English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789

David Fairer

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317892878
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism

In recent years the canon of eighteenth-century poetry has greatly expanded to include women poets, labouring-class and provincial poets, and many previously unheard voices. Fairer's book takes up the challenge this ought to pose to our traditional understanding of the subject.

This book seeks to question some of the structures, categories, and labels that have given the age its reassuring shape in literary history. In doing soFairer offers a fresh and detailed look at a wide range of material.

Chapter 1
Between Manuscript and Print

The manuscript looks like a printed book. Its nineteen leaves are written with meticulous care in a small italic hand that mimics type. The lines are neatly spaced just as on a printed page, including even the ‘catchwords’ (the first word of the next page set in each right-hand corner). There are running headlines, and in the titles of the four poems each large individual capital letter is elegantly shaped. It seems newly delivered from the printing house.

The text is Alexander Pope’s handwritten manuscript of his own ‘Pastorals’, done in 1704 at the age of sixteen.¹ He would not see them in print for another five years, but already he was thinking of what they should look like. This superfine copy was made so that his first work could be read by possible patrons and men of influence, and the teenager succeeded brilliantly. On the opening page, just opposite his introductory ‘Essay on Pastoral’, Pope proudly writes: ‘This Copy is that wch past thro the hands of Mr Walsh, Mr Congreve, Mr Mainwaring, Dr Garth, Mr Granville, Mr Southern, Sr H. Sheers, Sr W. Trumbull, Ld Halifax, Ld Wharton, Marq. of Dorchestr. D. of Bucks. &c.’ – a sparkling list of practising poets and literary connoisseurs from the aristocracy, the professions, and the world of public affairs. As the manuscript circulated amongst them, corrections or re-wordings were suggested, and Pope accepted some of them as he continued to revise his work. However, one figure missing from Pope’s roll-call of literary gentlemen is the manuscript’s most important reader of all – the publisher Jacob Tonson.² Tonson, the foremost printer-bookseller of the age, could claim the copyright for Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden, and in Pope he spotted another star in the making. It was he who launched the young man’s poetic career by publishing the Pastorals in his 1709 Miscellany.

We are between two worlds here. On one side is a cultural elite, circulating, judging and correcting Pope’s manuscript, and on the other is a shrewd businessman eager to add him to his publisher’s list. Throughout the rest of his writing career (1709–1744) Pope would bestride these worlds. He formed for himself a network of influential and cultured friends whose tastes and interests he shared (and helped to shape), but at the same time he was the writer who, more than any other, manipulated the world of print to his own advantage. Out of the first he achieved a virtually unassailable cultural authority, and out of the second he made his fortune.

Pope was only the most successful exploiter of a period in poetry’s development when the cultures of manuscript and print overlapped and engaged with each other as never before, and it is this concept of a fruitful interplay between the two modes (collaborative as much as antagonistic) that will guide this chapter. Rather than see an ‘old’ world being replaced by a ‘new’ one (a democratised print culture displacing a courtly manuscript culture; or innovatory ‘Moderns’ battling with traditional ‘Ancients’³), I want to explore some of the ways in which the two modes worked with, and even mimicked, each other, and see how poets relished their entanglements. At the same time, the aim is to use the poetic texts to bring into focus some of the preoccupations of recent cultural historians – politeness, print capitalism, and the public sphere – while being conscious of the tensions and contradictions that make it dangerous to generalise about the period. The London of Tonson and Pope was in many ways an impolite world that talked much about politeness, an emerging capitalist market that exploited networks of patronage, a world that published the private, and cheated as much as it debated. The literary scene in the period 1700–44 cannot truthfully be called a single ‘culture’, and even that term (as we now use it) risks oversimplifying diversity. There were growing pressures, and therefore new possibilities. Many writers were aware of becoming ‘authors’ in a confused marketplace where the status of any text might suddenly be transformed from private to public, where its readership might alter overnight, its origins and ownership be disputed, or its meanings twisted. In offering an angle of entry into the poetry of the period through this confusion, I find it useful to think in terms of the cultural implications of a creative interplay between manuscript and print.

During the earlier ‘Restoration’ period (the reign of Charles the Second, 1660–85) much poetry circulated in manuscript, and both gentlemen and ladies had their private commonplace books into which they could transcribe copies of others’ verses as well as their own. A poetical taste and ready wit were the expected accomplishments of any ‘man of affairs’, and upper-class women could cultivate the former while knowing when to conceal the latter. An aristocrat or busy politician might also employ a professional scribe to compile a poetical miscellany for him. Many of these handwritten books still survive, and the practice continued until 1750 and beyond.⁴ But by the first decade of the new century the market for printed poetry was greatly increasing. The new polite literary journals, The Tatler (1709–11), Spectator (1711–12, 14), and Guardian (1713) stimulated a taste for verse. Cheap reprints began to be widely available, and poetry miscellanies of all kinds enjoyed a surge in popularity. Arthur Case’s bibliography records 57 different printed miscellanies for the period 1651–75; 63 for 1676–1700; 113 for 1701–25; and 136 for 1726–50 (the increase in sales was even sharper, given that after 1700 items tended to run into many more editions).⁵ The old network of poetic patronage did not break down, but found new ways of exerting its influence in the print market.⁶ The Whig grandees who had been the cultural establishment since the time of Charles the Second became the nucleus of the celebrated Kit-Kat Club. Their patronage system, presided over by Lords Somers and Halifax, developed a ‘publishing arm’ in Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, authors of The Spectator, and they in turn nurtured new poetic talent and helped channel it into print. At Button’s Coffee-House, where Addison presided over the poetry scene, aspiring writers for The Guardian could post their contributions into a letter-box shaped like a lion’s head.⁷

By 1725 there was an extensive nationwide network of printers and booksellers,⁸ but the London trade was dominant, especially in its close working relationship with the literary culture of the metropolis, where poetical clubs and coteries of ‘wits’ formed, dissolved, and re-formed as political alliances shifted. Individual coffee-houses developed a distinct literary or political character. They took in journals and pamphlets, and a poem or letter headed ‘Will’s Coffee-House’ could be in print the next day.⁹ More than ever before there was an easy and tempting access to publication, and some booksellers had a network of writers to supply copy, edit material, or pass on manuscript poems that came their way. They distributed their sale catalogues among coffee-houses with a literary clientele, and might hold book auctions there, as Edmund Curll did at the Temple Coffee-House near his shop. It has been calculated that by 1739 London had 551 coffee-houses and two thousand clubs.¹⁰ The sheer concentration of cultural forces inside the six square miles of the capital meant that the circulation of ideas was rapid and diverse, and generated considerable energy. ‘By visiting four or five coffeehouses one might meet most of the leading scientists, theologians, and writers of the day – and hear talk about the others’.¹¹ To this list we could add financiers, printers, journalists and politicians. The seething metropolitan world stamped its character on much of the poetry of the 1700–44 period. Now extending beyond the restricted ambit of the court, this busy, sociable, literate and eloquent society formed an arena for the kind of cultural debate that could no longer be seen as ‘elite’ and was much more attuned to our modern concept of ‘public opinion’.

In a theory that has been extremely influential on recent eighteenth-century cultural studies, Jürgen Habermas saw this world of the coffee-house and of Addison and Steele’s Spectator as inaugurating, and virtually defining, what he called ‘the public sphere’.¹² His far-reaching term (Öffentlichkeit in German – roughly the equivalent of the Russian glasnost, ‘openness’) is a conceptual space (i.e. a cultural atmosphere) liberated from the Court and State on the one side (i.e. public authority and state power), and on the other from the ‘private realm’ constrained by the family within the system of civil society. In Habermas’s ‘public sphere’ people come together not as private selves or instruments of the state, but as disinterested individuals meeting for ‘rational critical debate’, free of party- or self-interest. Habermas is easier to summarise than to quote, and the fine tunings and larger-scale revisions of his theory that have proliferated in recent years are usually clearer and more carefully historicised than the original. His theory has been criticised for largely excluding the role of women, and I think this is linked to a more deep-seated problem with his categories: Habermas’s stress on disinterested rational discussion simply won’t fit the literary playground explored in this opening chapter, which like any playground has its cheats, sneaks, and bullies. The ‘public sphere’ pictured here is not separated out from state power or the private realm – on the contrary, its poetry exploits both systems by entangling courtly and bourgeois codes (Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot is an example). Something was clearly happening to the old establishment in the difficult move from a court politics to a more national politics in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland (which saw the creation of ‘Great Britain’ under a single parliament). But the debate at all levels of society, from the court to the political clubs, was never free of faction and self-interest, and the poetry of the period is everywhere marked by such divisions.

In a literary culture becoming obsessed with ‘publication’, the notion of an emergent ‘public sphere’ of debate is a useful one, but it was much more contested and impolite than Habermas allows, and in the figures of Robert Harley, Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu we have three representatives of Court and State who played an active part in it. Habermas stresses Addison’s project for encouraging polite debate through the influence of The Spectator; but another significant person, Edmund Curll, the publishing pirate, also thrived in the new market-place. This chapter argues that, just as the London print market was acutely conscious of exploiting the manuscript, so the poets who supplied them could make tactical use of publication and manipulate the printed medium as part of the meaning of their work. Print capitalism and cultural capital fed each other.¹³

Between the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the financial crash known as the ‘South Sea Bubble’ (1720), poetry began engaging with the new economic model being established in the metropolis. Concepts of value, integrity and permanence were having to defend themselves in a society where the old ‘wealth’ of land and property was transforming into a dynamic concept of ‘money’. Success came to those who mastered the new fluid economy of production-circulation-consumption. These were the decades when our modern notion of an ‘economy’ began, and the distinction between manuscript and print reflects this – but not in quite the way we might expect. It is true that printed material circulated far more swiftly and unpredictably, and was responsive to variables like supply and demand, profit and loss. At the same time, however, a manuscript (such as a letter) has a fluidity and intimacy that printing lacks. A handwritten poem or note can be spontaneous, immediate, private and personalised, while a printed text is fixed, authorised, published, marketed, and finally criticised by a ‘public’. But just as Pope’s manuscript mimicked the licensed dignity of print, so printed works could play with elements of the casual, unlicensed and surreptitious. There is no simple equation here, and generalisations are dangerous. What can be said, I think, is that poets were alert to these factors and creatively exploited the tensions between them. Such contradictions sharpened their wits and helped give them an awareness of duality (between public and private, laboured and spontaneous, fixed and fluid). Some of the power of early eighteenth-century satire, for example, comes from its resourcefulness in exploiting the interplay between authoritative broadcast statement and a more elusive personalised suggestiveness. Poets of the period are acutely conscious of the medium through which their thoughts are being conveyed, and the uncertainties of reception by a reading public make them sensitive about how they are projecting and directing their voices.

This was an especially complex issue for women poets, who had to negotiate the problem of speaking in public at a time when such a thing was repeatedly cautioned against, even in normal conversation. The Ladies Library (1714) warned that ‘a young Lady should never speak, but for Necessity, and even then with Diffidence and Deference’ (e.g. ask politely for the butter). She should have the prudence ‘to know when to talk and when to be silent’.¹⁴ A caricature of the ‘female philosopher’ or ‘petticoat-author’ was a favourite turn on the comic stage (Lady Knowell, Mrs Lovewit, or Phoebe Clinket), and the woman writer was caught between being an unsexed scholarly pedant or an over-amorous poetess who had crossed the line of respectability. The frontispiece to volume one of The Ladies Library shows a woman sitting in a library poring over a huge printed volume, her head propped on her hand as she concentrates hard, while beneath her are two naked cupids sitting amongst discarded love letters. Between print and manuscript, she is compromised either way – hardening into a philosopher, or sinking to a coquette.

In the case of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, this problem was negotiated in an interesting way. In the ‘Preface’ to her volume of poems she is careful to point out that during her career at court she had resisted circulating her poems in manuscript, as she regarded it as too public a gesture:

it is still a great satisfaction to me, that I was not so far abandon’d by my prudence, as out of a mistaken vanity, to let any attempts of mine in Poetry, shew themselves whilst I liv’d in such a publick place as the Court, where every one wou’d have made their remarks upon a Versifying Maid of Honour; and far the greatest number with prejudice, if not contempt.

In ‘such a publick place as the Court’ it would have been for her, not private circulation, but a kind of publication. Finch had allowed one or two things out, but regretted it (‘I have writ, and expos’d my uncorrect Rimes, and immediately repented; and yet have writ again, and again suffer’d them to be seen’). But she has finally been prevailed upon by her friends, she says, to put this collection together. The ‘Volume’ in question, however, is not a printed book, but the handsome folio manuscript of her poems which is now in the Folger Library, Washington, transcribed by her devoted husband.¹⁵ She introduces it with a formal ‘Preface’ just as if it is being published: ‘the following Poems… tho’ never meriting more than to be once read, and then carelessly s...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Preface
• 1 Between Manuscript and Print
• 2 Debating Politeness
• 3 Wit, Imagination, and Mock-Heroic
• 4 The Verse Letter
• 5 Pastoral and Georgic
• 6 The Romantic Mode, 1700–1730
• 7 Sublimity, Nature, and God
• 8 Recovering the Past
• 9 Genuine Voices
• 10 Economies of Landscape
• 11 Sensibility: Selves, Friends, Communities
• Chronology
• General Bibliographies
• Individual Poets
• Index
• Longman Literature in English Series