The Dunciad Summary

Book 1

Book 1 of The Dunciad begins by establishing its mock-heroic

style through an invocation, much the way a classical epic
would. The speaker calls to "The Mighty Mother and her son
who brings / The Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings" and
establishes that they were called to this work by
"Dulness, Jove, and Fate." These three figures establish three
keys to Pope's work: the first being the mythological
representation of England's intellectual culture and values
ruled over by Dulness, the second being the classical allusions
and poetic structure of ancient Greece and Rome that Pope
replicates, and the third being Fate, which becomes a major
theme within the work, forcing the reader to question
whether anything might now be done about the spread of
Dulness.

Pope gives us a description of Dulness as an immortal

anarchic Goddess exerting control over the minds of writers,
artists, and intellectuals. Pope also provides a series of names
of writers who serve Dulness, mocking and criticizing the
works by authors like Cervantes, Swift, and Rabelais. We are
told that Dulness means to begin a "new Saturnian age of
Lead," or a gloomy, slow, and heavy period for the minds of
Britain.
A mythological world meant to introduce us to the plagues
upon the literary world of England begins to take shape next
in Book 1. Folly holds a throne, Poetry and Poverty share a
cave out of which dull poets flood the literary landscape with
new printed works, and Dulness has a college for nurturing
these poets. She sits here on a throne surrounded by the four
"guardian Virtues" of Fortitude, Temperance, Prudence, and
Poetic Justice. Folly, subordinate to the Goddess of Dulness,
supervises the four guardians: Virtue supports the throne,
Fortitude knows no fear of bad reputation, and Calm
Temperance and Prudence have their own specific roles to
play. Last, there is Poetic Justice, who weighs truth with gold,
which means he transforms lies into truth and takes gold for
bribes. Within this world, it is not only the writers of Pope's
time that are vivid characters; so are the various facets of
writing, such as Metaphors, Tragedy, Comedy, Farce, and so
on—all of which are illustrated as amassing into one chaotic
and confusing force under the influence of Dulness.

Dulness, shrouded in clouds with a veil of fog over her face,

now takes us to the mock-heroic's first conflict: she must pick
a successor for Eusden, the aging poet-laureate. Though she
has many poets who serve her whom Pope lists and of whom
she is deeply proud, she sets her sights on a poet named Bayes
as her choice. Bayes, however, is deep in conflict. While his
works certainly serve Dulness and "Nonsense precipitate," he
is struggling to finish works and around "him much Embryo,
much Abortion lay, / Much future Ode, and abdicated Play." In
his library, he looks around and thinks of all of the writers he
has plagiarized, including Shakespeare and Molière. The rest
of the great books in his library have largely remained unread,
used merely as decor and "serve (like other fools) to fill a
room." Many of these have been spared from Bayes' touch,
according to Pope, lying outside of his mental or physical
reach, closed and protected on the highest shelves.

Now, however, Bayes seizes twelve of these from the shelves

and takes his own folio of work to use as the base for building
an altar to Dulness. He cries out the Goddess, expressing his
disillusionment. He has served her well, but wonders if it is
time to move on to other pursuits. He describes how once a
demon stole his pen and "betry'd [him] into common sense,"
but aside from this incident, his writing has been purely loyal
to Dulness. He asks the Goddess if his work did not please her,
and feeling lost, he wonders what other professions he might
take up in place of being one of Dulness' poets. He considers
entering the Church, taking up gambling or "gaming," or
becoming a party-writer. He comes to no conclusion and
decides to burn his altar as an effigy, sending his unpublished
works out into the world untouched or tarnished by
England's printing world, London's in particular.
Dulness is awakened by the light and takes "a sheet of Thule
from her bed," referring to a sheet of an unfinished poem
whose ink is still wet or whose writing was too cold and heavy
to complete. She flies down to Bayes and uses the sheet to put
out the fire, rescuing the works. She takes him back to the
most sacred hall of her college and declares the place his
home. She anoints him with opium and puts the symbol of her
sacred bird upon a crown which she places on Bayes' head.
Eusden, Dulness' poet-laureate, is dead, the Goddess
announces, and Bayes is made King of Dulness and is now
referred to as Cibber, after Pope's real-world object of
criticism, Britain's poet laureate at the time. This news is met
with much chaotic noise and celebration as "the hoarse nation
croak'd, 'God save King Log!'"

Analysis

This section expertly established Pope's ability to mimic the

writers he is critiquing while simultaneously producing a
deeper literary meaning in his own writing. As critic William
Kinsley points out, in Book I, Pope writes that under Dulness
and Chaos, Epic and Farce "get a jumbled race" (ln. 70) even
as Pope himself writes a farcical epic (29). Pope chooses this
style intentionally, and his knowing artfulness makes his
work both impactful and canonical. In Book I, Pope uses a
variety of literary devices to establish that the writers he
critiques are, in caving to Dulness, less human than his own
masterful speaker. In doing so, he provides a roadmap for
understanding the text and the world it creates.

Early on in this work, we are provided with language both

beautiful and grotesque to describe this new period in
England's literary and intellectual life. Scholar Edward
Thomas describes the world of Dulness as "full of monstrous
distortion," and this certainly rings true in the diction and the
imagery we are provided (448). We are told that the poet
servants of Dulness are "momentary monsters" (ln. 83),
"brazen, brainless brothers" (ln. 33) who breed "spawn,
scarce quick in embryo" (ln.59), "new-born nonsense" (ln.
60), and "Maggots, half-form'd" (ln. 61). Though the language
used here clearly communicates a disturbing realm full of
inhuman creatures, the construction of this language within
the poem tells a different story. Most of the above examples
showcase the speaker using alliteration to create repetitive
sounds that are pleasing to the ear. They create consistency
within the text rather than the distortion the images seem to
imply. Also, while the images of half-formed maggots and
newborns are meant to convey that the works of these poets
are not fully or effectively shaped, they exist within a
predetermined pattern: ten-syllable lines paired into
rhyming couplets, often following iambic pentameter in
metric structure. This would suggest that this poem has, in
fact, always been fully formed or fully imagined. Both of these
details tell us that though the speaker wishes to convey the
dark side of Dulness' reign and her army, he cannot help but
write with skill and even beauty. As readers, we see that this
speaker cannot be simply another Dunce.

The personification of any number of abstract concepts

within this first book acts as a foil for the monstrous nature of
Dulness' army of Dunces, a juxtaposition that makes this
degradation of humanity seem all the more extreme. Dulness'
throne is surrounded by four guardian Virtues who are given
strikingly human descriptions like these:

Fierce champion Fortitude, that knows no fears

Of hisses, blows, or want, or loss of ears:

Calm Temperance, whose blessings those partake,

Who hunger and who thirst for scribbling sake:

Prudence, whose glass presents th' approaching jail:

Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale,

Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,

And solid pudding against empty praise. (ln. 47-54)

These are figures we can picture and imagine quite clearly in

human form. Similarly, literary devices become
anthropomorphized as well. Readers see a "Mob of
Metaphors" (ln. 67), "Tragedy and Comedy embrace" (ln. 69),
and "Time himself [stand] still at [Dulness'] command" (ln.
71). Meanwhile, what human actions we are given in this
book are often dehumanized. Take our protagonist, Bayes.
The speaker tells us that Bayes "gnaw'd his pen" (ln. 117),
"Plunged for his sense" (ln. 119), and "flounder'd on in mere
despair" (ln. 120). These are all animalistic actions, some of
which conjure up the sense that, at least mentally, Bayes
seems to exist in a watery world in which humans could not
survive. These categorizations of mythological, abstract, and
human figures align in many ways with the classical
mythology that Pope is alluding to and drawing from in his
work. In many Greek and Roman tales, it is gods and
demigods who are depicted as fully human and who often
turned humans who had committed wrongs in the gods' eyes
into animals, such as Acanthus, Aedon, and Cereus. Pope's
writing, therefore depicts an intellectual, cultural, and
historical depth in drawing these connections between
classical works and his own mock-epic.
The speaker's point of view is also incredibly telling here.
Within Book I, we see the speaker take us through the world
of Dulness, her college, her Empire, and then to the world of
Bayes in his library. We see references to important, albeit
infamous, areas in the English literary and artistic world,
including Grub-Street and Drury-lane (ln. 44). The scope of
the speaker's understanding and vision is broad in this Book.
Readers are able to see early on that the perspective
presented by the speaker is far different from the "bards, like
Proteus long in vain tied down" (ln. 37) who dwell and creep
out of the "cave of Poverty and Poetry" in the world of Dulness
(ln. 34). Contrast this with Bayes, who readers are told has
not read the most important works buried within his library
(ln. 145-151), and we see a different picture. Bayes is
described as "sinking from thought to thought," plunging "for
his sense, but [finding] no bottom there" (ln. 119). If Bayes
has any perspective that can compete in power with the
speaker's, it is one that is very deep, dark, and suffocating,
revealing little to nothing to reader. Pope kills two birds with
one stone in this approach: we are given a broad
understanding of the mock-heroic's geography and scope,
and we are given additional reason to believe that the speaker
of this work is himself no Dunce blinded by Dulness.

Between Book I's structure, diction, imagery, and allusions,

we are given a firm understanding of what, according to the
poem, is at stake for humanity, as well as what is at stake for
Pope. In creating a mock-epic of this nature, Pope risks being
aligned with the very behavior he so loathes. But by studying
the details he gives the reader in contrast with the creatures
populating his epic, he encourages the reader to trust that his
choices are intentional and multi-faceted, mocking and
sophisticated. It is essential for Pope to establish this early on,
and it is why this must be a critical focus in analyzing Book I
and understanding how the rest of the epic reinforces and
builds upon this initial part.
Book 2

As readers begin Book II of The Dunciad, they are greeted

with a much different version of Bayes than before. Rather
than the desperate and insecure figure of Book I, the newly
crowned and renamed King Cibber is described by Pope as an
arrogant and jealous figure looking down upon his many
servants, the Dunces. As all manner of Dunces gather to
celebrate, the Queen of Dulness declares that there will be a
series of heroic games played in order to honor the new
successor. All poets and authors who serve Dulness are
present, but in addition, all of the Stationers, or printers and
sellers of books and print material, who serve Dulness are
there as well.
It is these booksellers and bookmakers who Dulness
summons forward to compete first. She creates "a poet's
form" (ln. 35) and packs it full of symbols meant to denote the
qualities of a dull poet: a brain full of feathers, a heart full of
lead, and a plump figure connoting commercial success. She
places this form in front of the booksellers and tells them that
the quickest and nimblest poet capable of reaching this effigy
first shall have him as a client whose work they might print.
We are told of two stationers in particular vying for the prize:
Lintot and Curll. They challenge one another and as the race
begins, it appears that Curll will be the winner. As he races to
the phantom poet, however, he slips in a puddle of his wife's
waste outside of his neighbor's shop. Fearing he will no longer
win the race, he cries out to Jove, the most powerful of the
Roman gods, and begs him for help winning the race. While
Jove on Olympus listens with amusement to the prayers of
humans below and does nothing, the goddess Cloacina serves
Jove and takes pity on Curll. He had often honored her with
his work and so she had him "oil'd with magic juices for the
course" (ln. 104) and he makes it to the poet figure first.
Unfortunately, Dulness is playing a trick on him, and while
Curll tries to grab the figure, Dulness makes him impossible
to catch as he disappears and reappears in a foggy cloud. She
creates illusions of other dull poets whom Curll also tries to
grab, all to no avail. She finally takes pity on Curll and tells him
that his gift shall be that all decent writers will soon have their
work made dull like the works of the poets under the Goddess,
and she gives him a fine tapestry depicting the actions of her
confessors, including Curll, to honor his victory.
Next, a poetess named Eliza is brought forward. The Goddess
starts a literal pissing contest, in which the victorious dunce
shall win the fair poetess. Curll, Osborne, and Eridanus
compete, with Osborne coming out the winner. Then, an
extravagant and wealthy looking man with an impressive
entourage appears. The Goddess decrees that the next
competition, which is aimed at authors this time, will result in
the winner of the contest obtaining this wealthy man as their
patron. The winner will be determined by "who can tickle
best" (ln. 196). While it looks like Welsted may win, a young
competitor unheard of prior to the competition prays to
Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, who teaches him to
find the patron's weakness, just as she taught Paris to find
Achilles' heel. As a result, the youth wins.
The Goddess wishes to turn to a different game and rouses the
crowd to shout, chant, and make the most chaotic noise
possible to determine who is the loudest. After they join her
in this command, she gifts them each a "Cat-call," telling them
they are all equal in their loud and disruptive sound, but so
that the contest may end, brings in her "Brayers" to make the
loudest noises possible. Blackmore and his vast voice are
proclaimed the winners.
The crowd then makes their way to Fleet Ditch for a diving
contest amongst party-writers, or gossip writers. The winner
is the diver who can both stay down the longest and also show
his love for reveling in the dirt more than any other. He shall
win the weekly journals and a pig of lead. Many dunces
attempt this challenge, including a "desp'rate pack" (ln. 305)
of gazetteers, or pamphlet publishers. Arnall wins and returns
from the depths to say that he has encountered mud-nymphs
and a branch of the river Styx blending into the Thames,
which is the river necessary to cross into the Underworld.
To cap off the games, Dulness issues a contest for critics. They
must listen to the dullest and most laborious writing possible
without falling asleep. All of the critics, the audience, and even
the readers of these works, despite their best efforts,
ultimately fall prey to the sleep-inducing literature. Included
in this is Cibber, who falls asleep on the Goddess' lap and
begins to dream.
Analysis
In Book I, we began to see how dunces like the new King
Cibber were trapped in a much narrower perspective than the
speaker. Dulness reigned within a "sacr'd Dome (Book I, ln.
122), symbolically representing a human head. Dulness is
trapped within the confines of an individual mind. In Book II,
Pope builds upon this with his parade of dunces to show how
Dulness is also permeating the inner circles of London and
English literary society. This internal death of the mind
radiates outward in Book II, both in the book's vivid imagery
and its characterization of many of the victors of the Goddess
of Dulness' games.
The idea that the parade of dunces speaks to the interiority
hinted at in Book I is expounded upon by David Sheehan, who
writes that the "movement is from outside the limits of the
City strictly defined, further and further inward, a movement
of contraction and narrowing" (34) and that this speaks to
Pope's desire to get to the heart of what is causing Dulness,
and not simply elaborating on what it is or can do (35).
Sheehan traces the geographic markers of London laid out in
Book II from "where the tall Maypole once o'erlooked the
Strand" (ln. 24), to "Bridewell" (ln. 257), "to Fleet-ditch" (ln.
260), and so on. But there are other kinds of interiority in
geography and in characters that readers are asked to
consider. Images like that of the "poet's form" (ln. 35) created
by Dulness show readers how key this hollowing out and
interiorization is for Dulness in this passage:

She form'd this image of well-bodied air;

With pert flat eyes she window'd well its head,
A brain of Feathers, and a heart of Lead;
And empty words she gave, and sounding strain,
But senseless, lifeless! idol void and vain!" (ln. 42-46)

Pope describes a symbolic transformation of a poet's insides

to show that this internal domain is important to Dulness—
how it seeks to get at the heart of minds, hearts, and societies.
The form mimics this point as well. Pope rarely places
enjambed lines in this poem, saving his definitive breaks
within lines for particularly important moments. In this
passage, the exclamation point which is found in the center of
the line acts to draw attention to the center and "heart" of a
line, as well. Simply recognizing the expected end-rhymes
which frame the ends of these lines and make them appear
whole is not enough for Pope. This transitional space is vital.
That this interior space is so important to Pope is clear in the
contests he writes about as devised by the Goddess. In the
author's challenge for obtaining a patron, they must find a
secret or disguised weak spot by poking and prodding at the
wealthy target (ln. 215-220). In the diving contest, the
competitors must stay as deep as they can for as long as they
can, as if delving into the center of the world. Readers see this
when they hear the winner encountered mud-nymphs who
"suck'd him in" and went so deep as to approach a part of the
Underworld (ln. 332, 338). As they parade further onward,
the dunces "all descend" (ln. 269), as if sinking into the city.
But what is perhaps made clearer from the contests is what
has already been relinquished within the minds of the victors.
Many of these victors, whether it be Curll or the unknown
youth, prayed to gods to assist them in order to win. While
this certainly shows a rather reliant nature, it also shows a
dullness the Goddess strives for, one that looks to others, be
they gods or writers, for their successes and triumphs. The
interiority of these figures has been corrupted, and therefore
only some exterior force—be it Cloacina (ln. 93) or Venus (ln.
215) or Dulness herself (ln. 243)—can aid them.
Why this interior conquest is so important to Dulness is
something that we are shown through the final contest issued
by the Goddess in particular. As the boring works read aloud
invite sleep, those who "sat the nearest, by the words
o'ercome, / Slept first ... One circle first and then a second
makes, ... Like motion from one circle to the rest: / So from the
midmost the mutation spreads" (ln. 401-402, 406, 408-409).
Once Dulness has control of the interior space, be it of a
person's mind or a city's intellectual heart, the spread of
Dulness is quick and cascading. For Pope, to sacrifice that
"midmost" point to Dulness is to sacrifice all points to
Dulness. Readers, too, are lulled into sleep with alliterative
lines full of open-mouthed tones like "soft creeping words on
words the sense compose, [...] As to soft gales top-heavy pines
bow low" (ln. 389, 341). Even Pope's audience is not safe once
the parade has taken them to the heart of London and opened
the gates for Dulness.
While Book II maintains the skill in both form, imagery, and
allusion that Book I established, it builds upon these earlier
themes and realizes them on a larger scale—that of Dulness'
army within London, the heart of Britain's literary, cultural,
and intellectual life. Book II reinforces recognizable exterior
geography, pushes symbolic understandings of interiority to
hyperbolic extremes, and in doing so requires the reader to
experience the text, inviting them into the interior of the
work. Should these textual clues not make this keystone of
Pope's work abundantly clear, just as readers discover how
important this interiority is in the final contest, they are
plunged into perhaps the most interior of places as they enter
Book III: the dreams of King Cibber.
Book 3

Summary
At the start of Book III, Dulness takes the sleeping King Cibber
back to her temple and lays him to rest on her lap. This is a
coveted position, one that has generated the token fantasies
of romantics, scientists, politicians, poets, architects, and so
on. As King Cibber sleeps, Fancy flies him down towards the
Underworld, where he can see the realm of Elysium, where
only the most exceptional humans and demigods dwell in the
afterlife. Sibyl, the Greek prophetess who acted as Aeneas'
guide to the Underworld in Virgil's Aeneid leads Cibber now
as he descends into the mythological afterlife. Immediately,
Cibber is greeted by other dull poets and writers who help
him along, like Taylor, who paddles him across the river Styx.
Cibber encounters Bavius, a notoriously bad poet and critic
from ancient Rome, who is responsible for dipping the souls
of poets into the river occupied by Lethe, goddess of
forgetfulness and oblivion. This act of dipping is meant to dull
these spirits so that they are ready, upon entering the world,
to serve Dulness. Cibber notes that there are countless
numbers of these souls on the riverbank waiting to be called
to Earth. Then Settle, an English poet and playwright whom
Pope critiques as dull, appears as a Sage to Cibber. Settle,
boring and relatively unchanged from his form in life,
addresses Cibber and invites him to see the place where his
own soul was made dull, a privilege few individuals ever
experience. His unique position is due in part, Settle tells him,
to the fact that he is the one who will now act as the central
point for Dulness' reign, understanding and relating its
history, while also forging its imperial future.
In order to see the true extent of Dulness' power and territory,
Settle takes him up to a hilltop known as the Mount of Vision.
He shows him Dulness' past to the east, where so many great
empires have succumbed. Science, however, has proven
difficult, and conquered some territory that otherwise might
belong to Dulness. To the south and north, he sees Science
halted by large scores of Dulness' armies from all corners of
the globe, which are largely linked to religious movements
like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He says that once the
Goddess is able to bring people to heel, it creates vast
happiness, thus warning Cibber that while the world he is to
bring about seems a good one, he ought to be careful not to
dominate so harshly that this fog of contentedness might be
corrupted.
Great Britain is singled out in Settle's monologue as Dulness'
next and most vital target. Settle introduces Cibber to a few
servants of Dulness who might be of assistance in his mission,
and Cibber analyzes their skill sets and what they might bring
to the ultimate goal. These figures are destroyers and
corrupters of language, sciences, and order, agents of Dulness
at Cibber's disposal. He notes that while all of them, in stealing
or borrowing from great minds, are sons of these thinkers,
they, like all sons, come to hate all that their fathers give them,
and hence serve Dulness and degrade art and scholarship. At
this moment, we see a small shift occur in Settle in which he
warns these men not to "scorn" those from whom they have
plagiarized and whose values they have rejected. A "ray of
Reason" makes its way into his mind and then immediately
disappears into the dark fog of Dulness once more.
Suddenly, the scene changes and King Cibber finds himself
surrounded by monsters and visions of chaos: "Gods, imps,
and monsters, music, rage, and mirth, / A fire, a jig, a battle,
and a ball" (ln. 238-240). These mark the start of Dulness'
new and stronger reign under King Cibber, but he doesn't
recognize these incarnations until the Angel of Dulness
explains to him that these are prophecies of what is to come
under his rule. Settle celebrates with him but also is
concerned having seen similar tendencies at work in his own
time. Readers are then given a brief timeline of how Dulness
might spread across Britain, beginning most strongly in opera
and the theaters. Eventually, though, the dream promises that
Dulness shall spread as far as court. Cibber is once again
anointed, this time by Bavius with a poppy plant, and the
energy and excitement bubbling around these prophetic
visions of Dulness' reign are so overwhelming that Cibber
finally cries "'Enough! enough!" (ln. 339) and is woken
abruptly from his dream.
Analysis
In Book III, readers are finally shown the full scale of Dulness'
reign. We see this both in the things the poem describes and
in the way it describes them. While we have seen crowds
around Dulness before, looking at Dulness through history
and the souls she intends to claim as her own creates an
overwhelming sense of dread at facing numbers so large and
seemingly unstoppable. For example, when King Cibber is
shown the “millions and millions” (ln. 31) of dull souls
waiting to be sent to earth from the underworld, the reader is
inundated with similes to describe this terrifying mass:

“Thick as the stars of night or morning dews,

As thick as the bees o’er vernal blossoms fly,
As thick as eggs at Ward in pillory.” (ln. 32-24)

As we progress through the books, the sense of a building and

unstoppable force continues to grow, and with that, the text
must instill in the reader a greater sense of panic. Disturbing
similes grouped together in this way pushes the reader
towards this effect.
This sense of progression for Dulness exists not only in the
geographic expansion we are shown either. The characters
themselves seem to show a continuing growth in power.
Settle is described as he meets Cibber as “the great father to
the greater son” (ln. 42). Both are “great” figures, both are
strong in the eyes of Dulness and have important sway, but as
the generations continue, each gets stronger and thus more
difficult, if not impossible to stop. The book itself builds this
way, showing us dull souls who may be sent to Earth at the
beginning, and ending with the vision of Chaos’ certain reign.
By the end, the reader, like Cibber, is meant to feel as though
it has all been too much (ln. 339).
One important symbol is revealed in the description from the
top of the Mount of Vision. Cibber looks to all directions
except west. The west, where the sun sets, is often meant to
signify death according to classical and literary tradition. By
not including the west, readers are led to believe that the sun
will never set on Dulness and that her reign is inevitable.
Similarly, though Cibber descends to the Underworld, he is
led by “Sibyl,” the guide of Orpheus—one of the few figures
from Greek mythology to travel to the Underworld and return
to the land of the living. This illustrates early on that Cibber is
immune to the touch of death. While the realm of the dead
should be a hopeless one, readers quickly discover that for
Dulness, this is a breeding ground where “Old Bavius sits to
dip poetic souls, / And blunt the sense, and fit it for a skull /
Of solid proof, impenetrably dull” (ln. 24-26). Even the realm
which should signal the end only signals new life for Dulness.
This is the reader’s first glimpse into the Chaos that they
won’t see fully realized until Book IV
Book 4

Summary
Book IV, the longest of the four, diverges from the present
narrative to which we have been introduced in Books I-III
of The Dunciad. Though it acts as an extension of these early
books, Book IV jumps to a future in which the prophecies that
King Cibber envisioned in Book III have come to pass. This,
the speaker tells us, requires a new invocation, which we have
not seen since Book I. While in Book I, the invocation is given
to Dulness, this invocation shrouds Dulness in a much darker
aura, referring to her as “dread Chaos” (ln. 1).
As Cibber envisioned, Chaos has come to conquer Order. As
always, Cibber sits on the Goddess’ lap, but now there are new
figures that surround her as well. Under her footstool,
anthropomorphized Science is chained, and he is not alone.
Wit sits nearby fearing torture and exile, Logic is depicted as
gagged, Rhetoric lies naked on the ground, and Morality is
killed after being “drawn” or stretched at either end of her
body by ropes. Math is alone left untied, but only because she
has been driven so mad that she need not be restrained. The
most carefully bound captives are the Muses, acting as the
definitive symbol that all the Arts and Sciences have been
taken over by Chaos and Dulness.
A harlot, one of Chaos’ followers, cries that soon the stubborn
and resistant Muses will be tortured into submission and then
Chaos shall reign fully, but she warns about the dangers of
music, which may make Sense and Order seductive, and asks
Dulness to banish great musicians like Handel from the
shores of Britain, which Dulness does. Following the harlot,
all of Dulness’ followers are compelled to gather around her
and follow in the harlot’s footsteps by discouraging the
spread of the arts and sciences.
They bring with them famous writers and thinkers who had
not fallen under the spell of Dulness, like Shakespeare, Milton,
and Johnson. Dulness decrees that her followers shall “revive
the Wits” but only after having unleashed other writers and
critics to murder and cut them up into pieces, an allegory for
the over-analysis of these writers’ works by Pope’s
contemporaries, thus degrading the artfulness they bring the
intellectual community.
As more figures vie to be the ones to address Dulness, fighting
each other in the process, Dulness comforts them, saying all
are encouraged to come forward. The first speaker whose full
address we are given is that of a young man called to speak
for the grammar schools. He says that by packing the brains
of young people with words alone, they are never granted
access to true knowledge and thus remain dull and safely
within the Goddess’ grasp for the rest of their lives. She
commends their work and wishes their teachings could be
spread into every hall and institution, be it the Universities,
the court, the Senate, or the throne.
Following her address, the Universities appear to take up the
call, led by Aristarchus, who speaks to Dulness next. He
elaborates on how this focus with mere words with young
people is sustained in the Universities by obsessing over tiny
details of spelling, grammar, and history, arguing that by
forever splitting hairs, no knowledge is achieved. He is
interrupted by the arrival of a group of young men who have
been studying abroad with tutors. One of these young men
relates to the goddess how they have learned nothing, lost
much of their earlier knowledge, and have succeeded only in
broadening their palates as opposed to their minds while
abroad, which pleases her greatly. She blesses him with the
“Want of Shame” by wrapping him in her veil.
As she does so, she notices the many lazy individuals
scattered around her. Annius, a crafty and duplicitous
antiquities collector and dealer, asks Dulness to make these
men skilled in his work so that he might best use dullness.
Overhearing this, however, his competitor Mummius declares
that he should be the one blessed by the Goddess and given
use of these people. Dulness ultimately appeases them both
without giving them control over these lazy people, and the
two leave hand in hand.
A strange tribe arrives bearing gifts for Dulness. One member
of this tribe cries out to her and relates how his flower named
Caroline, which had so long fascinated him and others, was
killed by another member of the tribe and ought to be
punished. This other member defends himself well, however,
and Dulness asks that they both take the aimless people
around her and have them study these small bits of nature,
from flowers to butterflies, with them. This comes with a
warning: don’t let these people study anything more than the
small and dull bits of nature which never hint at the larger
happenings within the universe.
A clerk then comes forward to speak on behalf of the “Minute
Philosophers and Freethinkers,” calling for the death of
morality and faith so that dull men might be deemed the
creators of all. Silenus then brings a group of young people to
Dulness. Dulness’ high priest Magus brings forward a cup
containing a mixture that will rid the drinker of all of their
obligations and duties to those he has once known. After the
youth have drunk from the cup, the Goddess “confers her
Titles and Degrees” upon her servants, including priests,
botanists, Freemasons, and more, telling them their new
responsibilities under her new and vast reign. She then
yawns, and it is this yawn which sets about the final collapse
of Order, bringing about the total rule of Chaos. As the last bit
of light dies, the poem is concluded as “universal Darkness
buries all.”
Analysis
Pope's fourth book in the Dunciad transports readers to a
different time than that of the first three books. Readers are
now in a chaotic future, and it is as a result of this that we see
certain key stylistic changes appear in this book. The Pope
scholar B.W. Young argues that these changes are signs of the
"rigorous commitment that the poem makes to the past," its
"moralistic" stance, and its "appeal to classically grounded
humanism" (Young 436). In a poem that, on the whole,
expresses a desire to honor past virtues and traditions, this
final book thrusts us into a dark future, producing certain
vital shifts in the poem's form, speaker, and imagery.
The speaker himself is a key place to see how these changes
begin. The invocation of Book I says that it was called by
Dulness to tell the story of the new King Cibber. Book IV,
however, is a plea, saying "Indulge, dread Chaos ... Suspend a
while your force inertly strong, / Then take at once the Poet
and the Song" (ln. 2, 7-8). The speaker's position as the poet
is now tenuous and delicate. There is a fragility in this future
for writing that did not exist in the past or the earlier books.
This shows that there is, in fact, a threat even to the telling of
the story of Dulness. The speaker is also present far less in
this book than in others. Here, more than in any other book,
Pope elects to have characters within the text speak for long
stretches of time as figures address Dulness or as Dulness
addresses her followers. It is as though the voice that has
guided the reader, the voice that earned the reader's trust, is
slowly disappearing along with the ways of the past.
In the personification of the Sciences, Arts, and Virtues who
serve Order, we can see the importance of the past. While
most of these figures are described as bound, broken, or even
dead, "sober History restrain'd her rage, / And promis'd
vengeance on a barb'rous age" (ln. 39-40). It is the past here
who is the figure with the power to cripple Dulness, who
promises that this darkness will not last. The traditions which
Pope honors are also those that, when anthropomorphized in
the poem, remain level-headed, rational, and capable of
envisioning a different future.
While personification in the text takes what Pope thinks is
happening to the arts and sciences in his contemporary age
and exacts these fates on human-like figures, the opposite can
be said of other moments in the text. Dulness advocates that
the best plan for treating great writers like Shakespeare and
Milton who are brought forward in this imagined realm be to
"murder first, and mince them all to bits; ... Let standard
authors thus, like trophies borne, / Appear more glorious as
more hack'd and torn" (ln. 120, 123-124). In this case, what
happens to the authorial figure in the "imagined" realm is
then afterward projected into the "real" world. As a result,
however, we must question which world shows the effects of
the other.
In the past, the realm the speaker described seemed to be a
symbolic and classical allegory for Pope's contemporary
moment. But as the prophecies of the past have become
present, it is now less clear which realm is a reflection of
which. This confusion mirrors the Chaos we are told is
descending upon Pope's literary world, and his writing drags
the reader into this confusion. Pope plays out this mirroring
within the text, using effects like chiasmus, a rhetorical device
that inverts phrases, words, or other syntactical structures to
reflect one another. One example is when Pope writes,
"Whate'er of mongrel no one class admits, / A Wit with
Dunces, and a Dunce with Wits" (ln. 89-90). Lines like these
heighten the circuitous and dizzying nature of this final
chaotic book, reinforcing the distressing and often
overwhelming imagery of hoards of Dulness' followers with
which the Dunciad's readers are already familiar