The Restoration & 18th-Century Literature

18th-Century World ViewThe 18th-century English mind was created by the reaction to the civil disorders of the 17th century

Puritan

For a century after the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the word Puritan was a term of contempt among the sophisticated, and the word enthusiasm, applied to either religion or politics, was a handy tool for reminding an audience of the grave dangers of innovation

Balance• The reestablishment of society on a new

common-sense basis after the civil wars had large reflections in literature and critical theory.

• Alexander Pope indicates that a new age is going to require a new attention to precision, control, and “correctness” in poetry: “Late, very late, correctness grew our care, / When the tir’d nation breath’d from civil war.”

Lockean Philosophy

• One result of the preeminence of Lockean philosophy was the prevalence of highly public and social kinds of literature.

• Satire flourishes while lyric all but disappears

• Confession is displaced by social observation

• The 18th century is the great age of British oratory, biography, and lexicography

Best Sellers

• Boswell’s Life of Johnson• Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of

the Roman Empire• Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in

France• Hume’s History of England• Captain Cook’s anthropological reports

form the South Seas

Artists

• The 18th-century poet and artist was conceived of as a member of society, not a special creature withdrawn from it.

• The true artist was in contact with his public. Unheard of yet was the Romantic conception of the artist as a retired and sensitive soul, working only as he is moved by the spirit.

Gainsborough

Wedgewood

Handel

Lord David Cecil

“England in the eighteenth century was a robust, red-blooded, uproarious place . . . How people ate and drank! . . . With what unflagging virile relish they swore, and begat bastards, and gambled and attended executions and proclaimed their belief in liberty and their contempt for the wretched frog-eaters on the other side of the Channel!”

Drink• Drink was the avocation of all classes.• The upper class consumed claret, port, and brandy• The sober middle class, strong beer• The lower class, cheap gin• “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, straw for

nothing.”• “Gin is the principal sustenance . . . Of more than a

hundred thousand people in this metropolis. Many of these wretches there are, who swallow pints of this poison within the twenty-four hours; the dreadful effects of which I have the misfortune every day to see, and to smell too.” – Henry Fielding

Beer Street

Gin Lane

Clarity and Order• It was a time when there was a remarkable agreement

about what constituted a good style in both poetry and prose. Style in both was to be a reflection of exactitude of perception and orderliness of arrangement

• “If any man were to ask me what I should suppose to be a perfect style . . . I would answer, that in which a man speaking to five hundred people, of all common and various capacities, idiots or lunatics excepted, should be understood by all of them, and in the same sense in which the speaker intended to be understood

False Wit

Reprehended now were the flowers and conceits and the occasionally astonishing rhythms of the 17th century. These were labeled “false wit.” What was wanted was “true wit”: a comfortable degree of predictability and effects of economy, clarity, and vigor

Essay of Criticism - PopeWords are like Leaves; and where they most abound,Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.False eloquence, like the Prismatic Glass,Its gaudy Colours spreads on ev’ry place; . . . But true Expression, like th’ unchanging Sun,Clears, and improves whate’er it shines upon.

Swift• It is within the context of violence, excess, and filth that

we should contemplate Swift’s cold fury at complacency.• Renaissance England was dangerous and dirty, but the

danger and dirt had seemed to most people the inevitable and unimprovable consequences of the Fall of Man.

• It was the unique affliction of people in the eighteenth century to labor under a consciousness both of the fallen estate of man and of his new obligations and opportunities to redeem his lot by institutional and humanitarian reform