heroics. Intentional mock-heroic revealed the dilemma of finding a suitable style for the age that combined traditionally elitist tastes with the reality of commercial expansion. Understood as a mixed form that did both, the mock-heroic actually broadened the social range of poetry. Alexander Pope ingeniously reset the mock-heroic in the world of the Catholic aristocracy at Hampton Court in The Rape of the Lock — , satirizing the preoccupation of these fashionable people with luxurious objects gleaned from the expansion of British trade.

Pope was the son of a retired merchant, and his exactly contemporaneous poem, Windsor-Forest , was propaganda for a major trading pact attached to the Treaty of Utrecht, just about to be ratified by the Tory government. The literary technique of Windsor-Forest is worth considering, for Pope avoids the absurd discontinuity of the mock-heroic by referring to international trade only through indirect allusions and metonymy.

Aiming to show the unexpected harmony of supposed opposites, the Stuart monarchy and the expansion of trade, Pope depicts the oaks of the royal forest leaping into the Thames to form fleets. The Thames, in turn, joins Windsor Palace with London, where the river jointly reflects both the seat of government and St. Mary-le-Bow, symbol of the City: Windsor-Forest updates another genre inherited from classical tradition, the pastoral. Virgil was the major model for both of the main forms of the pastoral, the eclogue and the georgic.

English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century : Sir Leslie Stephen :

In an age of major economic development on the land, with the increase of enclosure and the development of new farming techniques, the pastoral presented an opportunity for combining a relatively dignified classical genre with the modern economic world. Like the heroic, however, the eclogue could be used as a poetic style to highlight the jarring disjunction between a noble past and a modern commercial world.

In this poem dedicated to Lord Rutland, the point is rather that the real poor are immoral, squalid, and in need of more responsible supervision by the aristocracy, gentry, and clergy. The eighteenth-century georgic was, however, short-lived and seldom faithful to its Virgilian origins.

First, the language of the new georgic was characteristically derived from the epic, especially Milton. Biographies of Milton by John Toland and Jonathan Richardson passed over his City birth quickly in favor of his landed heritage and grand tour of Italy. As the Tory Johnson complained, his admirers seemed embarrassed by his stint as a schoolmaster.

Actual labor and the worker fell below the abiding demand that poetry obey the restrictions of classically inspired genres aimed at a genteel and classically literate sensibility. As suggested by the rapid decline of georgic imitations during the last quarter of the century, his judgment was widely shared. As the above descriptions suggest, the lines between successful innovation, unintentional absurdity, and deliberate satire had become exceedingly ambivalent and porous. Satire was indeed the most natural response to a perplexed social order where the middle ranks rode the tide of commerce while remaining subservient to royal and aristocratic standards of fashion and prestige.

The two main models of classical satire during the eighteenth century, Horace and Juvenal, both exemplified a kind of enlightened gentility servile to neither titles nor avarice. He served as the main satiric role model for Pope, who similarly valued his independence and self-sufficiency.

Despite its social flexibility, however, satire could not finally fill the role of bridging the gaps in eighteenth-century society or setting up a unifying model of national identity. During the second half of the century, Swift in particular was often attacked for his lack of patriotism or positive ideals, along with his willingness to dwell on low and vulgar realities.

As we have considered, experiments in mixing or reforming the main classical traditions of drama, poetry, and prose led indeed to some popular and critical acclaimed innovations. It is doubtful, however, that any of the older traditions could be fully adapted to the complex and evolving realities of a nation that, while it still maintained a stabilizing commitment to the old elite, was being transformed permanently by the influx of wealth, the financial empowerment of new groups of people, and a vibrant literary marketplace.

The celebrated rise of the novel owed much to these circumstances and to the failure of literary forms linked to a previous kind of social hierarchy. This thesis is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the so-called middling sort incorporated an exceedingly wide and ill-defined range of occupations, incomes, and life-styles from the untitled gentry through to the professions, from great City merchants to moderately prosperous traders and shopkeepers.

Second, this wide range of people had few attitudes that were distinctive or unifying, for they usually regarded the fashions and tastes of the aristocracy and great gentry as the standard of social prestige. It was this upwardly mobile sensibility that disconcerted Samuel Richardson, whose sensational Pamela concerns a servant girl who bravely resists attempted seduction by a rich landed gentleman until he agrees to marry her. Accused by Fielding, Haywood and others of promoting the social ambitions of the serving class, Richardson invented a genteel heritage for his heroine in the sequel of the novel.

This assessment is plausible insofar as the villain Lovelace recalls the libertines of the Restoration stage who demonstrate their elite status through a disdain for the Puritan morality associated with the City. Although the Harlowes have not yet achieved noble rank, modern historians have insisted on the close integration, in part through intermarriage, of the untitled gentry with the nobility in an essentially unified governing class after the Glorious Revolution see Rosenheim Yet Fielding, proud of his own noble connections, flaunts his classical education and genteel wit in the narration of his novels.

The disagreements between Richardson and Fielding were less about the authority of the traditional elite than about the form that this authority should take. Richardson wished the aristocracy to set an example of moral propriety.

In This Article

Although Richardson and Fielding are critical of upper-rank immorality and concern about money, the same can be said of The Way of the World, The Provoked Husband, Windsor-Forest, The Seasons, and innumerable plays and poems of the same time. What really made the novel distinctive from poetry and drama was, instead, its freedom from traditional generic constraints and its effortless social range.

The dignity of the novel certainly suffered from its lack of a noble classical pedigree and its commercial appeal to readers who were well down the social hierarchy.

Nevertheless, novelists could justify the nobility of their form in the name of the classical genres. Richardson described Clarissa a new kind of Christian tragedy By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the novel had gained sufficient authority as a literary genre to enter fully into the debate about the nature of the modern social hierarchy. Gothic novels, though not always radical in their political outlook, dramatized a fascinating world of aristocratic lawlessness and chivalry that now seemed to belong to the distant past or the European continent.

Equally influential were novels of a more conservative kind that resisted social change or, more accurately, attempted to establish new standards of gentility based on virtue and manners rather than title or wealth. James Raven has examined the many largely forgotten novels in the s and s that particularly targeted the vulgar and immoral parvenus who began to invade established circles of privilege. For example, Cecilia presented a scathing critique of immorality, greed, stupidity, and bad manners pervasive in fashionable London society.

Burney also satirized the avarice and vulgarity of the stock-jobber Mr. The main crisis of this novel, however, concerns the love of an heiress to a rich estate, Cecilia, for Mortimer Delvile, scion of a family diminished in wealth but obsessed with its own noble ancestry. Like Richardson and Fielding, Burney does not openly question the natural authority of the landed elite. Nonetheless, her implication that the ruling class should be defined by these qualities, and not just noble lineage, set standards for a reformed and more inclusive social hierarchy.

Rather, eighteenth-century society generally sought stability by maintaining old political structures in the face of economic change and in fearful memory of social upheaval during the Civil War and Interregnum. Literary evolution during this era was highly sensitive to these changes but also to the desire for stability. Harmonizing these opposite forces was not, however, easily accommodated within existing literary genres. Although the eighteenth century was an era of extraordinary experimentation within the traditional genres of drama and poetry, these older models increasingly receded in the face of the commercial tide of the novel.

Generally conservative from its outset, disagreeing about the nature of elite authority rather than its preeminence, the novel seemed uniquely positioned to harmonize rather than exacerbate social difference.

Culture, Society, and Politics in England, — A Collection of Poems on Various Subjects. The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, — Cecilia, or the Memoirs of an Heiress , edited by P. The Peerage of the Eighteenth Century. The Critical Works, 2 vols.

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Johns Hopkins University Press. The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, — The Works of John Dryden 20 vols. University of California Press.

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