   #copyright

Augustan literature

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Literature types

   Augustan literature is a style of English literature whose origins
   correspond roughly with the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and
   George II. In contemporary critical parlance, it refers to the
   literature of 1700 up to approximately 1760 (or, for some, 1789). It is
   a literary epoch that featured the rapid development of the novel, an
   explosion in satire, the mutation of drama from political satire into
   melodrama, and an evolution toward poetry of personal exploration. In
   philosophy, it was an age increasingly dominated by empiricism, while
   in the writings of political-economy it marked the evolution of
   mercantilism as a formal philosophy, the development of capitalism, and
   the triumph of trade.

   The chronological anchors of the era are generally vague, largely since
   the label's origin in contemporary 18th century criticism has made it a
   shorthand designation for a somewhat nebulous age of satire. This new
   Augustan period exhibited exceptionally bold political writings in all
   genres, with the satires of the age marked by an arch, ironic pose,
   full of nuance, and a superficial air of dignified calm that hid sharp
   criticisms beneath.

   As literacy (and London's population, especially) grew, literature
   began to appear from all over the kingdom. Authors gradually began to
   accept literature that went in unique directions rather than the
   formerly monolithic conventions and, through this, slowly began to
   honour and recreate various folk compositions. Beneath the appearance
   of a placid and highly regulated series of writing modes, many
   developments of the later Romantic era were beginning to take place —
   while politically, philosophically, and literarily, modern
   consciousness was being hewn out of hitherto feudal and courtly notions
   of ages past.
   William Hogarth's portrait of a Grub Street poet starving to death and
   trying to write a new poem to get money. The "hack" (hired) writer was
   a response to the newly increased demand for reading matter in the
   Augustan period.
   Enlarge
   William Hogarth's portrait of a Grub Street poet starving to death and
   trying to write a new poem to get money. The "hack" (hired) writer was
   a response to the newly increased demand for reading matter in the
   Augustan period.

Enlightenment? The historical context

   "Augustan" derives from George I wishing to be seen as Caesar Augustus,
   for his given name was George Augustus. Alexander Pope, who had been
   imitating Horace, wrote an Epistle to Augustus that was to George II
   and seemingly endorsed the notion of his age being like that of
   Augustus, when poetry became more mannered, political and satirical
   than in the era of Julius Caesar. Later, Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith
   (in his History of Literature in 1764) used the term "Augustan" to
   refer to the literature of the 1720s and '30s. Outside of poetry,
   however, the Augustan era is generally known by other names. Partially
   because of the rise of empiricism and partially due to the
   self-conscious naming of the age in terms of Ancient Rome, two
   imprecise labels have been affixed to the age. One is that it is the
   age of neoclassicism. The other is that it is the Age of Reason. Both
   terms have some usefulness, but both also obscure much. While
   neoclassical criticism from France was imported to English letters, the
   English had abandoned their strictures in all but name by the 1720s. As
   for whether the era was "the Enlightenment" or not, the critic Donald
   Greene wrote vigorously against it, arguing persuasively that the age
   should be known as "The Age of Exuberance," while T.H. White made a
   case for "The Age of Scandal." Most recently, Roy Porter attempted
   again to argue for the developments of science dominating all other
   areas of endeavor in the age unmistakably making it the Enlightenment
   (Porter 2000).
   An auctioneer sells books from the estate of a condemned doctor (an
   abortionist?), c. 1700, in Moorfields. The books contain pornography,
   medicine, and Classics. The print satirizes "new men" wanting to
   collect libraries without collecting learning.
   Enlarge
   An auctioneer sells books from the estate of a condemned doctor (an
   abortionist?), c. 1700, in Moorfields. The books contain pornography,
   medicine, and Classics. The print satirizes "new men" wanting to
   collect libraries without collecting learning.

   One of the most critical elements of the 18th century was the
   increasing availability of printed material, both for readers and
   authors. Books fell in price dramatically, and used books were sold at
   Bartholomew Fair and other fairs. Additionally, a brisk trade in
   chapbooks and broadsheets carried London trends and information out to
   the farthest reaches of the kingdom. Not only, therefore, were people
   in York aware of the happenings of Parliament and the court, but people
   in London were more aware than before of the happenings of York.
   Furthermore, in this age before copyright, pirate editions were
   commonplace, especially in areas without frequent contact with London.
   Pirate editions thereby encouraged booksellers to increase their
   shipments to outlying centers like Dublin, which increased, again,
   awareness across the whole realm.

   All types of literature were spread quickly in all directions.
   Newspapers not only began, but they multiplied. Furthermore, the
   newspapers were immediately compromised, as the political factions
   created their own newspapers, planted stories, and bribed journalists.
   Leading clerics had their sermon collections printed, and these were
   top selling books. Since dissenting, Establishment, and Independent
   divines were in print, the constant movement of these works helped
   defuse any one region's religious homogeneity and fostered emergent
   latitudinarianism. Periodicals were exceedingly popular, and the art of
   essay writing was at nearly its apex. Furthermore, the happenings of
   the Royal Society were published regularly, and these events were
   digested and explained or celebrated in more popular presses. The
   latest books of scholarship had "keys" and "indexes" and "digests" made
   of them that could popularize, summarize, and explain them to a wide
   audience. The cross-index, now commonplace, was a novelty in the 18th
   century, and several persons created indexes for older books of
   learning, allowing anyone to find what an author had to say about a
   given topic at a moment's notice. Books of etiquette, of
   correspondence, and of moral instruction and hygiene multiplied.
   Economics began as a serious discipline, but it did so in the form of
   numerous "projects" for solving England's (and Ireland's, and
   Scotland's) ills. Sermon collections, dissertations on religious
   controversy, and prophecies, both new and old and explained, cropped up
   in endless variety. In short, readers in the 18th century were
   overwhelmed by competing voices. True and false sat side by side on the
   shelves, and anyone could be a published author, just as anyone could
   quickly pretend to be a scholar by using indexes and digests.

   The positive side of the explosion in information was that the 18th
   century was markedly more generally educated than the centuries before.
   Education was less confined to the upper classes than it had been in
   centuries, and consequently contributions to science, philosophy,
   economics, and literature came from all parts of the newly United
   Kingdom. It was the first time when literacy and a library were all
   that stood between a person and education. It was an age of
   "enlightenment" in the sense that the insistence and drive for
   reasonable explanations of nature and mankind was a rage. It was an
   "age of reason" in that it was an age that accepted clear, rational
   methods as superior to tradition. However, there was a dark side to
   such literacy as well, a dark side which authors of the 18th century
   felt at every turn, and that was that nonsense and insanity were also
   getting more adherents than ever before. Charlatans and mountebanks
   were fooling more, just as sages were educating more, and alluring and
   lurid apocalypses vied with sober philosophy on the shelves. As with
   the world-wide web in the 21st century, the democratization of
   publishing meant that older systems for determining value and
   uniformity of view were both in shambles. Thus, it was increasingly
   difficult to trust books in the 18th century, because books were
   increasingly easy to make and buy.

Political and religious historical context

   A "sulkily stupid" Queen Anne.
   Enlarge
   A "sulkily stupid" Queen Anne.

   The Restoration period ended with the exclusion crisis and the Glorious
   Revolution, where Parliament set up a new rule for succession to the
   British throne that would always favour Protestantism over sanguinity.
   This had brought William and Mary to the throne instead of James II,
   and was codified in the Act of Settlement 1701. James had fled to
   France from where his son James Francis Edward Stuart launched an
   attempt to retake the throne in 1715. Another attempt was launched by
   the latter's son Charles Edward Stuart in 1745. The attempted invasions
   are often referred to as "the 15" and "the 45". When William died, Anne
   Stuart came to the throne. Anne was reportedly immoderately stupid:
   Thomas Babbington Macaulay would say of Anne that "when in good humour,
   [she] was meekly stupid and, when in bad humour, was sulkily stupid."
   Anne's reign saw two wars and great triumphs by John Churchill, the
   Duke of Marlborough. Marlborough's wife, Sarah Churchill, was Anne's
   best friend, and many supposed that she secretly controlled the Queen
   in every respect. With a weak ruler and the belief that true power
   rested in the hands of the leading ministers, the two factions of
   politics stepped up their opposition to each other, and Whig and Tory
   were at each others' throats. This weakness at the throne would lead
   quickly to the expansion of the powers of the party leader in
   Parliament and the establishment in all but name of the Prime Minister
   office in the form of Robert Walpole. When Anne died without issue,
   George I, Elector of Hanover, came to the throne. George I never
   bothered to learn the English language, and his isolation from the
   English people was instrumental in keeping his power relatively
   irrelevant. His son, George II, on the other hand, spoke some English
   and some more French, and his was the first full Hanoverian rule in
   England. By that time, the powers of Parliament had silently expanded,
   and George II's power was perhaps equal only to that of Parliament.

   London's population exploded spectacularly. During the Restoration, it
   grew from around 30,000 to 600,000 in 1700 (Old Bailey) (Millwall
   history). By 1800, it had reached 950,000. Not all of these residents
   were prosperous. The enclosure act had destroyed lower-class farming in
   the countryside, and rural areas experienced painful poverty. When the
   Black Act was expanded to cover all protestors to enclosure, the
   communities of the country poor were forced to migrate or suffer (see
   Thompson, Whigs). Therefore, young people from the country often moved
   to London with hopes of achieving success, and this swelled the ranks
   of the urban poor and cheap labor for city employers. It also meant an
   increase in numbers of criminals, prostitutes and beggars. The fears of
   property crime, rape, and starvation found in Augustan literature
   should be kept in the context of London's growth, as well as the
   depopulation of the countryside.
   William Hogarth's Gin Lane is not caricature, for in 1750, over a
   fourth of all houses in St Giles were gin shops, all unlicensed.
   Enlarge
   William Hogarth's Gin Lane is not caricature, for in 1750, over a
   fourth of all houses in St Giles were gin shops, all unlicensed.

   Partially because of these population pressures, property crime became
   a business both for the criminals and for those who fed off of the
   criminals. Major crime lords like Jonathan Wild invented new schemes
   for stealing, and the newspapers were eager to report crime.
   Biographies of the daring criminals became popular, and these spawned
   fictional biographies of fictional criminals. Cautionary tales of
   country women abused by sophisticated rakes and libertines in the city
   were popular fare, and these prompted fictional accounts of exemplary
   women abused (or narrowly escaping abuse).

   The population pressure also meant that urban discontent was never
   particularly difficult to find for political opportunists, and London
   suffered a number of riots, most of them against supposed Roman
   Catholic agent provocateurs. When highly potent, inexpensive distilled
   spirits were introduced, matters worsened, and authors and artists
   protested the innovation of gin (see, e.g. William Hogarth's Gin Lane).
   From 1710, the government encouraged distilling as a source of revenue
   and trade goods, and there were no licenses required for the
   manufacturing or selling of gin. There were documented instances of
   women drowning their infants to sell the child's clothes for gin, and
   so these facilities created both the fodder for riots and the
   conditions against which riots would occur (Loughrey and Treadwell,
   14). Dissenters (those radical Protestants who would not join with the
   Church of England) recruited and preached to the poor of the city, and
   various offshoots of the Puritan and "Independent" ( Baptist) movements
   increased their numbers substantially. One theme of these ministers was
   the danger of the Roman Catholic Church, which they frequently saw as
   the Whore of Babylon. While Anne was high church, George I came from a
   far more Protestant nation than England, and George II was almost low
   church, as the events of the Bangorian Controversy would show. The
   convocation was effectively disbanded by George I (who was struggling
   with the House of Lords), and George II was pleased to keep it in
   abeyance. Additionally, both of the first two Hanoverians were
   concerned with James Francis Edward Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart
   who had considerable support in Scotland and Ireland, and anyone too
   high church was suspected of being a closet Jacobite, thanks in no
   small part to Walpole's inflating fears of Stuart sympathizers among
   any group that did not support him.

History and literature

   The literature of the 18th century — particularly the early 18th
   century, which is what "Augustan" most commonly indicates — is
   explicitly political in ways that few others are. Because the
   professional author was still not distinguishable from the hack-writer,
   those who wrote poetry, novels, and plays were frequently either
   politically active or politically funded. At the same time, an
   aesthetic of artistic detachment from the everyday world had yet to
   develop, and the aristocratic ideal of an author so noble as to be
   above political concerns was largely archaic and irrelevant. The period
   may be an "Age of Scandal," for it is an age when authors dealt
   specifically with the crimes and vices of their world.

   Satire, both in prose, drama, and poetry, was the genre that attracted
   the most energetic and voluminous writing. The satires produced during
   the Augustan period were occasionally gentle and
   non-specific—commentaries on the comically flawed human condition—but
   they were at least as frequently specific critiques of specific
   policies, actions, and persons. Even those works studiously non-topical
   were, in fact, transparently political statements in the 18th century.
   Consequently, readers of 18th-century literature today need to
   understand the history of the period more than most readers of other
   literature do. The authors were writing for an informed audience and
   only secondarily for posterity. Even the authors who criticized writing
   that lived for only a day (e.g. Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, in
   The Dedication to Prince Posterity of A Tale of a Tub and Dunciad,
   among other pieces) were criticizing specific authors who are unknown
   without historical knowledge of the period. 18th-century poetry of all
   forms was in constant dialog: each author was responding and commenting
   upon the others. 18th-century novels were written against other
   18th-century novels (e.g. the battles between Henry Fielding and Samuel
   Richardson and between Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett). Plays were
   written to make fun of plays, or to counter the success of plays (e.g.
   the reaction against and for Cato and, later, Fielding's The Authors
   Farce). Therefore, history and literature are linked in a way rarely
   seen at other times. On the one hand, this metropolitan and political
   writing can seem like coterie or salon work, but, on the other, it was
   the literature of people deeply committed to sorting out a new type of
   government, new technologies, and newly vexatious challenges to
   philosophical and religious certainty.

Prose

   Main article: Augustan prose
   An engraved ticket for Francis Woods's circulating library in London
   from some time after mid-century.
   Enlarge
   An engraved ticket for Francis Woods's circulating library in London
   from some time after mid-century.

   The essay, satire, and dialogue (in philosophy and religion) thrived in
   the age, and the English novel was truly begun as a serious art form.
   Literacy in the early 18th century passed into the working classes, as
   well as the middle and upper classes (Thompson, Class). Furthermore,
   literacy was not confined to men, though rates of female literacy are
   very difficult to establish. For those who were literate, circulating
   libraries in England began in the Augustan period. Libraries were open
   to all, but they were mainly associated with female patronage and novel
   reading.

The essay/journalism

   English essayists were aware of Continental models, but they developed
   their form independently from that tradition, and periodical literature
   grew between 1692 and 1712. Periodicals were inexpensive to produce,
   quick to read, and a viable way of influencing public opinion, and
   consequently there were many broadsheet periodicals headed by a single
   author and staffed by hirelings (so-called "Grub Street" authors). One
   periodical outsold and dominated all others, however, and that was The
   Spectator (1711), written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (with
   occasional contributions from their friends). The Spectator developed a
   number of pseudonymous characters, including "Mr. Spectator," Roger de
   Coverley, and " Isaac Bickerstaff", and both Addison and Steele created
   fictions to surround their narrators. The dispassionate view of the
   world (the pose of a spectator, rather than participant) was essential
   for the development of the English essay, as it set out a ground
   wherein Addison and Steele could comment and meditate upon manners and
   events. Rather than being philosophers like Montesquieu, the English
   essayist could be an honest observer and his reader's peer. After the
   success of The Spectator, more political periodicals of comment
   appeared. However, the political factions and coalitions of politicians
   very quickly realized the power of this type of press, and they began
   funding newspapers to spread rumors. The Tory ministry of Robert Harley
   (1710–1714) reportedly spent over 50,000 pounds sterling on creating
   and bribing the press (Butt); we know this figure because their
   successors publicized it, but they (the Walpole government) were
   suspected of spending even more. Politicians wrote papers, wrote into
   papers, and supported papers, and it was well known that some of the
   periodicals, like Mist's Journal, were party mouthpieces.

Philosophy and religious writing

   A woodcut of Daniel Defoe.
   Enlarge
   A woodcut of Daniel Defoe.

   The Augustan period showed less literature of controversy than the
   Restoration. There were Puritan authors, however, and one of the names
   usually associated with the novel is perhaps the most prominent in
   Puritan writing: Daniel Defoe. After the coronation of Anne, dissenter
   hopes of reversing the Restoration were at an ebb, and dissenter
   literature moved from the offensive to the defensive, from
   revolutionary to conservative. Defoe's infamous volley in the struggle
   between high and low church came in the form of The Shortest Way with
   the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church. The
   work is satirical, attacking all of the worries of Establishment
   figures over the challenges of dissenters. It is, in other words,
   defensive. Later still, the most majestic work of the era, and the one
   most quoted and read, was William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and
   Holy Life (1728). The Meditations of Robert Boyle remained popular as
   well. Both Law and Boyle called for revivalism, and they set the stage
   for the later development of Methodism and George Whitefield's sermon
   style. However, their works aimed at the individual, rather than the
   community. The age of revolutionary divines and militant evangelists in
   literature was over for a considerable time.

   Also in contrast to the Restoration, when philosophy in England was
   fully dominated by John Locke, the 18th century had a vigorous
   competition among followers of Locke. Bishop Berkeley extended Locke's
   emphasis on perception to argue that perception entirely solves the
   Cartesian problem of subjective and objective knowledge by saying "to
   be is to be perceived." Only, Berkeley argued, those things that are
   perceived by a consciousness are real. For Berkeley, the persistence of
   matter rests in the fact that God perceives those things that humans
   are not, that a living and continually aware, attentive, and involved
   God is the only rational explanation for the existence of objective
   matter. In essence, then, Berkeley's skepticism leads to faith. David
   Hume, on the other hand, took empiricist skepticism to its extremes,
   and he was the most radically empiricist philosopher of the period. He
   attacked surmise and unexamined premises wherever he found them, and
   his skepticism pointed out metaphysics in areas that other empiricists
   had assumed were material. Hume doggedly refused to enter into
   questions of his personal faith in the divine, but his assault on the
   logic and assumptions of theodicy and cosmogeny was devastating, and he
   concentrated on the provable and empirical in a way that would lead to
   utilitarianism and naturalism later.

   In social and political philosophy, economics underlies much of the
   debate. Bernard de Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1714) became a
   centre point of controversy regarding trade, morality, and social
   ethics. Mandeville argued that wastefulness, lust, pride, and all the
   other "private" vices were good for the society at large, for each led
   the individual to employ others, to spend freely, and to free capital
   to flow through the economy. Mandeville's work is full of paradox and
   is meant, at least partially, to problematize what he saw as the naive
   philosophy of human progress and inherent virtue. However, Mandeville's
   arguments, initially an attack on graft of the War of the Spanish
   Succession, would be quoted often by economists who wished to strip
   morality away from questions of trade.

   Adam Smith is remembered by lay persons as the father of capitalism,
   but his Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759 also attempted to strike out
   a new ground for moral action. His emphasis on "sentiment" was in
   keeping with the era, as he emphasized the need for "sympathy" between
   individuals as the basis of fit action. These ideas, and the psychology
   of David Hartley, were influential on the sentimental novel and even
   the nascent Methodist movement. If sympathetic sentiment communicated
   morality, would it not be possible to induce morality by providing
   sympathetic circumstances? Smith's greatest work was An Inquiry into
   the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. What it held in
   common with de Mandeville, Hume, and Locke was that it began by
   analytically examining the history of material exchange, without
   reflection on morality. Instead of deducing from the ideal or moral to
   the real, it examined the real and tried to formulate inductive rules.

The novel

   The ground for the novel had been laid by journalism, drama and satire.
   Long prose satires like Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) had a central
   character who goes through adventures and may (or may not) learn
   lessons. However, the most important single satirical source for the
   writing of novels came from Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605, 1615). In
   general, one can see these three axes, drama, journalism, and satire,
   as blending in and giving rise to three different types of novel.

   Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) was the first major novel of the
   new century. Defoe worked as a journalist during and after its
   composition, and therefore he encountered the memoirs of Alexander
   Selkirk, who had been stranded in South America on an island for some
   years. Defoe took the actual life and, from that, generated a fictional
   life, satisfying an essentially journalistic market with his fiction.
   In the 1720s, Defoe interviewed famed criminals and produced accounts
   of their lives. In particular, he investigated Jack Sheppard and
   Jonathan Wild and wrote True Accounts of the former's escapes (and
   fate) and the latter's life. From his reportage on the prostitutes and
   criminals, Defoe may have become familiar with the real-life Mary
   Mollineaux, who may have been the model for Moll in Moll Flanders
   (1722). In the same year, Defoe produced A Journal of the Plague Year
   (1722), which summoned up the horrors and tribulations of 1665 for a
   journalistic market for memoirs, and an attempted tale of a
   working-class male rise in Colonel Jack (1722). His last novel returned
   to the theme of fallen women in Roxana (1724). Thematically, Defoe's
   works are consistently Puritan. They all involve a fall, a degradation
   of the spirit, a conversion, and an ecstatic elevation. This religious
   structure necessarily involved a bildungsroman, for each character had
   to learn a lesson about him or herself and emerge the wiser.
   A plate from the 1742 deluxe edition of Richardson's Pamela, or, Virtue
   Rewarded showing Mr. B intercepting Pamela's first letter home to her
   mother.
   Enlarge
   A plate from the 1742 deluxe edition of Richardson's Pamela, or, Virtue
   Rewarded showing Mr. B intercepting Pamela's first letter home to her
   mother.

   Although there were novels in the interim, Samuel Richardson's Pamela,
   or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) is the next landmark development in the
   English novel. Richardson's generic models were quite distinct from
   those of Defoe. Instead of working from the journalistic biography,
   Richardson had in mind the books of improvement that were popular at
   the time. Pamela Andrews enters the employ of a "Mr. B." As a dutiful
   girl, she writes to her mother constantly, and as a Christian girl, she
   is always on guard for her "virtue" (i.e. her virginity), for Mr. B
   lusts after her. The novel ends with her marriage to her employer and
   her rising to the position of lady. Pamela, like its author, presents a
   dissenter's and a Whig's view of the rise of the classes. The work drew
   a nearly instantaneous set of satires, of which Henry Fielding's
   Shamela, or an Apology for the Life of Miss Shamela Andrews (1742) is
   the most memorable. Fielding continued to bait Richardson with Joseph
   Andrews (1742), the tale of Shamela's brother, Joseph, who goes through
   his life trying to protect his own virginity, thus reversing the sexual
   predation of Richardson and satirizing the idea of sleeping one's way
   to rank. However, Joseph Andrews is not a parody of Richardson, for
   Fielding proposed his belief in "good nature," which is a quality of
   inherent virtue that is independent of class and which can always
   prevail. Joseph's friend Parson Adams, although not a fool, is a naïf
   and possessing good nature. His own basic good nature blinds him to the
   wickedness of the world, and the incidents on the road (for most of the
   novel is a travel story) allow Fielding to satirize conditions for the
   clergy, rural poverty (and squires), and the viciousness of
   businessmen.
   A portrait of Henry Fielding.
   Enlarge
   A portrait of Henry Fielding.

   In 1747 through 1748, Samuel Richardson published Clarissa in serial
   form. Unlike Pamela, it is not a tale of virtue rewarded. Instead, it
   is a highly tragic and affecting account of a young girl whose parents
   try to force her into an uncongenial marriage, thus pushing her into
   the arms of a scheming rake named Lovelace. In the end, Clarissa dies
   by her own will. The novel is a masterpiece of psychological realism
   and emotional effect, and when Richardson was drawing to a close in the
   serial publication, even Henry Fielding wrote to him, begging him not
   to kill Clarissa. As with Pamela, Richardson emphasized the individual
   over the social and the personal over the class. Even as Fielding was
   reading and enjoying Clarissa, he was also writing a counter to its
   messages. His Tom Jones of 1749 offers up the other side of the
   argument from Clarissa. Tom Jones agrees substantially in the power of
   the individual to be more or less than his or her birth would indicate,
   but it again emphasizes the place of the individual in society and the
   social ramifications of individual choices. Fielding answers Richardson
   by featuring a similar plot device (whether a girl can choose her own
   mate) but showing how family and village can complicate and expedite
   matches and felicity.
   A portrait of Tobias Smollett.
   Enlarge
   A portrait of Tobias Smollett.

   Two other novelists should be mentioned, for they, like Fielding and
   Richardson, were in dialog through their works. Laurence Sterne's and
   Tobias Smollett's works offered up oppositional views of the self in
   society and the method of the novel. The clergyman Laurence Sterne
   consciously set out to imitate Jonathan Swift with his Tristram Shandy
   (1759–1767). Tristram seeks to write his autobiography, but like
   Swift's narrator in A Tale of a Tub, he worries that nothing in his
   life can be understood without understanding its context. For example,
   he tells the reader that at the very moment he was conceived, his
   mother was saying, "Did you wind the clock?" To explain how he knows
   this, he explains that his father took care of winding the clock and
   "other family business" on one day a month. To explain why the clock
   had to be wound then, he has to explain his father. In other words, the
   biography moves backward rather than forward in time, only to then jump
   forward years, hit another knot, and move backward again. It is a novel
   of exceptional energy, of multi-layered digressions, of multiple
   satires, and of frequent parodies. Journalist, translator, and
   historian Tobias Smollett, on the other hand, wrote more seemingly
   traditional novels. He concentrated on the picaresque novel, where a
   low-born character would go through a practically endless series of
   adventures. Sterne thought that Smollett's novels always paid undue
   attention to the basest and most common elements of life, that they
   emphasized the dirt. Although this is a superficial complaint, it
   points to an important difference between the two as authors. Sterne
   came to the novel from a satirical background, while Smollett
   approached it from journalism. In the 19th century, novelists would
   have plots much nearer to Smollett's than either Fielding's or Sterne's
   or Richardson's, and his sprawling, linear development of action would
   prove most successful.

   In the midst of this development of the novel, other trends were taking
   place. The novel of sentiment was beginning in the 1760s and would
   experience a brief period of dominance. This type of novel emphasized
   sympathy. In keeping with the theories of Adam Smith and David Hartley
   (see above), the sentimental novel concentrated on characters who are
   quickly moved to labile swings of mood and extraordinary empathy. Sarah
   Fielding's David Simple outsold her brother Henry Fielding's Joseph
   Andrews and took the theory of "good nature" to be a sentimental
   nature. Other women were also writing novels and moving away from the
   old romance plots that had dominated before the Restoration. There were
   utopian novels, like Sarah Scott's Millennium Hall (1762),
   autobiographical women's novels like Frances Burney's works, female
   adaptations of older, male motifs, such as Charlotte Lennox's The
   Female Quixote (1752) and many others. These novels do not generally
   follow a strict line of development or influence. However, they were
   popular works that were celebrated by both male and female readers and
   critics.

Historians of the novel

   Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) still dominates attempts at
   writing a history of the novel. Watt's view is that the critical
   feature of the 18th-century novel is the creation of psychological
   realism. This feature, he argued, would continue on and influence the
   novel as it has been known in the 20th century. Michael McKeon brought
   a Marxist approach to the history of the novel in his 1986 The Origins
   of the English Novel. McKeon viewed the novel as emerging as a constant
   battleground between two developments of two sets of world view that
   corresponded to Whig/Tory, Dissenter/Establishment, and
   Capitalist/Persistent Feudalist.

Satire (unclassified)

   An illustration from Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub showing the three
   "stages" of human life: the pulpit, the theatre, and the gallows. Click
   on the image for detail.
   Enlarge
   An illustration from Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub showing the three
   "stages" of human life: the pulpit, the theatre, and the gallows. Click
   on the image for detail.

   A single name overshadows all others in 18th-century prose satire:
   Jonathan Swift. Swift wrote poetry as well as prose, and his satires
   range over all topics. Critically, Swift's satire marked the
   development of prose parody away from simple satire or burlesque. A
   burlesque or lampoon in prose would imitate a despised author and
   quickly move to reductio ad absurdum by having the victim say things
   coarse or idiotic. On the other hand, other satires would argue against
   a habit, practice, or policy by making fun of its reach or composition
   or methods. What Swift did was to combine parody, with its imitation of
   form and style of another, and satire in prose. Swift's works would
   pretend to speak in the voice of an opponent and imitate the style of
   the opponent and have the parodic work itself be the satire. Swift's
   first major satire was A Tale of a Tub (1703–1705), which introduced an
   ancients/moderns division that would serve as a distinction between the
   old and new conception of value. The "moderns" sought trade, empirical
   science, the individual's reason above the society's, while the
   "ancients" believed in inherent and immanent value of birth, and the
   society over the individual's determinations of the good. In Swift's
   satire, the moderns come out looking insane and proud of their
   insanity, and dismissive of the value of history. In Swift's most
   significant satire, Gulliver's Travels (1726), autobiography, allegory,
   and philosophy mix together in the travels. Thematically, Gulliver's
   Travels is a critique of human vanity, of pride. Book one, the journey
   to Liliput, begins with the world as it is. Book two shows that the
   idealized nation of Brobdingnag with a philosopher king is no home for
   a contemporary Englishman. Book four depicts the land of the
   Houyhnhnms, a society of horses ruled by pure reason, where humanity
   itself is portrayed as a group of "yahoos" covered in filth and
   dominated by base desires. It shows that, indeed, the very desire for
   reason may be undesirable, and humans must struggle to be neither
   Yahoos nor Houyhnhnms, for book three shows what happens when reason is
   unleashed without any consideration of morality or utility (i.e.
   madness, ruin, and starvation).

   There were other satirists who worked in a less virulent way, who took
   a bemused pose and only made lighthearted fun. Tom Brown, Ned Ward, and
   Tom D'Urfey were all satirists in prose and poetry whose works appeared
   in the early part of the Augustan age. Tom Brown's most famous work in
   this vein was Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the
   Meridian of London (1700). Ned Ward's most memorable work was The
   London Spy (1704–1706). The London Spy, before The Spectator, took up
   the position of an observer and uncomprehendingly reporting back. Tom
   D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719) was
   another satire that attempted to offer entertainment, rather than a
   specific bit of political action, in the form of coarse and catchy
   songs.

   Particularly after Swift's success, parodic satire had an attraction
   for authors throughout the 18th century. A variety of factors created a
   rise in political writing and political satire, and Robert Walpole's
   success and domination of House of Commons was a very effective
   proximal cause for polarized literature and thereby the rise of parodic
   satire. The parodic satire takes apart the cases and plans of policy
   without necessarily contrasting a normative or positive set of values.
   Therefore, it was an ideal method of attack for ironists and
   conservatives—those who would not be able to enunciate a set of values
   to change toward but could condemn present changes as ill-considered.
   Satire was present in all genres during the Augustan period. Perhaps
   primarily, satire was a part of political and religious debate. Every
   significant politician and political act had satires to attack it. Few
   of these were parodic satires, but parodic satires, too, emerged in
   political and religious debate. So omnipresent and powerful was satire
   in the Augustan age that more than one literary history has referred to
   it as the "Age of satire" in literature.

Poetry

   Main article Augustan poetry

   In the Augustan era, poets wrote in direct counterpoint and direct
   expansion of one another, with each poet writing satire when in
   opposition. There was a great struggle over the nature and role of the
   pastoral in the early part of the century, reflecting two simultaneous
   movements: the invention of the subjective self as a worthy topic, with
   the emergence of a priority on individual psychology, against the
   insistence on all acts of art being performance and public gesture
   designed for the benefit of society at large. The development seemingly
   agreed upon by both sides was a gradual adaptation of all forms of
   poetry from their older uses. Odes would cease to be encomium, ballads
   cease to be narratives, elegies cease to be sincere memorials, satires
   no longer be specific entertainments, parodies no longer be performance
   pieces without sting, song no longer be pointed, and the lyric would
   become a celebration of the individual rather than a lover's complaint.
   These developments can be seen as extensions of Protestantism, as Max
   Weber argued, for they represent a gradual increase in the implications
   of Martin Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, or they
   can be seen as a growth of the power and assertiveness of the
   bourgeoisie and an echo of the displacement of the worker from the home
   in growing industrialization, as Marxists such as E.P. Thompson have
   argued. It can be argued that the development of the subjective
   individual against the social individual was a natural reaction to
   trade over other methods of economic production. Whatever the prime
   cause, a largely conservative set of voices argued for a social person
   and largely emergent voices argued for the individual person.
   Alexander Pope, the single poet who most influenced the Augustan Age.
   Alexander Pope, the single poet who most influenced the Augustan Age.

   The entire Augustan age's poetry was dominated by Alexander Pope. His
   lines were repeated often enough to lend quite a few clichés and
   proverbs to modern English usage. Pope had few poetic rivals, but he
   had many personal enemies and political, philosophical, or religious
   opponents, and Pope himself was quarrelsome in print. Pope and his
   enemies (often called "the Dunces" because of Pope's successful
   satirizing of them in The Dunciad) fought over central matters of the
   proper subject matter for poetry and the proper pose of the poetic
   voice.

   There was a great struggle over the nature and role of the pastoral in
   the early part of the century. After Pope published his Pastorals of
   the four seasons in 1709, an evaluation in the Guardian praised Ambrose
   Philips's pastorals above Pope's, and Pope replied with a mock praise
   of Philips's Pastorals that heaped scorn on them. Pope quoted Philips's
   worst lines, mocked his execution, and delighted in pointing out his
   empty lines. Pope later explained that any depictions of shepherds and
   their mistresses in the pastoral must not be updated shepherds, that
   they must be icons of the Golden Age: "we are not to describe our
   shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be
   conceived then to have been, when the best of men followed the
   employment" (Gordon). Philips's Pastorals were not particularly awful
   poems, but they did reflect his desire to "update" the pastoral. In
   1724, Philips would update poetry again by writing a series of odes
   dedicated to "all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the
   realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery." Henry Carey was one of the
   best at satirizing these poems, and his Namby Pamby became a hugely
   successful obliteration of Philips and Philips's endeavor. What is
   notable about Philips against Pope, however, is the fact that both
   poets were adapting the pastoral and the ode, both altering it. Pope's
   insistence upon a Golden Age pastoral no less than Philips's desire to
   update it meant making a political statement. While it is easy to see
   in Ambrose Philips an effort at modernist triumph, it is no less the
   case that Pope's artificially restricted pastoral was a statement of
   what the ideal should be.
   Portrait of John Gay from Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets,
   the 1779 edition. Gay's gentle satire was a contrast with the harsher
   Pope and Swift.
   Enlarge
   Portrait of John Gay from Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets,
   the 1779 edition. Gay's gentle satire was a contrast with the harsher
   Pope and Swift.

   Pope's friend John Gay also adapted the pastoral. Gay, working at
   Pope's suggestion, wrote a parody of the updated pastoral in The
   Shepherd's Week. He also imitated the Satires of Juvenal with his
   Trivia. In 1728, his The Beggar's Opera was an enormous success,
   running for an unheard-of eighty performances. All of these works have
   in common a gesture of compassion. In Trivia, Gay writes as if
   commiserating with those who live in London and are menaced by falling
   masonry and bedpan slops, and The Shepherd's Week features great detail
   of the follies of everyday life and eccentric character. Even The
   Beggar's Opera, which is a satire of Robert Walpole, portrays its
   characters with compassion: the villains have pathetic songs in their
   own right and are acting out of exigency rather than boundless evil.

   Throughout the Augustan era the "updating" of Classical poets was a
   commonplace. These were not translations, but rather they were
   imitations of Classical models, and the imitation allowed poets to veil
   their responsibility for the comments they made. Alexander Pope would
   manage to refer to the King himself in unflattering tones by
   "imitating" Horace in his Epistle to Augustus. Similarly, Samuel
   Johnson wrote a poem that falls into the Augustan period in his
   "imitation of Juvenal" entitled London. The imitation was inherently
   conservative, since it argued that all that was good was to be found in
   the old classical education, but these imitations were used for
   progressive purposes, as the poets who used them were often doing so to
   complain of the political situation.

   In satire, Pope achieved two of the greatest poetic satires of all time
   in the Augustan period. The Rape of the Lock (1712 and 1714) was a
   gentle mock-heroic. Pope applies Virgil's heroic and epic structure to
   the story of a young woman (Arabella Fermor) having a lock of hair
   snipped by an amorous baron (Lord Petre). The structure of the
   comparison forces Pope to invent mythological forces to overlook the
   struggle, and so he creates an epic battle, complete with a mythology
   of sylphs and metempsychosis, over a game of Ombre, leading to a
   fiendish appropriation of the lock of hair. Finally, a deux ex machina
   appears and the lock of hair experiences an apotheosis. To some degree,
   Pope was adapting Jonathan Swift's habit, in A Tale of a Tub, of
   pretending that metaphors were literal truths, and he was inventing a
   mythos to go with the everyday. The poem was an enormous public
   success.
   One of the scabrous satirical prints directed against Pope after his
   Dunciad of 1727.
   Enlarge
   One of the scabrous satirical prints directed against Pope after his
   Dunciad of 1727.

   A decade after the gentle, laughing satire of The Rape of the Lock,
   Pope wrote his masterpiece of invective and specific opprobrium in The
   Dunciad. The story is that of the goddess Dulness choosing a new
   avatar. She settles upon one of Pope's personal enemies, Lewis
   Theobald, and the poem describes the coronation and heroic games
   undertaken by all of the dunces of Great Britain in celebration of
   Theobald's ascension. When Pope's enemies responded to The Dunciad with
   attacks, Pope produced the Dunciad Variorum, with a "learned"
   commentary upon the original Dunciad. In 1743, he added a fourth book
   and changed the hero from Lewis Theobald to Colley Cibber. In the
   fourth book of the new Dunciad, Pope expressed the view that, in the
   battle between light and dark (enlightenment and the dark ages), Night
   and Dulness were fated to win, that all things of value were soon going
   to be subsumed under the curtain of unknowing.

   John Gay and Alexander Pope belong on one side of a line separating the
   celebrants of the individual and the celebrants of the social. Pope
   wrote The Rape of the Lock, he said, to settle a disagreement between
   two great families, to laugh them into peace. Even The Dunciad, which
   seems to be a serial killing of everyone on Pope's enemies list, sets
   up these figures as expressions of dangerous and antisocial forces in
   letters. Theobald and Cibber are marked by vanity and pride, by having
   no care for morality. The hireling pens Pope attacks mercilessly in the
   heroic games section of the Dunciad are all embodiments of avarice and
   lies. Similarly, Gay writes of political society, of social dangers,
   and of follies that must be addressed to protect the greater whole.
   Gay's individuals are microcosms of the society at large. On the other
   side of this line were people who agreed with the politics of Gay and
   Pope (and Swift), but not in approach. They include, early in the
   Augustan Age, James Thomson and Edward Yonge. Thomson's The Seasons
   (1730) are nature poetry, but they are unlike Pope's notion of the
   Golden Age pastoral. Thomson's poet speaks in the first person from
   direct observation, and his own mood and sentiment colour the
   descriptions of landscape. Unlike Pope's Windsor Forest, Thomson's
   seasons have no mythology, no celebration of Britain or the crown.
   Winter, in particular, is melancholy and meditative. Edward Yonge's
   Night Thoughts (1742–1744) was immediately popular. It was, even more
   than Winter, a poem of deep solitude, melancholy, and despair. In these
   two poets, there are the stirrings of the lyric as the Romantics would
   see it: the celebration of the private individual's idiosyncratic, yet
   paradigmatic, responses to the visions of the world.
   James Thomson, from the 1779 edition of Samuel Johnson's Lives of the
   English Poets.
   James Thomson, from the 1779 edition of Samuel Johnson's Lives of the
   English Poets.

   These hints at the solitary poet were carried into a new realm with
   Thomas Gray, whose Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard (1750) set
   off a new craze for poetry of melancholy reflection. It was written in
   the "country," and not in or as opposed to London, and the poem sets up
   the solitary observer in a privileged position. It is only by being
   solitary that the poet can speak of a truth that is wholly individually
   realized. After Gray, a group often referred to as the Churchyard Poets
   began imitating his pose, if not his style. Oliver Goldsmith (The
   Deserted Village), Thomas Warton, and even Thomas Percy (The Hermit of
   Warkworth), each conservative by and large and Classicist (Gray himself
   was a professor of Greek), took up the new poetry of solitude and loss.

   When the Romantics emerged at the end of the 18th century, they were
   not assuming a radically new invention of the subjective self
   themselves, but merely formalizing what had gone before. Similarly, the
   later 18th century saw a ballad revival, with Thomas Percy's Reliques
   of Ancient English Poetry. The relics were not always very ancient, as
   many of the ballads dated from only the 17th century (e.g. the Bagford
   Ballads or The Dragon of Wantley in the Percy Folio), and so what began
   as an antiquarian movement soon became a folk movement. When this
   folk-inspired impulse combined with the solitary and individualistic
   impulse of the Churchyard Poets, Romanticism was nearly inevitable.

Drama

   Main article at Augustan drama

   The "Augustan era" is difficult to define chronologically in prose and
   poetry, but it is very easy to date its end in drama. The Augustan
   era's drama ended definitively in 1737, with the Licensing Act. Prior
   to 1737, however, the English stage was changing rapidly from the
   Restoration comedy and Restoration drama and their noble subjects to
   the quickly developing melodrama.

   George Lillo and Richard Steele wrote the trend-setting plays of the
   early Augustan period. Lillo's plays consciously turned from heroes and
   kings and toward shopkeepers and apprentices. They emphasized drama on
   a household scale, rather than a national scale, and the hamartia and
   agon in his tragedies are the common flaws of yielding to temptation
   and the commission of Christian sin. The plots are resolved with
   Christian forgiveness and repentance. Steele's The Conscious Lovers
   (1722) hinges upon his young hero avoiding fighting a duel. These plays
   set up a new set of values for the stage. Instead of amusing the
   audience or inspiring the audience, they sought to instruct the
   audience and ennoble it. Further, the plays were popular precisely
   because they seemed to reflect the audience's own lives and concerns.

   Joseph Addison also wrote a play, entitled Cato, in 1713. Cato
   concerned the Roman statesman. The year of its première was important,
   for Queen Anne was in serious illness at the time, and both the Tory
   ministry of the day and the Whig opposition (already being led by
   Robert Walpole) were concerned about the succession. Both groups were
   contacting the Old Pretender about bringing the Young Pretender over.
   Londoners sensed this anxiety, for Anne had no heirs, and all of the
   natural successors in the Stuart family were Roman Catholic or
   unavailable. Therefore, the figure of Cato was a transparent symbol of
   Roman integrity, and the Whigs saw in him a champion of Whig values,
   while the Tories saw in him an embodiment of Tory sentiments. Both
   sides cheered the play, even though Addison was himself clearly Whig.
   John Home's play Douglas (1756) would have a similar fate to Cato in
   the next generation, after the Licensing Act.
   A print by William Hogarth entitled A Just View of the British Stage
   from 1724 depicting the managers of Drury Lane (Robert Wilks, Colley
   Cibber, and Barton Booth) rehearsing a play comprised of nothing but
   special effects, while they used the scripts for Macbeth, Hamlet,
   Julius Caesar and The Way of the World for toilet paper. This battle of
   effects was a common subject of satire for the literary wits, including
   Pope in The Dunciad.
   Enlarge
   A print by William Hogarth entitled A Just View of the British Stage
   from 1724 depicting the managers of Drury Lane ( Robert Wilks, Colley
   Cibber, and Barton Booth) rehearsing a play comprised of nothing but
   special effects, while they used the scripts for Macbeth, Hamlet,
   Julius Caesar and The Way of the World for toilet paper. This battle of
   effects was a common subject of satire for the literary wits, including
   Pope in The Dunciad.

   As during the Restoration, economics drove the stage in the Augustan
   period. Under Charles II court patronage meant economic success, and
   therefore the Restoration stage featured plays that would suit the
   monarch and/or court. The drama that celebrated kings and told the
   history of Britain's monarchs was fit fare for the crown and courtiers.
   Charles II was a philanderer, and so Restoration comedy featured a
   highly sexualized set of plays. However, after the reign of William and
   Mary, the court and crown stopped taking a great interest in the
   playhouse. Theaters had to get their money from the audience of city
   dwellers, therefore, and consequently plays that reflected city
   anxieties and celebrated the lives of citizens drew and were staged.

   Thus, there were quite a few plays that were, in fact, not literary
   that were staged more often than the literary plays. John Rich and
   Colley Cibber duelled over special theatrical effects. They put on
   plays that were actually just spectacles, where the text of the play
   was almost an afterthought. Dragons, whirlwinds, thunder, ocean waves,
   and even actual elephants were on stage. Battles, explosions, and
   horses were put on the boards. Rich specialized in pantomime and was
   famous as the character "Lun" in harlequin presentations. The plays put
   on in this manner are not generally preserved or studied, but their
   monopoly on the theaters infuriated established literary authors.

   Additionally, opera made its way to England during this period.
   Inasmuch as opera combined singing with acting, it was a mixed genre,
   and this violated all the strictures of neo-classicism. Further, high
   melodies would cover the singers' expressions of grief or joy, thus
   breaking "decorum." To add insult to injury, the casts and celebrated
   stars were foreigners, and, as with Farinelli, castrati. The satirists
   saw in opera the non plus ultra of invidiousness. As Pope put it in
   Dunciad B:

          "Joy to Chaos! let Division reign:
          Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them [the muses] hence,
          Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:
          One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,
          Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage;
          To the same notes thy sons shall hum, or snore,
          And all thy yawning daughters cry, encore." (IV 55-60)

   John Gay parodied the opera with his satirical Beggar's Opera (1728)
   and offered up a parody of Robert Walpole's actions during the South
   Sea Bubble. Superficially, the play is about a man named Macheath who
   keeps being imprisoned by a thief named Peachum and who escapes prison
   over and over again because the daughter of the jailor, Lucy Lockitt,
   is in love with him. This is an obvious parallel with the case of
   Jonathan Wild (Peachum) and Jack Sheppard (Macheath). However, it was
   also the tale of Robert Walpole (Peachum) and the South Sea directors
   (Macheath). The play was a hit, and its songs were printed up and sold.
   However, when Gay wrote a follow up called Polly, Walpole had the play
   suppressed before performance.
   Frontispiece to Fielding's Tom Thumb, a play satirizing plays (and
   Robert Walpole).
   Enlarge
   Frontispiece to Fielding's Tom Thumb, a play satirizing plays (and
   Robert Walpole).

   Playwrights were therefore in straits. On the one hand, the playhouses
   were doing without plays by turning out hack-written pantomimes. On the
   other hand, when a satirical play appeared, the Whig ministry would
   suppress it. This antagonism was picked up by Henry Fielding, who was
   not afraid to fight Walpole. His Tom Thumb (1730) was a satire on all
   of the tragedies written before him, with quotations from all the worst
   plays patched together for absurdity, and the plot concerned the
   eponymous tiny man attempting to run things. It was, in other words, an
   attack on Robert Walpole and the way that he was referred to as "the
   Great Man." Here, the Great Man is made obviously deficient by being a
   midget. Walpole responded, and Fielding's revision of the play was in
   print only. It was written by "Scribblerus Secundus," its title page
   announced, and it was the Tragedy of Tragedies, which functioned as a
   clearly Swiftian parodic satire. Anti-Walpolean sentiment also showed
   in increasingly political plays, and the theaters began to stage them.
   A particular play of unknown authorship entitled A Vision of the Golden
   Rump was cited when Parliament passed the Licensing Act of 1737. (The
   "rump" in question is Parliament, on the one hand, and buttocks on the
   other.)

   The Licensing Act required all plays to go to a censor before staging,
   and only those plays passed by the censor were allowed to be performed.
   The first play to be banned by the new Act was Gustavus Vasa, by Henry
   Brooke. Samuel Johnson wrote a Swiftian parodic satire of the
   licensers, entitled A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the
   English Stage. The satire was, of course, not a vindication at all, but
   rather a reductio ad absurdum of the position for censorship. Had the
   licensers not exercised their authority in a partisan manner, the Act
   might not have chilled the stage so dramatically, but the public was
   well aware of the bannings and censorship, and consequently any play
   that did pass the licensers was regarded with suspicion by the public.
   Therefore, the playhouses had little choice but to present old plays
   and pantomime and plays that had no conceivable political content. In
   other words, William Shakespeare's reputation grew enormously as his
   plays saw a quadrupling of performances, and sentimental comedy and
   melodrama were the only choices.

   Very late in the Augustan period, Oliver Goldsmith attempted to resist
   the tide of sentimental comedy with She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and
   Richard Brinsley Sheridan would mount several satirical plays after
   Walpole's death, but to a large degree the damage had been done and
   would last for a century.
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