18th Century
(1700 - 1799)
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold:
Alike fantastic if too new or old.
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"
History of the Period
The most striking political feature of the
times was the rise of constitutional and party government. The
Revolution of 1688, which banished the Stuarts, had settled the
king question by making Parliament supreme in England, but not all
Englishmen were content with the settlement. No sooner were the
people in control of the government than they divided into hostile
parties: the liberal Whigs, who were determined to safeguard
popular liberty, and the conservative Tories, with tender memories
of kingcraft, who would leave as much authority as possible in the
royal hands. On the extreme of Toryism was a third party of
zealots, called the Jacobites, who aimed to bring the Stuarts back
to the throne, and who for fifty years filled Britain with plots
and rebellion. The literature of the age was at times dominated by
the interests of these contending factions.
The two main parties were so well balanced that power shifted
easily from one to the other. To overturn a Tory or a Whig cabinet
only a few votes were necessary, and to influence such votes London
was flooded with pamphlets. Even before the great newspapers
appeared, the press had become a mighty power in England, and any
writer with a talent for argument or satire was almost certain to
be hired by party leaders. Addison, Steele, Defoe, Swift,--most of
the great writers of the age were, on occasion, the willing
servants of the Whigs or Tories. So the new politician replaced the
old nobleman as a patron of letters.
Social Life
Another feature of the age was the rapid development of social
life. In earlier ages the typical Englishman had lived much by
himself; his home was his castle, and in it he developed his
intense individualism; but in the first half of the eighteenth
century some three thousand public coffeehouses and a large number
of private clubs appeared in London alone; and the sociability of
which these clubs were an expression was typical of all English
cities. Meanwhile country life was in sore need of refinement.
The influence of this social life on literature was inevitable.
Nearly all writers frequented the coffeehouses, and matters
discussed there became subjects of literature; hence the enormous
amount of eighteenth-century writing devoted to transient affairs,
to politics, fashions, gossip. Moreover, as the club leaders set
the fashion in manners or dress, in the correct way of taking snuff
or of wearing wigs and ruffles, so the literary leaders emphasized
formality or correctness of style, and to write prose like Addison,
or verse like Pope, became the ambition of aspiring young authors.
There are certain books of the period (seldom studied amongst its
masterpieces) which are the best possible expression of its thought
and manners. The Letters of Lord Chesterfield, for example,
especially those written to his son, are more significant, and more
readable, than anything produced by Johnson. Even better are the
Memoirs of Horace Walpole, and his gossipy Letters, of which
Thackeray wrote:
"Fiddles sing all through them; wax lights, fine dresses,
fine jokes, fine plate, fine equipages glitter and sparkle;
never was such a brilliant, smirking Vanity Fair as that
through which he leads us."
Spread of Empire
Two other significant features of the age were the large part
played by England in Continental wars, and the rapid expansion of
the British empire. These Continental wars, which have ever since
influenced British policy, seem to have originated (aside from the
important matter of self-interest) in a double motive: to prevent
any one nation from gaining overwhelming superiority by force of
arms, and to save the smaller "buffer" states from being absorbed
by their powerful neighbors. Thus the War of the Spanish Succession
(1711) prevented the union of the French and Spanish monarchies,
and preserved the smaller states of Holland and Germany. As Addison
then wrote, at least half truthfully:
'T is Britain's care to watch o'er Europe's fate,
And hold in balance each contending state:
To threaten bold, presumptuous kings with war,
And answer her afflicted neighbors' prayer. [1]
[Footnote [1]: From Addison's Address to Liberty, in his poetical
"Letter to Lord Halifax."]
The expansion of the empire, on the whole the most marvelous
feature of English history, received a tremendous impetus in this
age when India, Australia and the greater part of North America
were added to the British dominions, and when Captain Cook opened
the way for a belt of colonies around the whole world.
The influence of the last-named movement hardly appears in the
books which we ordinarily read as typical of the age. There are
other books, however, which one may well read for his own
unhampered enjoyment: such expansive books as Hawkesworth's
Voyages (1773), corresponding to Hakluyt's famous record of
Elizabethan exploration, and especially the Voyages of Captain
Cook, [Footnote: The first of Cook's fateful voyages appears in
Hawkesworth's collection. The second was recorded by Cook himself
(1777), and the third by Cook and Captain King (1784). See Synge,
Captain Cook's Voyages Around the World (London, 1897).]
which take us from the drawing-room chatter of politics or fashion
or criticism into a world of adventure and great achievement. In
such works, which make no profession of literary style, we feel the
lure of the sea and of lands beyond the horizon, which is as the
mighty background of English literature from Anglo-Saxon times to
the present day.
It is difficult to summarize the literature of this age, or to group such
antagonistic writers as Swift and Addison, Pope and Burns, Defoe and
Johnson, Goldsmith and Fielding, with any fine discrimination. It is simply
for convenience, therefore, that we study eighteenth-century writings in
three main divisions: the reign of so-called classicism, the revival of
romantic poetry, and the beginnings of the modern novel. As a whole, it is
an age of prose rather than of poetry, and in this respect it differs from
all preceding ages of English literature.
|
