Summary of the chapter ‘Restoration to Romanticism’ (1660-1789) – Letteratura Inglese I LM

Commonwealth Oliver Cromwell (1649-1658)

Richard Cromwell (1658-1659)
King Charles II (1660-1685)
King James II (1665-1668)
Glorious Revolution William III Orange (1689-1702) – Mary II Stuart (1689-1694)
Anne Stuart (1702-1714)
George I Hannover (1714-1727) James III (1701-1766)
George II (1727-1760) Charles III (1766-1788)
George III (1760-1820) Henry IX

CONTEXTS AND CONDITIONS

The Cromwell’s Commonwealth replaced the power of the monarchy (/ˈmɒnərki/) with the power of a
parliamentary system, giving more social stability. Restoration replaced the probing, exploring, risk-talking
values of the Renaissance.
So, in the decades between 1660 and 1700, the basis was set for the growth of a new kind of society, which
was protestant.
The Royal Society represents the trend towards the institutionalisation of scientific investigation and research
in this period. The other highly significant institution was the Bank of England, founded in 1694. The beliefs
and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The
Leviathan, which was written in exile (/ˈɛksaɪl/) in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of his time,
The Leviathan is an allegory. The leviathan is the Commonwealth, society as a total organism, in which the
individual is the absolute subject of state control, represented by the monarch.
Self-interest and social stability become the keynotes of British society after 1660, the voice of the new
middle-class bourgeoisie making itself heard more and more in the expression of values, ideals, and ethics.
Hobbes describes the effects of war on society, affirming the need for ‘a common Power’, a strong state. Later,
Hobbes will stress the notion central to Augustan thinking, the binary of passion and reason.
Milton’s Paradise Lost (completed in 1667) was read not as a Renaissance text about free will and freedom,
but as a commentary on God’s supremacy, ‘to justify the ways of God to men’. It was read to confirm an
image of God as the period demanded should be. Paradise Lost took on the authority of quasi-(/kweɪzaɪ-/)-
religious text – an imaginative representation of the beliefs contained in the Authorised Version of the Bible
and the Book of Common Prayer.
If this was so, the image began to be created in the late seventeenth century. Paradise Lost and John Bunyan’s
allegorical The Pilgrim’s Progress were two fundamental texts for the times.
The growth of a city-based middle-class economic mentality during the early and middle years of the
eighteenth century parallels the developments which came to be known as the Industrial Revolution and the
Agrarian Revolution. At the same time, several trends can be seen in literary production:
 the rise of the novel as a popular if critically unprestigious genre;
 the growth of journalism and magazines;
 a noticeable increase in literary criticism;
 a decline in the reputation of contemporary drama;
 a reaction to Augustan neoclassicism in poetry;
 towards the end of the eighteenth century, an attraction for the fantastic, the exotic and the primitive
(/ˈprɪmɪtɪv/).
Revolution was the great nightmare of eighteenth-century British society; and when first the American
Revolution of 1776, then the French Revolution of 1789 overturned the accepted order, the United Kingdom
exercised all its power so that revolution would not damage its own hard-won security and growing prosperity.
Eighteenth-century writing is full of pride in England as the land of liberty (far ahead of France, the great
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rival, in political maturity), and saw a corresponding growth in national self-confidence accompanying the
expansion of empire.

MILTON
John Milton has, since his own lifetime, always been one of the major figures in English literature, but his
reputation has changed constantly. Milton’s was the last great liberal intelligence of the English Renaissance.
The values expressed in all his works are the values of tolerance, freedom and self-determination, expressed
by Shakespeare, Hooker and Donne.
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso are companion pieces advocating contrasting styles of life, the carefree and the
studious.
Lycidas is one of the most-quoted elegies in English, moving from its commemoration of his Cambridge
university friend, Edward King, to reflections on the writer’s own mortality and ambitions. Like all Milton’s
works, Lycidas has been interpreted as specifically Christian.
Milton’s prose can be related to the writings of Browne and Burton, with the major difference that Milton
engages in polemics as well as touching upon philosophical concerns. It was no accident that Milton’s first
polemic pamphlet was entitled Of Reformation in England and the Causes that Hitherto Have Hindered It
(1641). He addressed such varied (/vɛərid/) subjects as divorce (in four pamphlet), education, and, famously,
the freedom of the press, in Aereopagitica (1644). In this extract, he anticipates his great epic Paradise Lost
by more than twenty years.
Milton argued (/ɑːrgjud/), in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, that people ‘freed by nature’ had a right to
overthrow (it. deporre) a tyrant; a subject that recalls vividly the questions examined by Shakespeare in his
major tragedies about fifty years before. Milton continued to defend his ideals of freedom and republicanism.
But during the Restoration, by which he was blind (/ˈblaɪnd/; it. cieco), he was arrested. It is interesting that –
like Spenser and Malory before him, and like Tennyson two centuries later – Milton was attracted to the
Arthurian legends as the subject for his great epic. For many critics, including the poets Blake and Shelley,
Satan, that embodies the devil, is the hero of the poem.
Milton’s Samson Agonistes, a verse drama, and Paradise Regarded, a sequel in four books to Paradise Lost,
were both published in 1671, four years after Paradise Lost. The fundamental difference between Adam and
Eve in Paradise Lost and the heroes of the other two poems – the former probably written during the
Commonwealth, whereas the latter nearer the end of Milton’s life – is humanity: both Samson and Christ are
superhuman, indeed beyond the bound (/baʊnd/; it. legato) of normal human beings. As such, their triumphs
and conquests are less clearly explorations of human qualities. Instead they become ideal exempla, as in
morality plays or medieval poems, of what humanity should be rather than (it. piuttosto che) what it is.
It is remarkable (it. degno di nota) that John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in two parts in 1678-
1679 and 1684, and probably the most widely read text in all English literature over the next two hundred
years, uses two forms which are pre-Renaissance: the moral fable or allegory, and the dream vision (like in
The Cross etc.). the closest text to The Pilgrim’s Progress is perhaps the medieval play Everyman.
The immediate appeal of the story led to The Pilgrim’s Progress becoming the most popular work of the
imagination in English for more than two centuries.
Bunyan’s language reached (it. raggiunse) an enormous number of people and together with the Book of
Common Prayer (a final version was published in 1662) and the Authorised Version of the Bible (1611),
helped to shape the English language. The prayer-book, first published in 1549, is still in use in the Church of
England (but not in the Church of Scotland or Roman Catholic Church).

RESTORARION DRAMA
The theatre of the Restoration was quite different from Shakespeare’s theatre, with the audience now largely
upper class. There were only two licensed, or ‘patient’, theatres – the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and Duke’s
House at Lincoln’s Inn, which moved to the Convent Garden Theatre in 1732. Actresses could now perform
on stage, the first being a Mrs Coleman, in a private performance of Sir William D’Avenant’s The Siege of

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Rhodes in 1656, when theatre performances were still officially suppressed. Shakespeare’s plays were still
presented, but usually in adapted versions (often with music), to make them more acceptable to the new tastes
of the times (for example King Lear was reworked to provide it a happy ending).
Restoration tragedy is ‘heroic’ tragedy. All for love (1678), by John Dryden, is a good example of the type.
This play takes the story of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra but makes a distinct and new play, in an
elaborately formal, neoclassical style. Thomas Otway was the major original tragedian of the Restoration
period, his The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserv’d (1682) remaining popular for over a century.
The Elizabethan domestic tragedy form finds a new middle-class setting in the plays of George Lillo, notably
The London Merchant (1731), and his treatment of the Arden of Faversham story, staged in 1736. The
influence of Lillo’s plays on European theatre was extensive (the story of The Fatal Curiosity was used by
Albert Camus as late as 1945), although they have tended to be ignored on the British stage.
It is, however, for comedy that Restoration drama is better known. It was called ‘the comedy of manners’
because it mirrored directly the manners, modes and morals of the upper-class society which was its main
audience. The main subject of Restoration comedy was sex: sexual attraction, sexual intrigue, and sexual
conquest. Sex, and the search for sex, becomes entertainment.
We see a concentration on acquisitiveness and an amorality that contrasts with the concerns of Bunyan’s
Christian. The plays manifest excesses of freedom, now that the constraints of the Puritan Commonwealth
have been thrown off (it. spazzati via). The new comedy – of values and appetites – lacks any of the
philosophical concerns found, for example, in Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, such as Love’s Labour Lost,
or in Ben Jonson’s ‘humours’.
The characters are obsessed with fashion, gossip and their own circle in society.
In Restoration comedy, women are such types as predatory young widows, or older ladies still trying to be
attractive to young men. The best comedies reflect an amoral and frivolous society. They could be comedies
of action, such as Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677-1681), or comedies of character and chatter (it. chiacchiere),
such as George Etherege’s The Man of Mode. One of the first comedies was The Comical Revenge (1664) by
George Etherege, which, as its title suggests, takes a theme, revenge, which was previously a subject for
tragedy, and balances it with a realistic, up-to-date love plot involving a country knight with more money than
sense, a valet with ideas above his station, and a rich widow who is in pursuit of the libertine hero. This was
the forerunner of many such plots.
The contrast between town manners and country pretensions (it. pretese), and the concern with fashion, are
seen again in Etherege’s two later works, She Wou’d if She Cou’d (1668) and The Man of Mode (1676).
The Country Wife (1675) by William Wycherley has frequently been held up (it. sostenuto) as the most
obscene and amoral of Restoration plays. It is a comedy of seduction and hypocrisy. Its hero, Horner, pretends
to be impotent to take his conquests, and Mrs Pinchwife claims in ‘all innocence’ to be behaving as ladies do
in town.
Such was the reaction to Wycherley’s work that a swell of opinion against the theatre to grow in the later
decades of the century. There was also an element of censure of the irresponsible but now less powerful upper
classes in the affirmation of a new middle-class ethic. The emergence of new social classes and divisions,
which began at this time, became more and more significant over the following century. Inevitably, religious
attitudes came into play. One outcome was a pamphlet published by a clergyman, Jeremy Collier, in 1698,
Short View of the Immortality and Profaneness of the English Stage. The immediate result was a royal order
prohibiting ‘the acting of anything contrary to religion and good manners’. Less than forty years later,
censorship became official.
Just as the first blows (it. fig. colpi) were being struck against it, Restoration drama produced its greatest
masterpieces in the plays of William Congreve, Sir John Vanbrugh (also an eminent architect), and George
Fraquhar, who was to die before he was 30 (thirty), just his final play, The Beaux’ Stratagem, achieved renown.
Congreve’s first three comedies in the 1690s – The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer and Love for love – lead
to the climatic work of all Restoration comedy, The Way of the World (1700).

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What raises Congreve above many of his contemporaries is the acute observation of the social and emotional
pressures on characters who are more richly drawn than traditional stereotypes. Like many later writers of
comedy, Congreve was something of an outsider, having been brought up in Ireland, and perhaps the
outsider’s eye gave him a privileged viewpoint on the society he portrayed with such insight, sympathy and
wit.
Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696) and The Provok’d Wife (1697) particularly outraged Jeremy Collier.
Farquhar’s plays are rather different. They are more realistic in setting, tone, morally concerned and humanly
sympathetic (it. compassionevoli). The Recruiting Officer (1706) reminds us that at this time the country was
at war: the War of the Spanish Succession involved considerable English army losses on the Continent. The
‘stratagem’ of Captain Plume and his sergeant, Kite, to catch a rich wife is echoed in The Beaux’ Stratagem
(1707), where Aimwell and his friend Archer plot to win the hand of Dorinda, the daughter of rich Lady
Bountiful.
Farquhar, again, was an Irishman, and his comedies are a significant contribution to the opening up (it.
schiudersi) of local settings for social comedy.
The plays of Susannah Centlivre, first presented around the turn of the century, were among those which
continued to enjoy great success throughout the 1700s. A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) is particularly
memorable, combining the battle of the sexes with witty (it. arguta [satira]) satire on religious narrow-
mindedness.
Between 1707 and 1737, drama went into critical decline although the theatre was still very active and popular.
The decline was partly due to opposition from Jeremy Collier and others, and partly because the middle classes
were turning to journals, newspapers and the developing new genre of fictional prose to find discussion,
entertainment and reinforcement of their values and beliefs. Farce (it. commedia programmata/farsa) and
musical plays became the regular entertainment. And only The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay achieved
lasting popular success, describing a ‘Newgate pastoral’, since Newgate was London’s principal prison. Gay
mixes ballads and songs, vivid characters in the city comedy tradition, burlesque (erotic comedy) parody of
Italian opera, some sentimental scenes, and more than a touch of political satire, to create a highly original
piece of theatre which has maintained its considerable influence and success. It was, however, the element of
political satire which was to bring trouble (it. portare guai) to the theatre in the 1730s. Sir Robert Walpole, the
Whig prime minister from 1721 to 1742, objected to satirical attacks on him in The Beggar’s Opera and, most
particularly, in The Historical Register for 1736, by a highly successful writer of farces and satires, Henry
Fielding.
The Theatres Licensing act of 1737 finally introduced censorship in the person of Lord Chamberlain, who
could grant or refuse a license to any play on political, religious, or moral grounds.
Fielding turned to the novel, with great success, but drama was effectively silenced as a vehicle for debate
until the end of the nineteenth century. The Theatre Licensing Act remained in force, with the Lord
Chamberlain as official government censor, until 1968.
DRAMA AFTER 1737
The Theatres Licensing Act of 1737 did not altogether (it. interamente) kill drama, but did successfully stifle
it (it. la represse).
Dr Johnson’s tragedy Irene ran for nine perfomances in 1749, for example, and Richard Steele, of Spectator
fame, left a heritage of sentimental comedies which held the stage for more than sixty years after his death in
1729.
Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were both Irishmen and the only two writers of
theatrical comedy who managed to write lasting masterpieces which go against the prevailing trend of
sentimentalism in the late eighteenth century.
Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) is seen as the first successful reaction to the sentimental comedy
originated by Steele. The comic premise is that the hero, Marlow, is shy with ladies of his own social level,
but quite open with servants and barmaids. So the heroine, Miss Hardcastle, ‘stoops’ to an acceptable level to
‘conquer’ him.

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The comedy of character took over (it. sostituì) from the comedy of delicacy (it. sensibilità) and sentiment in
Goldsmith, and in Sheridan, the most successful playwright of the time. The School for Scandal (1777)
presents London society as a hotbed (it. ricettacolo) of gossip and intrigue.
Sheridan’s The Critic (1779) is a burlesque comedy, based on a Restoration farce, which makes the device (it.
espediente) of a theatrical rehearsal (it. prova teatrale) the vehicle for a neat (it. pura) satire on the conventions,
and the critics, of the time.

ROCHESTER
The one individual who epitomises (it. incarna) the spirit of the early Restoration is John Wilton, Earl of
Rochester. His life-style was more notorious than his writing: drunk ‘for five years together’, with sexual
liaisons (/liˈeɪzɒn/; it. relazioni sessuali) of every possible variety, Rochester represented the kind of
scandalous extremes of behaviour which both titillate (it. solletica) and shock ‘proper’ society.
The range of Rochester’s poetry is considerable. He is a clear link between Metaphysical poets, the Cavalier
writers of love lyrics, and the Augustans, with their taste for satire. Rochester wrote in all these veins.
He is a sexually explicit poet, capable of treating a subject with both delicacy and bawdy (/ bɔːdi/; it. osé,
sconcio) humour. His satires are self-mocking (as in The Maimed Debauchee) as well as scurrilous about
others.
The mocking comedy of Rochester is not far removed from the comic mode of the best Restoration drama,
and his railing against the ‘Rational’ is particularly damning as the Augustan age prided itself, above all, on
being rational. Rochester and the comic dramatists share a worldview that is, at the same time, able to point
up (it. evidenziare) enjoyment and to see its own faults.
Instead of expanding, as it did so rapidly in the previous two centuries, the world was becoming more closed,
contained and inward-looking. So the comedy and satire become self-referential.

DRYDEN
At a time when people were taking sides (Whig or Tory, Protestant or Catholic, middle class or aristocrat) and
establishing social, political and religious identities for themselves, it is not surprising that there should be
criticisms and friction between the parties concerned (it. interessate). A great deal of this is found in the satire
of the 1670s to the 1730s.
Satire was at first largely expressed in poetry; the form of poetry perhaps tempered the virulence a little,
giving the writing a degree of respectability.
The ‘new’ classicism took what it saw as the highest point of classical culture, and applied its techniques,
forms and models to create a new Augustan age, the neoclassical, which lasted (significa ‘’durare fino a …’’)
some sixty or seventy years from the early 1670s.
Restoration satire could be of two types: the kind of very general, sweeping criticism of mankind found in
poetry in A Satire against Reason and Mankind by Rochester, and in prose in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels or A Modest Proposal; or it could be highly specific, with allusions to real figures in politics and
society.
This specifically targeted satire is found in the poetry of one of the main literary figures of the Augustan age,
John Dryden, notably in his MacFlecknoe (1682-1684), which is an attack on a literary rival( UK:*/ˈraɪvəl/),
Thomas Shadwell, and Absalom and Achitopel (1681), which uses an allegorical form to comment on the
fundamental religious and political issues of the time, issues which would only be resolved by the overthrow
of the Catholic monarchy in 1688.
Achitophel (in Absalom and Achitopel) is identified with the Earl of Shaftesbury and David is King Charles
II. The ambitions and plots remain of their own times – but the scheming (it. pianificare) and crowd-pleasing
(it. gradito alle folle) can be seen in politicians in any age and nation!
The Medal (1682) follows on from Absalom and Achitophel and predicts much of the religious and political
upheaval ( /ʌpˈhiːvəl/ it. sconvolgiemnto, en. difficult change) which was to come in the next few years.

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This kind of political satire, in the lands of later writers of novels and plays like Delarivier Manley and Henry
Fielding, became less and less acceptable to the people who were its victims. The result would be political
censorship of the theatre and a refinding (it. riscoperta) of satirical content into highly political satires used as
upper-class entertainment in some of the writings of Alexander Pope who, with Dryden, is the main figure in
Augustan poetry.
Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who was at the centre of all the greatest
debates of his time: the end of the Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political and religious
upheavals of the 1680s and the specifically literary questions of neoclassicism oppose to more modern trends.
He was Poet Laureate from 1668, but lost his position in 1688 on the overthrow of James II. Dryden had
become Catholic in 1685, and his allegorical poem The Hind and the Panther (1687) discusses the complex
issues of religion and politics in an attempt to reconcile (/ˈrɛkənsaɪl/) bitterly (it. molto) opposed factions. This
contains a well-known line which anticipates Wordsworth more than a century later: ‘By education most have
been misled… / And thus the child imposes on the man’.
After 1688, Dryden returned to the theatre, which had given him many of his early successes in tragedy, tragi-
comedy and comedy, as well as with adaptations and critical writings, with one or two significant works such
as Alexander’s Feast (/’fi:st/; it. banchetto) (1697) and The Secular Masque (1700), are his main achievements
in his later years.
Dryden was an innovator, leading the move from heroic couplets to blank verse in drama, and at the centre of
the intellectual debates of the Augustan age. He experimented with verse form throughout (/θruːˈaʊt/; it. in
tutta, let. ‘dappertutto, tutto’) his writing life until Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which brings together
critical, translated, and original works, in a fitting (it. appropriate) conclusion to a varied career.
The term ‘heroic’ was, as we have seen, applied to tragedy in the Restoration period. As satire lost its venom,
the heroic couplet adopted a gentler (it. più amabile), more humorous tone. It is in this context that the term
‘mock heroic’ can be best understood. The term is normally applied to Pope’s poetry, but can be seen to refer,
more widely, to a whole restructuring of values at what was felt to be the beginning of a new age.
Matthew Prior and Samuel Butler were very well known and highly successful in their own day, but their
writings have not had the lasting regard (it. considerazione, stima) that Dryden, for instance, has enjoyed.
Butler wrote the long satirical poem Hudibras which was published in three parts between 1663 and 1680 and
quickly gained great popularity.
Matthew Prior is more a poet of light occasional verse, although his first major work was a satire on Dryden’s
The Hind and the Panther. As a very popular poet, he covers a wide (it. ampio) range of themes and forms,
but his poetry remains anchored in the passing events of the age rather than handling (it. trattare) themes of
continuing relevance and concern: a comparison between Prior’s Ode celebrating the arrival of William III,
Carmen Seculare (1700) and Andrew Marvell’s Horatian Oden upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.

POPE
Alexander Pope was, like Dryden after 1685, a Catholic, and therefore an outsider in the Protestant-dominated
society of the early eighteenth century. The two men were, however, of totally different generations and
background. Pope was 12 when Dryden died and was suffering from spinal disease which left him deformed
and sickly for the rest of his life.
Pope had, in common with Dryden, considerable success in translating Greek and Latin classics – especially
Homer – into English, and also prepared a noted, even if flawed (/ˈflɔːd/; it. fallace), edition of Shakespeare
in 1725. But he never engaged in serious political, philosophical, and religious debate on the scale that Dryden
achieved. Pope’s sphere was social and intellectual. The Rape of the Lock (1712-1714) written when he was
in his mid-twenties, is the essence of the mock heroic.
The Dunciad (1726, expanded in 1743) is Pope’s best-known satire. It is again mock heroic in style, and, like
Dryden’s MacFlecknoe some fifty years before, it is an attack on the author’s literary rivals, critics, and
enemies. Pope groups (it. le raggruppa) them together as the general enemy ‘Dulness’, which gradually takes
over the world, and reduces it to chaos (/ˈkeɪɒs/) and darkness. Limited though these issues may be seen,

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Pope’s intentions in his writings were wide-ranging (it. ad ampio raggio). His Moral Essays from the 1730s,
his An Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot (1735), his An Essay in Man (1733-1734) and the early Essay on Criticism
(1711) explore the whole question of man’s place in the universe, and his moral and social responsibilities in
the world.
The Imitations of Horace (1733-1738) raise (it. solleva) issues of political neutrality, partisanship (it.
partigianeria) and moral satire, and as such are a key text of the Augustan age. The conclusion of An Essay on
Man, ‘Whatever is, is right’, may seem sadly banal; but a many of Pope’s lines are among the most memorable
and quotable from English poetry. His technical ability and wit, although firmly based in the neoclassical spirit
of the time, raised Pope’s achievement to considerable heights (/ˈhaɪts/).

POETRY AFTER POPE

It was perhaps inevitable that there would be a reaction to the highly formal, self-consciously heightened (it.
accresciuta), and satirically self-referential poetry of the Augustans. During the remainder (it. resto) of the
eighteenth century there was an exploration in poetry of new themes, handled in more low-key language and
forms, without the bite (/ˈbaɪt/; it. puntura) of satire, and, in most cases, without the wit and humour of the
Augustan age.
James Thomson’s The Seasons, published season by season between 1726 and 1730, can be seen as the first
eighteenth-century work to offer a new view of nature. Written largely in blank verse, Thomson’s vision of
nature as harsh (it. ostile), especially in winter, but bountiful (it. generosa, munifica), stresses the ‘pure
pleasures of the rural life’ with no denial (it. smentita, negazione) of the pain these pleasures can involve.
Celebration of nature is closely allied with a sense of desolation, of hard work and harsh landscapes, so the
tone of The Seasons is far removed (it. più lontano) from the classical idyll. His works were very popular, and
are an excellent contrast with Keat’s Odes, such as Ode to Autumn, almost a century later. Thomson sees the
negative side of a ‘philosophic melancholy’ which is very much of its own time, just as the sensuousness
(/ˈsensjʊəsnɪs/; it. sensualità) of Keats is clearly Romantic.
The most important single poem of the mid-eighteenth century is arguably (it. presumibilmente) Gray’s Elegy,
published in 1751. Its full title is Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and, as such, its subject matter is
much more ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’ and ‘to teach the rustic moralist to die’ than the graveyard
itself. The Elegy has often been associated with the rather earlier ‘graveyard school’ of poetry, such as Edward
Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) – pretentiously subtitled On Life, Death, and Immortality – and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743). These poets revel at great length (fare baldoria ) in death – ‘that dread moment’ –
and morbidity, creating an atmosphere of ‘delightful (it. incantevole) gloom (it. depression, tristezza)’.
Thomas Gray’s Elegy is considerably different in emphasis, although suffused with a gently humanist
melancholy. It is, in some sense, a life-affirming reconsideration of rural values, although the ending is often
read as involving the poet’s suicide.
The Elegy can be read as a poem against mourning, anticipating Wordsworth’s concern with agricultural life
and ‘useful’ labour (it. UK sforzo); finding meaning in the life lived, rather than in the death feared. In the
concluding Epitaph, however, many readers identify the ‘youth’ with the poet himself.
The true successors to Gray’s poetry are Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), William Cowper’s
The Task (1785), and George Crabbe’s narrative poems of rural life, such as The Village (1783) and The
Borough (/ˈbʌrə/; it. quartiere, circoscrizione) (1810).
William Cowper’s The Task, a blank-verse poem in six books, was, with Thomson’s The Seasons, one of the
most lastingly (it. durevolmente) popular of poems on the theme of nature and the simple life. Its famous
distinction ‘God made the country, and man made the town’ underlines the search for tranquillity in a hectic
(/ˈhɛktɪk/ it. febrile) world.
To a certain extent, Goldsmith can be accused of idealising a lost idyll of country life, in the village of Auburn.
Certainly Crabbe, in The Village, thirteen years after Goldsmith’s poem, reacted against any such view of a
lost ‘golden age’, stressing the trials (/ˈtraɪəls/; it. processi) of real life, and rejecting the kind of Arcadian ideal
which had been found in poetry since Sir Philip Sidney two centuries before.

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This was a time in which women writers, through both novel and poetry, were making their presence be felt,
and recent critics and anthologisers have brought a great deal (it. operazione commerciale) of women’s writing
to the attention of modern readers. It is perhaps a sign of history’s marginalisation of women’s writing that,
even now, we tend to group up the work of several women together.
Mary Leapor’s An Essay on Woman (published posthumously in 1751) sums up (it. riassume) the few positive
aspects of an eighteenth-century woman’s fate: she, in fact, was one of the first lower-class female voices in
poetry; a kitchen maid from Northamptonshire, who died in her early twenties.
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, is highly regarded among (it. in mezzo a, tra) women poets of the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Anne Finch’s reputation has been revalued recently, not just for
her achievements as a poet, but for the insights (it. intuizioni) her writing gives to the thoughts and concerns
of the Augustan Age.
She anticipates many themes which would become significant later in the eighteenth century: women’s
education, the primacy (it. primato) of nature, contentment (it. contentezza, appagamento) without ambition
far from the court and London, many of which would be taken up by writers (mostly men, of course) who
followed her. Wordsworth was to acknowledge her ‘new images of external nature’. The Spleen (1709)
remains her most quoted ode, with its themes of melancholy and what might today be termed depression, in a
high Augustan Style. Ann Finch’s writings look back to both the Metaphysical poets and the Cavalier poets,
and look forward, beyond James Thomson and Thomas Gray, towards the Romantics and even Gerard Manley
Hopkins.
By no means all women poets were from the upper class. Elizabeth Thomas spoke for generations about
women with her line ‘Unhappy sex! How hard’s our fate’, when complaining that she had been instructed (by
a man, obviously) not to read, as books would make her mad.
Mehetabel (Hetty) Wright’s tone is also one of complaint (it. protesta). She was the sister of the founders of
Methodism, John and Charles Wesley, but her writings reveal her as a quite different spirit from her brothers,
speaking of an unhappy marriage as ‘a living death, a long despair’, and, in Address to her Husband, asserting
‘I will not brook contempt from thee!’ Wright’s short elegy To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of its Birth
(1733) is a useful female contrast to Blake’s later Song of Innocence.
Joanna Baillie, from Bothwell near Glasgow, is a distinctive Scottish lyrical voice; Alison Cockburn and Jane
Elliot wrote versions of The Flowers of the Forest, one of the best known of all Scottish airs.

MELANCHOLY, MADNESS AND NATURE

The Odes of William Collins has a considerable influence on the poetry of the second half of the eighteenth
century, although they received little recognition during their author’s short lifetime. His poetry is visionary
and intensely lyrical, and some of his poems, such as How sleep the brave, have become very well known.
Collins grew melancholic, and produced very little poetry after the Odes of 1746; he died before he reached
the age of 40. Another visionary poet lapsed into madness – Christopher Smart, having begun his poetic career
in the 1750s with clever satires and elegant light verse, was overcome with religious fervour, and spent several
years in an asylum (it. istituto psichiatrico). He produced A Song to David in 1763, a highly charged poem in
praise of the biblical figure of David. His Jubilate Agno was not published until 1939, more than 150 years
after his death. It is an extraordinary, quite unique work, again a poem of praise, in some ways not until
William Blake’s work – and Blake was frequently considered mad too. This time Smart’s praise is for the
whole of creation, from the days of the week to the toad, from the nations of Europe to his famous line in
praise of his cat, ‘For I will consider my cat, Jeoffry’.
In 1771, the same year as two important novels by Scottish writers were published (Smollett’s Humphry
Clinker and Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling), the first poems by Robert Fergusson appeared in ad Edinburgh
magazine.
The poetry and song collections of Allan Ramsay in the 1720s and 1730s brought the work of such writers as
Dunbat and Henryson back into wide circulation. Fergusson was the first contemporary writer to move away

8
from (it. ad allontanarsi da) the imitation of English writing to the vigour of Scots. Auld Reekie, his celebration
of the city of Edinburgh, is still quoted.
The language is not a nostalgic return to tradition, but an assured affirmation of a living language which the
Union of the Kingdom in 1707 had threatened but not submerged. Fergusson, like several other poets of the
time, died mad, and tragically young, but not before he had satirised both Dr Johnson and Mackenzie’s
bestsellers, two of the great literary eminences of the day.
Robert Burns is the most lyrical of the rural poets, and perhaps the most universal. A ploughman (/ˈplaʊmən/;
it. lavoratore agricolo) himself, he was the closest to nature of his contemporaries. When he turns up (it. ha
alzato) a fieldmouse’s (/ˈfiːldmaʊs/) nest (it. tana di topo selvatico) with his plough (it. aratro), he realises that
he has destroyed a complete world, wrecked the hopes and plans of a ‘sleeket, cowran’, tim’rous beatsie’.
His linking here of ‘the best laid schemes o’ Miche an’ Men’ has become almost proverbial both in the kind
of humanity it displays and in its identification with the smallest and most helpless of creatures.
These qualities are linked to Burns to a storytelling ability which opens up new areas of experience to
literature. The Cotter’s Saturday Night (1786) is an intimate, affectionate, unsentimental portrait of
agricultural family life, written in Scots and English.
Tam O’ Shanter (1791) was a racing tale of a drunk man pursued (it. inseguito) by witches and spirits while
his wife sits at home, ‘nursing her wrath to keep it warm’. Much of Burns’s work is in the dialect of his
Ayrshire home, but there are moments when he shows himself capable of as vivid imagery (/ˈɪmɪdʒəri/; it. arte
figurativa) in English as any of his contemporaries with whose work he was familiar.
The love lyric, largely unexplored in English since the time of Lovelace in the 1640s, reached new heights of
both simplicity and precision of imagery in Burns more than a century later. He used a tradition of Scottish
songs and ballads as the basis of many of his lyrical poems, some of which – like Auld Lang Syne and My
Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose – have become universally known.
Burns lived close to the land, and to poverty, all his life.
Crabbe, and, later, John Clare are peasant (/ˈpɛzənt/; it. contadino, campagnolo) poets of the land, in a way
that the Romantic poets would never be. There were, of course, many women poets at the time; but Charlotte
Smith stands above the rest. Her Sonnet Written at the Close of Spring (1782) provides a link between James
Thomson, early in the century, and the Romantics – with their concerns of nature and time.
Smith also wrote expressively in The Emigrants (1793) of her disillusionment with the French Revolution.
Her maturity and wit can be seen in Thirty-Eight, a poem to a woman friend on reaching (it. arrivare a) that
August age, which is not unlike Lord Byron’s thoughts on reaching 30!
All these poets, except Byron and Clare, are often described as pre-Romantic. It is true that, in their concern
for nature, their use of simple spoken language, and their rejection (it. rifiuto) of neoclassicism, they anticipate
many of the concerns of the Romantic poets. But, above all (it. sopra ogni cosa), the difference between these
poets and Wordsworth, in particular, is one of ideals and intentions.

JOHNSON
Dr Samuel Johnson is remembered for his Dictionary, for one novel, Rasselas (1759), written quickly to pay
off (it. finire di pagare, saldare) debts, and as the first major critic in English. The theme of Rasselas, subtitled
Price of Abyssinia, is ‘choice of life’. It is rather didactic romance, which has echoes in Johnson’s best-known
poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749).
Johnson had been working as a journalist, contributing to many of the magazines of the time, since 1737, and
writing poems and plays of varying (it. mutevoli) degrees (it. livelli) of success.
In 1755, his monumental Dictionary of the English Language was published; the cost of these nine years of
hard work bore immediate fruit, establishing Johnson as the leading literary figure of his age. The Dictionary
is more than just a set of definitions; it is a rich mine (/ˈmaɪn/; it. miniera) of quotations (it. citazioni) and
references (it. menzioni), with literary rather than a linguistic or etymological bias(/ˈbaɪəs/; it. propensione),
and remains a valuable reference work to this day.

9
It is an ongoing (it. ininterrotto) process, with the Oxford English Dictionary constantly documenting new
coinages/neologism (it. neologismi), new usages (it. utilizzi) and new forms in twenty-first century.
Critics have always sought (it. desiderato) to find the ‘best’ writers and works, and to hold them up models.
Although his Preface (1765) to Shakespeare is one of the first major critical essays on the subject, Johnson
slighted Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, undervalued Milton’s pastoral elegy Lycidas, and was strongly prejudiced
again Swift.
Johnson’s later life, from 1763, is among the best documented of all literary lives. James Boswell gave himself
the enormous task (it. compito), after Johson’s death in 1784, of producing what is now held to be a model of
biography; rich in details and anecdotes, a complete picture of the man and his times, traced over a period of
more than twenty years. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, published in 1791, carries on Johnson’s own contribution
to the growing art of biography, and consolidates Johnson’s position as a major literary figure, who, although
a poet and a novelist, is remembered more for his academic and critical achievement than for his creative
writings.

JOURNALISM
The rising middle classes were the readerships for a wide range of daily and weekly newspapers and journals
founded at this time. The Tatler, founded by Richard Steele, ran from April 1709 to January 1711, to be
followed by The Spectator, run by Steel with Joseph Addison from March 1711 until December 1712, and by
Addison alone for several months in 1714. These were journals of coffee-house gossip and ideas in London.
The Spectator became the journal of a gentleman’s club, led by the fictional Sir Roger de Coverley.
This sense of class and social identity is significant in the papers’ consideration of market appeal (it. richiesta
di mercato).
What emerges as important is, therefore (it. pertanto), a point of view, an attitude, rather than a committed
engagement with issues and debates – a well–informed distance which is both tolerant and self-protective. The
Gentleman’s Journal, which was published from 1692 to 1694, was the first magazine of this kind.
Despite their seeming decorum, many of the magazines and journals of the eighteenth century did engage in
highly critical and controversial debates. Indeed, many of the age’s writers used journalism as a vehicle for
their ideas, and some fell foul of libel (/ˈlaɪbəl/) laws/actions (it. leggi diffamatorie) and factional disputes and
were subject to prosecution for their ideas.
Daniel Defoe, for example, ran The Review for several years, he then edited a trade journal, The Mercator,
before becoming a novelist. His strong opinion landed (it. lo fece finire, piombare) him in prison on more than
one occasion.
Other major figures, from Pope to Dr Johnson, used journalism as an integral part of their literary careers.
Writing with the advent of journalism and the growing popularity of the novel was now a profession.

SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT, DIARISTS AND GIBBON

In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment focused attention on Glasgow and Edinburgh as centres
of intellectual activity. The Scottish Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which originated in
Glasgow in the early eighteenth century and flourished in Edinburgh in the second half of the century. Its
thinking was based on philosophical enquiry (/ɪnˈkwaɪəri/; it. inchiesta) and its practical applications for the
benefit of society (‘improvement’)was a favoured term. The Enlightenment encompassed literature,
philosophy, science, education and even geology. One of its lasting (it. persistenti, durevoli) results was the
founding of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1771).
Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations (1776) was probably the most important work on economics of
the century, revolutionising concepts of trade and prophesying the growing importance of America as ‘one of
the foremost nations of the world’. By a remarkable coincidence, the book was published in the very same
year as the American Declaration of Independence. One of the comments later used by Napoleon Bonaparte
against the British is first found I Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, again underlining the new mercantile ethos
of the time.

10
The growth of the writing profession coincided with a rise in writing which was private and not intended for
publication. Diaries and letters were, for the new literate middle class, forms of expression which enjoyed
increasingly wider currency.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys is probably the best-known example of its kind in all literature. Running from 1st
January 1660 until 31st May 1669, the diary was written in a form of code, which was deciphered (/dɪˈsaɪfər:d/)
until 1825.
From Pepys and his contemporary John Evelyn we owe first-hand accounts of the new society as it was taking
shape.
Letters gave fiction the basis of the epistolary novel, echoing the newly established fashion of letter-writing
among the middle and upper classes. The eighteenth century was the great era of letter-writing. The best-
known letters of the century are those (it. quelle) written by Lord Chesterfield to his son, from 1737 until the
son’s death in 1768.
The writing of history as a contribution to literature can be traced back to the twelfth century and Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (INFO: (c. 1095- c. 1155) He was a British cleric and one of the
major figures in the development of British historiography and the popularity of tales of King Arthur. He is
best known for his chronicle The History of the Kings of Britain (Latin: De gestis Britonum or Historia Regum
Britanniae) which was widely popular in its day, being translated into other languages from its original Latin.
It was given historical credence well into the 16th century,[2] but is now considered historically unreliable.)
In the eighteenth century, with the growth of publishing and with the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment,
there was a great demand for new historical writing. The greatest product of this was The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, a massive six-volume work published between 1776 and 1778, precisely between the
American Revolution and the French Revolution. The Context is important, as the author Edward Gibbon was
examining not only the greatness of Rome, but also the forces which brought about its decay.
Gibbon’s interpretation of history was controversial, especially in its examination of the growth of
Christianity, but his accurate scholarship (it. erudizione) and engaging prose style made The Decline and Fall
the most enduring work of history in English.

STERNE, SMOLLETT AND SCOTTISH VOICES

The tradition of the novel from Behn to Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, even after less than a century of
existence, already lent itself to subversive experimentation.
This first age of experiment in fiction upsets previous notion of time, place, and action, and extends the
boundaries of what was possible in the novel. No longer just the observation of human actions, with moral
overtones, the genre takes on (it. assunse) a range and diversity that led (/ˈliːds/; it condusse) to its pre-
eminence as the dominant literary form for the next two centuries.
Laurence Sterne published the first volume of Tristram Shandy in 1759, completing the eighth volume of the
novel in 1767. The work was attacked by critics such as Johnson, and Goldsmith, but has arguably ‘lasted’ (it.
durò) longer and has been more influential than any other novel of its time.
The plot of the novel in the nearly eighteenth century followed the natural order of things: beginning, middle,
and end. Sterne was the first to employ these ‘not necessarily in that order’. He also played with digressions
(/daɪˈgrɛʃəns/), episodes going off at a tangent from the ‘main’ line of the plot. Tristram Shandy, in the novel
that bears (it. portare il suo nome ) his name, is conceived right at the beginning, born in Volume III (some
130 pages into the book) - but the story ends four years before this birth.
The association of language and thought is important here. The epistolary novel posited an imaginary
addresser and an addressee (it. destinatario), one person writing letter and another reading it. Fielding’s
omniscient author/narrator establishes a direct relationship with the ‘dear reader’. Sterne’s narrator uses no
fictional intermediary device, and frequently addresses the reader directly. His thoughts ramble (it. si snodano)
forward (it. in avanti), backwards (it. all’indietro), sideways (it. di traverso), where they will. He describes a
wide range of characters, with all their obsessions and peculiarities. Perhaps coincidentally, Sterne has no

11
single ideological or moral position to enforce: his declared aim (it. scopo ultimo/scopo principale) was to be
unique, and to write a ‘civil, nonsensical good-humoured Shandean book’.
Sterne’s other contribution to literature is equally unique: A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
(1767). It is an account (it. resoconto) of a journey in which the narrator, the parson (it. parroco/pastore) Yorick
from Tristram Shandy, only gets as far as Lyons in France. Again, Sterne is parodying a convention – that of
the fashionable travel journal – but at the same time his use of ‘sentimental’ in the title points up (it. evidenzia),
perhaps ironically, a new emphasis on the ‘sensibility’ of Yorick. The sentimental issue was to bring a whole
new range of emotions into literature in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
The ‘outsider’, as observer and commentator on English society (usually London-based society) is an
important figure in British writing. Spenser, in the Elizabethan age, wrote from the distant exile of Ireland,
as did Swift a century later.
The dramatist William Congreve, also educated in Ireland, was a Yorkshireman; conversely, Laurence Sterne
was born in Ireland, but educated in Yorkshire. The Anglo-Irish contribution to English literature is highly
significant, from Spenser to the present day. Scottish writing, not fully known in England since the
Reformation, became a major presence late in the eighteenth century.
Smollett was Scottish and his finest novel, Humphry Clinker (1771) as one of many works, in the novel and
in poetry, and by a wide range of authors, which underlines difference rather than unity in the newly United
Kingdom.
Like many of his contemporaries, including Goldsmith, Smollett used journalism as a vehicle for his ideas.
While Addison and Steele, early in the century, had kept their writing conformably 'middle-brow' (it. livello
medio), Smollett's various ventures (/ˈvɛntʃərs/; avventure) into magazine publications are dominated by
anger.
His novels put some of this contentiousness to good use. His picaresque heroes (Roderick Random, Ferdinand
Count Fathom, Sir Lancelot Graves, and finally, in 1771, Humphrey Clinker) reflect the author's interests,
experiences (he had been a naval surgeon's mate (it. compagno di un medico chirurgo della Marina), and
profound concern with the state of the world.
As we have seen, the term 'picaresque' is often used to describe the kind of novel which Smollett wrote, and
has also been applied to any novels of trickery (it. raggiro) and rogues (it. furfanti), including Moll
Flanders and Tom Jones.
The term was first used in 1829 but can usefully cover the eighteenth-century novel which takes its hero or
heroine on a journey, or through a series of events and misadventures, out of which he or she emerges
triumphant.
Smollett's characters encompass (it, abbracciare, includere) all level of society, with servants always having
significant identities and key roles. The range of experiences his characters undergo (it. subire, sottoporsi) is
also vast.
Ferdinand Count Fathom creates one of the first truly monstrous anti-heroes in fiction - a more thoroughly
evil creature even than Fielding's Jonathan Wild. Peregrine Pickle is anti-authoritarian, and highly satirical
about the kind of grand tour which Sterne also mocks in A Sentimental Journey.
Class and social judgement are, however, not eliminated; and, in the mailing (it. carteggio/insieme di lettere)
and mishandling (it. maltrattamenti) of the English language by some of the letter-writers, Smollett shows a
mastery of linguistic disparity, subconscious sexual desires, and divergent moral standpoints (it. posizioni),
reaching a climax in the multi-level punning (it. azione di fare giochi di parole) of the final letters when some
kind of 'union' is reached.
Smollett's non-fictional output was also vast. His Complete History of England (1757-1758) was
controversial, but very successful financially; his immense The Present State of All Nations (1768-1769) is a
work of tremendous breadth (/ˈbrɛdθ/; it. spessore, portata) and complexity.
A certain sexual openness (it. apertura) begins to emerge in the novel in the mid-eighteenth century.
Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) contains a not totally serious defence of (and invitation to) homosexuality,
citing the Roman satirist Petronius as precedent.
In the same year, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland was published. Better known as Fanny
Hill, the book gave rise to an indecency charge and became a huge (it. grandissimo, vasto) seller. Fanny Hill is
a rather examination of both male and female sexuality, in detail and in considerable variety.
12
Coincidentally, 1771 saw the publication both of Smollett's masterpiece Humphrey Clinker and the novel
which most typifies the opposing tendency towards 'sensibility', The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie,
another Scot.
This move towards (it. si avvcina/va verso) the acceptance of 'feminine' elements in the masculine hero is, in
a sense, a continuation of the exploring and defining of sexual roles in contemporary society, which
Richardson and Fielding used in their novels. It was to have an enormous influence outside Britain: Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, who is one of the central figures of European literature of the time, acknowledged the
influence of Mackenzie's novel on his Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which gave the figure of the
sensitive, suffering and finally suicidal hero both a universal dimension and lasting popularity.
Mackenzie's novel takes the form of a mutilated manuscript - 'scattered (it. sparpagliati) chapters, and
fragments of chapters' - from which pages and whole sections have been 'lost'.
James Macpherson is practically forgotten today, but, as the producer of Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763),
which purported to be translations of Gaelic epics by Ossian, became the favourite writer of characters as
diverse as Young Werther and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Macpherson’s project was not, however, just an exercise in sentimental primitivism, but part of a larger
attempt (it. tentative) – in which Tomas Gray and Thomas Percy, editor of the highly influential Reliques of
Ancient English Poetry (1765), can also be seen to have taken part – to relocate the origins of British literature
in a Norther cultural context, as opposed to Southern classical context.
Matthew Arnold’s neglected (it. dimenticato, trascurato, omesso) but important mid-Victorian epic Balder
Dead (1855) continues this Northern cultural shift of emphasis, almost a century after Ossian.
This ever-expanding influence of literature in English becomes more and more noticeable as publishing turned
into an international business. The colonies, and Europe, were eager (/ˈiːgər/; it. desiderosi/impazienti) markets
for books of all kinds, and the era of the international bestseller was dawning (it. avendo inizio).

THE NOVEL
The concern of Augustan age was not so much with exploration – both of the bounds of human potential and
of the bounds of geography and the science, which were the concerns of the Renaissance – as with experience.
The novel and fiction became the dominant form and genre in terms of readership, although for more than a
century they would be considered ‘inferior’ by critics.
The novel was not a sudden (it. improvvisa, repentina) innovation at the end of the seventeenth century.
Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) provides (/prəˈvaɪds/; it. fornisce) us with one of the
earliest picaresque tales in English. It recounts (it. narra) ‘the life of Jack Wilton’ in a mixture of styles,
anticipating the picaresque heroes and heroines of Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding just over a century later.
In general, however, the exotic influence in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature was to be tamed;
subsumed into recognisably English middle-class ways of thinking and brought into line with the worldview
of the time. The expanding readership was largely female and upper or upper-middle class. The new ethos
indicated that all kinds of social behaviour were monitored, regulated, controlled. In this context, the first
female figure in English literature stands out as a vivid exception to the newly formulated rule.
Aphra Behn’s exotic Oroonoko uses a tale of a noble African, who is carried off (it. viene condotto) to slavery
in the English colony of Surinam, to illustrate the violence of the slave trade (it. tratta degli schiavi) and the
corruption of the primitive people by treacherous (it. viscidi) and hypocritical (it. ipocriti) Christian colonisers.
Behn was a controversial figure, despite her considerable success as a writer for theatre. She was accused of
lewdness (it. oscenità) and of plagiarism (it. plagio). She cannot be ignored, however, as the writer of some
seventeen plays, and thirty works of fiction – some three decades before Daniel Defoe is credited with writing
the first proper novels.
The works of other writers who were accused of immorality or anti-government sentiments also suffered in
this climate. Delarivier Manley is a good example of a hugely successful writer whose voice was silenced
admitting (it. ammettendo) scandalous accusations. Her The New Atlantis (1709) was a sensational political
allegory, not far removed from Swift.

13
Manley’s The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) took the kind of refined political satire of Dryden into
the sphere of contemporary politics.
The novels of Daniel Defoe are fundamental to eighteenth-century ways of thinking. They range from the
quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year, an almost journalistic (but fictional) account of London between
1664 and 1665 (when the author was a very young child), to Robinson Crusoe, one of the most enduring fables
of Western culture. Thus, Defoe’s best-known heroine, Moll Flanders, can titillate her readers with her first-
person narration of a dissolute life as thief (/ˈθiːf/; ladro), prostitute and incestuous wife, all the time telling
her story from the vantage point of one who has been accepted back (it. riaccettato) into society and improved
her behaviour.
However, artistic representation of low life continued to be popular for other reasons too. John Gay’s theatrical
work The Beggar’s Opera is a good example of the entertainment value of cutpurses (/ˈkʌtˌpɜːsis/; scippatori),
thieves, and their womenfolk (it. donne all’interno di una comunità). Its hero, Macheath, is one of the lasting
figures of ‘popular’ culture to emerge from this period.
Robinson Crusoe makes a kingdom of the island upon which he is shipwrecked (it. naufragato). His
relationships, first with Xury, then with his ‘man, Friday’, lack the kind of respect Behn gave the royal slave
in Oroonoko.
Crusoe is a coloniser, who establishes on the island a model of his own society which will continue after the
end of the tale. Robinson’s belief in God, or in what he himself is doing, is never questioned.
So, this novel, which has become a potent myth of survival, confirms for the reader the ultimate rightness (it.
correttezza) of Crusoe’s way of thinking and acting. The novel ends positively in order not to subvert any of
the middle-class mercantile values Robinson Crusoe upholds (it. sostiene/conferma). Friday can be seen as
the simple native, but, alternatively, he can be seen as the victim of colonisation. Robinson Crusoe has been
seen as one of the first capitalist’s heroes, who overcomes extreme difficulties to reach economic security.
Love and romance were not excluded, however. Moll’s search is for love and identity as well as for social
stability and acceptability.
The heroine of Defoe’s Roxana, subtitled The Fortunate Mistress, is a kind of superior Moll Flanders, going
through (it. attraversando) a series of rich protectors and becoming very rich herself in the process.
One writer who dares (it. ha il coraggio) to criticise and mock authority figures, with ever-increasing venom,
was Jonathan Swift. It is indicative of how ‘dissidents’ can be absorbed that his most famous novel, Gulliver’s
Travels (1726), has long been considered a comic fable for children (like it happened with George Orwell’s
Animal Farm). In fact, it is a severe attack on the political parties of the time, and on the pointlessness of
religious controversies between different denominations within Christianity (for example, the tiny Liliputians
and the enormous Brobdingnagians or the differences between Big-endias or Little-endians).
The novel goes on to satirize the new scientific institutions of the time, such as The Royal Society. The
culmination of Swift’s angry polemic comes when he presents the Houyhnhnms, a race of rational and highly-
civilised horses who are contrasted with the brutal Yahoos, a race of ape-like beasts in human forms. Gulliver,
the traveller who has visited so many different worlds, has to recognise that the Yahoos are, sadly, the closest
to his own species – some 133 years before Charles Darwin confirmed their ape-like connections in On the
Origin of Species.
In tone, Swift is sometimes not far from Mandeville, over 350 years before him. Mandeville spoke of an island
he visited where children were eaten, describing their flesh (/ˈflɛʃ/; it. carne) as ‘the best and sweetest flesh in
the world’. Swift, in a prose pamphlet (1729) about the situation of Ireland (already a political problem for
more than a century), offers, as a solution to the problem, the marketing of Irish children for English
consumption.
Mandeville’s exotic joke here becomes a vehicle for serious political satire; but the English reading public
was shocked and horrified, unable to see Swift’s humour or his serious concern.
Swift is yet another example of an Anglo-Irish writer, criticising English society ever more strongly
(another outsider, like him will be Oscar Wilde, a century later).

14
It is with the next generation of novelists that love stories come into their own. Samuel Richardson had worked
his way up (it. eccitare/alterare) from poverty to become a prosperous printer (it. tipografo). Among (it. in
mezzo a) the works he published in the late 1730s were books of moral advice and a version for the times of
Aesop’s Fables. The success of these led him to develop a series of ‘familiar letters’ with their original aim
being a manual of letter-writing. But they turned into a major epistolary novel, Pamela, published in 1740.
Poor but virtuous, Pamela suffers a series of trials at the hands of Mr B, culminating in attempted rape. She
refuses to become his mistress or his wife until she converts Mr B. Then she agrees to marry him and becomes
a paragon of virtue admired by all.
Modern psychological commentators have found Pamela’s behaviour perplexing, and the discussion of
male/female roles since Richardson wrote Pamela has kept the novel in the forefront (it. ribalta) of literary
and social interest.
Richardson’s next epistolary novel, Clarissa (1747-1748), marks a major step forward. There are four major
letter writers, where in Pamela almost all the letters come from the heroine alone. The novel ends in tragedy,
and it is interesting to compare Clarissa’s tragedy with similar Renaissance precedents. Clarissa’s suitor
Lovelace play with her emotions in devious ways, consigning her (it. spendendola) to a brothel (/ˈbrɒθəl/; it.
bordello), attempting rape, and leading to the key question.
Finally, Lovelace drugs and rapes her and Clarissa not only begins to lose her reason but also her very identity.
The dilemma recalls Isabella’s insistence on her chastity in Measure for Measure, nearly 150 year earlier. But
Shakespeare’s concern was for justice; extreme Puritanism was mocked and overcomed. Richardson’s concern
is with male and female roles and identities, and the interplay of his character’s psychology is handled with
considerable subtlety and complexity.
Henry Fielding, a highly successful satiric dramatist until the introduction of censorship in 1737, began his
novel-writing career with Shamela, a pastiche (it. satira, parodia) of Pamela, which humorously attacked the
hypocritical morality which that novel displayed.
Fielding focuses more on male characters and manners than Richardson. In doing so, he creates a new kind of
hero in his novels. Joseph Andrews is chaste (/ˈtʃeɪst/; it. casto), while Tom Jones in Tom Jones (1749) is quite
(it. esattamente) the opposite. Tom is the model of the young foundling (it. trovatello) enjoying his freedom
(to travel, to have relationships with women, to enjoy sexual experience) until his true origins are discovered.
When he matures, he assumes his social responsibilities and marries the woman he has ‘always’ loved, who
has, of course, like a mediaeval crusader’s beloved (it. amata), been waiting faithfully (it. fedelmente) for him.
Both of these heroes are types, representatives of their sex.
Jonathan Wild the Great (1743) is, like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, a story of a criminal, and presents one the first
real anti-heroes in English literature. The target is, as it was in Fielding’s plays, the prime minister, Sir Robert
Walpole, who is ‘Newgate with the mask on’. Jonathan Wild’s career of cheating (it. imbroglio), robbery (it.
rapina), and vice leads him to Newgate, and a sentence of death. He faces (it. lo affronta) it most unheroically,
but emerges as a champion of hypocrisy and double-dealing (it. doppio-giochista) – a devil-figure for the time.
Eliza Haywood ran the periodical The Female Spectator, one of the first magazines intended specifically for
a female readership. She and Henry Fielding’s sister Sarah, above all, deserve to reclaim (it. meritano di
rivendicare) a place in the history of the novel, both for the quality of their works and for the opinions and
attitudes they display.
As with Sarah Fielding’s eponymous hero (it. l’eroe eponimo/che dà il nome al romanzo) David Simple, the
name of the heroine Betsy Thoughtless gives the clue (it. definizione) to the character, but the thoughtless (it.
irriguardosa) heroine undergoes a transformation. While dithering (it. tergiversa), trying to choose between
two possible suitors (/ˈsuːtərs/; it. pretendenti), Sober and Gaylord, she loses her ‘true love’, Mr Truelove, who
gives up waiting. Thus, she ends up in an unhappy marriage, and the author must resort to killing off (it.
sterminare) both the husband and Mrs Truelove in order to bring about the happy ending.
David Simple is an unusual, complex and penetrating examination of human motivation. It lacks the wit and
the exuberance of Henry Fielding’s novels, but brings a new note into the novel, a note of struggle and despair
(it. afflizione, angoscia), which remains striking (it. impressionante) and unexpected (it. innatesa).

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Oliver Goldsmith, successful as poet and comic dramatist, published his novel The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766.
It is a kind of pastoral parable, an improbable fairy-tale of a vicar whose family is beset by misfortunes; not
unlike the unfolding of Georg Eliot’s Silas Marner almost a century later, redemption and justice triumph in
the end.
Don Quixote, the epic novel of Spanish literature by Cervantes, was a major influence on English writing after
Restoration. It was published in Spain in 1605 as Don Quixote de la Mancha and added to (it. arricchita) in
1615. The earliest English translation was published in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. Many
seventeenth-century plays and novels borrowed something from Cervantes – the idea of the ‘picaro’, or clever
rogue (it. furfante perspicace), is often associated with Don Quixote, but is in fact nothing to do with that
work.
The picaresque novels of Fielding, Smollett, and others derive from another slightly earlier (it. leggermente
antecedente) Spanish tradition. Samuel Butler’s satire Hudibras (1663) is in the form of a mock romance (it.
romanzo d’imitazione), derived from Cervantes, with the her Sir Hudibras and his servant, the squire
(/ˈskwaɪər/; it. proprietario terriero) Ralpho, paralleling Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
The direct influence of Cervantes can be found in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), where the
heroine, Arabella, echoes the Spanish hero’s naivety (it. ingenuità, innocenza) in a challenging world (it.
mondo di sfide). She is a very funny, very modern heroine, one of the first characters in a novel to let her
novel-reading go to her head: she believes everything she has read. She sees a prince in every gardener, and
her clearer-eyed maid Lucy as a ‘Weak-souled Wench’. And she believes that, as all ladies are irresistible to
all gentlemen, every man must be a ‘Ravisher’ – unless he is the kind of ‘Knight’ who will ‘Rescue’ her.
Charlotte Lennox also compiled three volumes of the earliest research into Shakespeare’s source material,
Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-1754) with Dr Johnson’s support, and wrote several other novels, plays,
translations and adaptations, including a version of a play by Ben Johnson and others, Eastward Ho, which,
retitled Old City Manners, was a big success in 1775 at Drury Lane Theatre.

THE GOTHIC AND THE SUBLIME

There is a degree of emotional impact in the nature poetry of the eighteenth century which marks a shift (it.
spostamento) in sensibility towards what came to be called ‘the sublime’. The concept, from classical Greek,
came to England through the French of Boileau (INFO Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636 – 1711), who was
a French poet and critic. He did much to reform the prevailing form of French poetry, in the same way
that Blaise Pascal did to reform the prose. He was greatly influenced by Horace and reached its definitive
explication in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful (1757–1759). This is a key text of the times, displaying an emphasis on feelings and on imagination,
which is almost the antithesis of the neoclassical insistence on form and reason. Burke’s idea of the sublime
goes beyond natural beauty (although the beauty of nature is very much a part of it) and goes into the realms
of awe, or ‘terror’.
Terror, emotion, feeling: all these represent a break from the intellectual rigours of the Augustan age, and
are in one sense a reaction against the new pressures of society and bourgeois (/bʊərˈʒwɑː/; it. borghesi)
concerns.
The link between the sublime and terror is most clearly seen in the imaginative exaggeration of the Gothic
novel – a form which concentrated on the fantastic, the macabre and the supernatural, with haunted (it.
infestati) castles, spectres from the grave and wild landscapes. It is significant that the term ‘Gothic’ originally
had mediaeval connotations: this is the first of several (it. parecchi) ways of returning to pre-Renaissance
themes and values which is to be found over the next hundred years or so. The novels of the 1760s to the
1790s, however, gave the term ‘Gothic’ the generic meaning of horror fantasy. The Castle of Otranto (1764)
by Horace Walpole (son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole) was the first of this kind, and the sub-genre
has flourished (it. prosperato) ever since. It is a story of mediaeval times, set in Southern Italy, with castles,
vaults (/ˈvɔːlts/; cripte), ghosts, statues which come to life, appearances and disappearances, sudden violent

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death, forest caves (it. caverne, grotte), and the whole paraphernalia (it. topici, nel senso di ‘armamentario) of
horror.
Strange religious characters abound in Gothic novels, from Friar Jerome in Walpole to Ambrosio, the hero of
The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis, one of the most successful novels of its kind.
Like many texts of its times, Walpole’s novel purported (/pərˈpɔːrt:d/ it. rivendicò) to be a translation of an
ancient manuscript dating from the eleventh or twelfth century.
Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton (1987) examines the phenomenon. However, The Castle of Otranto is not
without its originality, despite the pretence of ancient provenance.
The Gothic novel’s immediate widespread (it. diffusa) popularity, in the hands of such accomplished (it. abili)
writers as Ann Radcliffe, can be seen in the fact that parodies of the form became common. Jane Austen’s
first mature novel, Northanger Abbey (1798-1803; published in 1818) sets out (it. espone) to take a critical
but affectionate perspective on The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Radcliffe’s most successful work,
transmuting its exaggerations and extravagances into the (sometimes rather sinister) realities of day-to-day
life which were to become Jane Austen’s primary subject matter. Clara Reeve, with The Old English Baron
(1777), enjoyed even greater success than her model, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.
Clara Reeve’s critical study in dialogue form, The Progress of Romance (1785), is interesting as one of the
comparatively few analyses of the novel by a novelist in this period.
Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) takes the Gothic to new heights. It is a tale of love, lust and
murder set in late fifteenth-century Venice. This novel marks a distinct step forward (or downwards) in its
heroine’s wholehearted commitment to vice, ‘the alarming paths of sin’, going beyond such depths (it.
profondità) as Lewis’s Ambrosio in The Monk had reached. It is daring (it. audace) in its depiction of female
sexual attraction, and touches on taboos of sexuality, class and race.
Thomas Love Peacock also mocks the Gothic in Nightmare Abbey (1818) and Gryll Grange (1860-1861),
written at a distance of more than forty years; but aspects of the Gothic continue to appear throughout the
mainstream Victorian novel, from the Brontës and Dickens to Stevenson and Wilde.
In some ways, it is the most resistant continuous strain (it. sforzo) in the history of the novel, leading to
psychological insights as well; at its best in works like Frankenstein (by Mary Shelley, 1818) and Dracula
(by Bram Stoker, 1897) which create images that can thrill (it. far rabbrividire) the reader even today.
Frankenstein is not properly Gothic in the way The Castle of Otranto and most of the novels of Clara Reeve
are, where the virginal female victim is subjected to increasingly exaggerated horrors. In Frankenstein the
‘hero’, the young doctor Victor Frankenstein, wants to create a perfect human being. The creature turns out to
be an eight-foot tall hideous (it. orrendo) monster: this is the ‘horror’ element of the story. Modern readings
of Frankenstein have reacted against the cinematic image of the monster and have read the tale as a
psychological exploration of creation, childbirth (it. parto) and responsibility, with an emphasis on the creature
as an outcast (it. reietto, emarginato).
Frankenstein was inspired, the story goes, by an evening which Mary Shelley spent with the poets Byron and
Shelley and their friend John Polidori (INFO the brother of Frances, who married Gabriele Rossetti) on the
shores of Lake Geneva in 1816. All four of them were to write something ‘supernatural’. Byron and Shelley
incorporated the ideas into poems. Polidori wrote The Vampire, published in 1818, a story which started a
long line of vampire tales in English.
A fashion for exotic locales and action, closely related to the Gothic, led to such outrageous (it. scandalosi)
works as Vathek (1786) by William Beckford. This Arabian tale involves a cruel hero, Caliph Vathek, palaces
for the indulgence of the five senses, child sacrifice, and considerable high-pitched (it. acuto, nel senso
‘fonico’) excitement. Its exaggerations are tempered with a degree of irony which make the book very funny,
although many readers and critics have taken its strangeness (it. stranezza) at face value. Vathek was the
precursor of many such oriental tales, and in some ways anticipates the ‘aesthetic’ temperament which was to
develop in Romanticism, such as Lalla Rookh (1817), four hugely successful verse tales (it. quattro racconti
in versi di enorme successo) with a linking narrative, by the Irish writer Thomas Moore.

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Like the Gothic terrors, Beckford’s exoticism is more the product of imagination and fantasy than of realism,
an extension of the imaginative range of the novel which brings together several trends: the fascination of far-
off (it. lontani) places, the exaggerations of Mandeville and Hakluyt, what came to be known as Orientalism,
and an enjoyment of sensuality and sensation.

CRITICISM
Criticism, or writing about books and their authors, is as old as writing itself. It is thus (it. così, perciò) hardly
surprising that the century which saw the greatest expansion in writing and reading should also see the arrival
(it. venuta, arrivo) of the professional critic. Critical essays on theory and form, such as Dryden’s Of Dramatic
Poesy (1668), or satirical views of the literary world, such as Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1697, published
in 1704) draw lines between older and newer styles and modes of writing. This is criticism as an aid to the
definition and aims of literature. Under the influence of the French Writer Nicholas Boileau’s Art Poétique
(1674), criticism in the Augustan age established canons of taste and defined principles of composition and
criticism. Pope, the wisest (it. il più saggio) and wittiest of Augustans, wrote the Essay on Criticism.

LANGUAGE NOTES
Thou (/dau/) became more familiar and informal, even though you became more formal, this happened since
Elizabethan period.

It has been estimated that between 1500 and 1650 around 12,000 new words were introduced into English
language. English grammar and vocabulary, before heavily influenced by other languages, became sufficiently
nativized and ‘Englished’ for several writers to feel that the English language should be more definitively
described and recorded. In 1662 was established The Royal Society and in the seventeenth and eighteenth
century many grammars, dictionaries and pronunciation guides were published.

In poetry, the dominant pattern is one of unstressed followed by stressed syllable (iambic) in five feet
(pentameter). Even though the iambic pentameter is the heartbeat (it. cuore pulsante, fulcro) of English poetry,
it possible seeing many variations of this basic pattern.

As the form of the novel developed, so the uses of point of view became more sophisticated. We see in Defoe’s
novels, for example, all the action through the eyes of the main character – Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders,
Roxana, and others, all of whom use a first-person narration.
Fielding introduces an omniscient third-person narrator, who frequently nudges (it. esorta) the reader – ‘dear
reader’ – pointing out moments when the reader might judge (positively or negatively) a character’s behaviour
and motivations. This explicit narratorial manipulation generally disappears in the novels of Jane Austen.

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 OUTSIDERS

IRISH PEOPLE (Philip Spenser and Oscar Wilde)

George Fraquhar SCOTS
Jonathan Swift Alison Cockburn
Laurence Sterne (born in Ireland,educated in Henry Mackenzie
Yorkshire) Jane Elliot
Oliver Goldsmith Joanna Baillie
Richard Brinsley Sheridan Robert Burns
Thomas Moore Robert Fergusson
William Congreve (educated in Ireland, Tobias Smollett
Yorkshireman)

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