THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1660–1780

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The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 offers readers discussions of the entire range of literary expression from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. In essays by thirty distinguished scholars, recent historical perspectives and new critical approaches and methods are brought to bear on the classic authors and texts of the period. Forgotten or neglected authors and themes as well as new and emerging genres within the expanding marketplace for printed matter during the eighteenth century receive special attention and emphasis. The volume’s guiding purpose is to examine the social and historical circumstances within which literary production and imaginative writing take place in the period and to evaluate the enduring verbal complexity and cultural insights they articulate so powerfully.

JOHN RICHETTI is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has taught at Rutgers University and Columbia University. His publications include Popular Fiction before Richardson, 1700–1739 (1969), Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (1975), Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (1983) and The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (1999). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge, 1996).

THE NEW CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
ENGLISH LITERATURE

The New Cambridge History of English Literature is a programme of reference works designed to offer a broad synthesis and contextual survey of the history of English literature through the major periods of its development. The organisation of each volume reflects the particular characteristics of the period covered, within a general commitment to providing an accessible narrative history through a linked sequence of essays by internationally renowned scholars. The History is designed to accommodate the range of insights and fresh perspectives brought by new approaches to the subject, without losing sight of the need for essential exposition and information. The volumes include valuable reference features, in the form of a chronology of literary and political events, extensive primary and secondary bibliographies and a full index.

The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature
EDITED BY DAVID WALLACE
The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature
EDITED BY DAVID LOEWENSTEIN AND JANEL MUELLER
The Cambridge History of English Literature 1660–1780
EDITED BY JOHN RICHETTI
IN PREPARATION
The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
EDITED BY JAMES CHANDLER
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature
EDITED BY LAURA MARCUS AND PETER NICHOLLS

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1660–1780

*

Edited by

JOHN RICHETTI

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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© Cambridge University Press 2005

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First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

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ISBN 0 521 78144 2 hardback

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Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

This project was begun years ago with the encouragement of Josie Dixon at the Cambridge University Press. Over the last few years, Linda Bree at the Press has provided expert advice and sustaining patience and faith in the enterprise. I owe both of them a deep debt of gratitude for their steady and sure guidance over this long haul. I want, also, to thank Saul Steinberg, whose sponsorship of my A. M. Rosenthal Chair at the University of Pennsylvania provided crucial financial support for my work through the last several years. Friends too numerous to mention have also given generously of their support, and I am especially grateful to my colleague at Penn and the editor of the medieval volume of the New Cambridge History, David Wallace, for his encouragement and example. And of course my greatest debt is to my collaborators in this enterprise, the thirty colleagues whose essays make up this volume. Among them, I especially want to thank for their smart advice on my own introduction to the book, Dustin Griffin, Isabel Rivers, Clifford Siskin and Steven Zwicker. John Sitter gave me invaluable help with the chronology.

Notes on contributors

PAULA BACKSCHEIDER is Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar in English at Auburn University, Alabama. Among her books is Daniel Defoe: His Life (1990), which won the British Council Prize in 1990 and was selected by Choice as one of the ten Outstanding Academic Books for 1990. She is also the author of A Being More Intense (1984), Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (1986), Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (1993) and Reflections on Biography (also a Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 1999). She has edited Selected Fiction and Drama by Eliza Haywood (1999), and, with John Richetti, the anthology, Popular Fiction by Women, 1680–1730 (1998). She has recently completed Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry.

JEFFREY BARNOUW is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published essays on Bacon, on Hobbes, on Leibniz, on Vico, on Johnson, on Schiller and on Charles Sanders Peirce. His most recent books are Propositional Perception. Phantasia, Predication and Sign in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics (2002) and Visceral Deliberation and Signs. Mental Activity and Practical Intelligence in Homer’s Odyssey (2003).

LANCE BERTELSEN is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture, 1749–1764 (1986) and Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer (2000).

TERRY CASTLE is Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University. She is the author of a number of books, including Clarissa’s Ciphers: Meaning & Disruption in Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’ (1982), Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (1986), The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (1993), The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (1995) and Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing (2002). She is the editor of The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (2003) and writes frequently for journals and periodicals such as The London Review and the Times Literary Supplement.

FRANS DE BRUYN is Professor of English Literature at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He is the author of The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Political Uses of Literary Form (1996). He is currently writing a book on the relation between Georgic poetry and scientific writing in the eighteenth century.

ROBERT DEMARIA, JR is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. His books include Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986), Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (1994) and Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (1997). He is the editor of British Literature 1640–1789: An Anthology, 2nd edn (2001), Gulliver’s Travels (2001) and, with Gwin J. Kolb, the forthcoming volume in the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Johnson on the English Language.

J. A. DOWNIE is Professor of English at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His books include: Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (1979) and Jonathan Swift, Political Writer (1984). He is the editor of the ‘Party Politics’ volume of The Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe (2000), one of the first eight volumes of the Complete Works of Daniel Defoe. He is working on a book called The Making of the English Novel.

WILLIAM C. DOWLING is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author, most recently, of The Epistolary Moment: the Poetics of the 18th-Century Verse Epistle (1991), Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson (1999) and The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory (1999). Among his other books are Language and Logos in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1981), Jameson, Althusser, Marx: an Introduction to The Political Unconscious (1984) and Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (1990).

CAROLE FABRICANT teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Riverside. The author of Swift’s Landscape (1982; reissued 1995), she has published widely on eighteenth-century, Irish and postcolonial topics. She is currently editing Jonathan Swift's Miscellaneous Prose and collaborating on an edition of Swift’s Irish Writings. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999 for her book-length study exploring the problems of colonial representation in eighteenth-century Ireland.

DAVID FAIRER is Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds. His most recent book is English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (2003). He is also the author of Pope’s Imagination (1984), The Poetry of Alexander Pope (1989) and many essays on eighteenth-century and Romantic poetry. He has edited The Correspondence of Thomas Warton (1995), and (with Christine Gerrard) Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, 2nd edn (2003).

ROBERT FOLKENFLIK is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published Samuel Johnson, Biographer (1978), The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation (1993), an edition of Sir Launcelot Greaves for the standard edition of Tobias Smollett (2002) and the Modern Library edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (2004).

DUSTIN GRIFFIN is Professor of English at New York University and the author of Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2002), Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (1996), Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (1994), Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (1986), Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (1978) and Satires Against Man: The Poems of Rochester (1974).

ROBERT D. HUME is Evan Pugh Professor of English Literature at Penn State University. He is author and co-author of numerous books and articles, mostly on drama, theatre and opera in the period 1660–1800. His books include The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (1976), and most recently Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism (1999) and – with Judith Milhous and Gabriella Dideriksen – Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, Volume 2: The Pantheon Opera and Its Aftermath, 1789–1795 (2001).

J. PAUL HUNTER is the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and now teaches spring semesters at the University of Virginia. His scholarly and critical work has mostly involved prose fiction (Before Novels, 1990, won the Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1991), but he is now at work on a cultural history of the couplet, tentatively entitled Sound Argument, and is preparing the 9th edition of the Norton Introduction to Poetry.

THOMAS KEYMER is currently Leverhulme Major Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. His books include Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (1992), Sterne, The Moderns, and the Novel (2002) and The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to 1830 (ed., with Jon Mee, 2004). He has edited a wide range of fiction, journalism and travel writing from the period, and is general editor (with Peter Sabor) of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (in progress).

LAWRENCE LIPKING is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. His books include The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (1970), The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (1981, which won the Christian Gauss Award), Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (1988) and Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (1998).

HAROLD LOVE is Emeritus Professor in the School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies at Monash University, Australia. He has edited the works of Southerne (1988, with R. J. Jordan) and Rochester (1999) for Oxford University Press. His books include Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-century England (1993) and Attributing Authorship: an Introduction (2002).

FELICITY A. NUSSBAUM is Professor of English at the University of California Los Angeles, and the author most recently of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (2003) and editor of The Global Eighteenth Century (2003). An earlier book, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain, was co-winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1989. Her other publications include Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narrative (1995) and The Brink of All We Hate: Satires on Women, 1660–1750 (1984), as well as a co-edited collection (with Laura Brown) entitled The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (1987).

KAREN O’BRIEN is Reader in English Literature at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (1997), winner of the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, and of Feminist Debate in Eighteenth-Century Britain (forthcoming). She is currently writing a study of British literature and the British Empire, 1660–1800, the subject of her 2001 British Academy Warton Lecture.

MICHAEL B. PRINCE is Associate Professor of English at Boston University and Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, where he is the founding director of the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program. His recent work includes Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment (1996), ‘The Eighteenth-Century Beauty Contest’, in Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader (1999), ‘Heidegger’s Turn to Poetry and the Paradox of Overcoming’, Fulcrum 2, June 2003, ‘Mauvais Genres’, New Literary History, Fall 2003 and ‘Editing Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks’, Essays in Criticism, January 2004.

JAMES RAVEN is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Essex and Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust. He has written widely on the history of printing, publishing and reading practices in eighteenth-century Britain, Europe and the colonies. His books include British Fiction 1750–1769 (1987), Judging New Wealth 1992), (co-authored) The English Novel 1770–1829 (2000), London Booksellers and American Customers (2002) and Commercialization of the Book: Booksellers and the Commodification of Literature in England 1450–1900 (2004) and he continues to direct the Arts and Humanities Research Board–Oxford project ‘Mapping the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London’.

JOHN RICHETTI is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is The English Novel in History 1700–1780 (1999). Among his other books are Popular Fiction Before Richardson: 1700–1739 (1969; rpt. 1992), Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (1975), Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (1983). He has also edited The Columbia History of the British Novel (1994), The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (1996) and (with Paula Backscheider) Popular Fiction by Women: 1660–1740 (1997) and the Penguin Robinson Crusoe (2000).

ISABEL RIVERS is Professor of Eighteenth-century English Literature and Culture at Queen Mary, University of London, and Co-Director of Dr. Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. Her books include The Poetry of Conservatism (1973) and Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols. (1991–2000); she has also edited Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (1982) and Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (2001), and written a number of articles of an interdisciplinary nature on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and religion. She has contributed articles on Tillotson, Watts and Doddridge among others to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) She is working on a new book entitled Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800.

MICHAEL SEIDEL is Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has written widely on eighteenth-century literature, especially on satire and on the novel. His books include Epic Geography: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1976), Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (1979), Exile and the Narrative Imagination (1986), Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (1991) and James Joyce: A Short Introduction (2002). He is an associate editor of the Columbia History of the British Novel (1994) and co-editor of the first two volumes in the Stoke Newington Works of Daniel Defoe.

STUART SHERMAN, Associate professor of English at Fordham University, is editor of the section on the Restoration and eighteenth century in the Longman Anthology of British Literature. He received the Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for his Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1795 (1996). He is also the recipient of the Quantrell Award for Undergraduate Teaching, as well as fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Chicago Humanities Institute.

CLIFFORD SISKIN is the William B. Ransford Professor of Literary History at Columbia University. The author of The Historicity of Romantic Discourse and The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700–1830, Siskin is also co-editor, with Anne Mellor, of the Palgrave-Macmillan series in Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. His new book is on the eighteenth-century genre that became the thing that we love to blame: The System.

JOHN SITTER is Notre Dame Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He has written and edited several works concerning Restoration and eighteenth-century English literature, including Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (1982), Arguments of Augustan Wit (1991), two volumes on eighteenth-century poets in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series (1990, 1991) and The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (2001). His interests include satire and poetry from the Renaissance to the present. He is working on a book entitled ‘The Knowledge of Eighteenth-Century Poetry,’ a primarily cognitive study of writers from Pope to Blake.

PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS is Edgar Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and is the author, most recently, of Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (2003). Among her other books are The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1962), The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (1967), An Argument of Images: the Poetry of Alexander Pope (1971), The Female Imagination (1975), Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (1976), Gossip (1985), Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (1990) and Boredom: the Literary History of a State of Mind (1995).

FIONA STAFFORD is Reader in English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor of Somerville College. Her books include The Sublime Savage: James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (1988), The Last of the Race: the Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (1994) and Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish and English Poetry: from Burns to Heaney (2000). She has also edited novels by Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, and published essays on Scottish, Irish and English literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

WILLIAM B. WARNER is Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His primary publications have explored the history and origins of the English novel: Reading Clarissa: the Struggles of Interpretation (1979) and Licensing Entertainment: the Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (1998). He has also published on theory and media culture. He is currently pursuing research on eighteenth-century transatlantic communication within the British empire in the period before the American Revolution. He serves as Director of the University of California Digital Cultures Project.

STEVEN N. ZWICKER is Stanley Elkin Professor of Humanities at Washington University, St Louis. He has written on Dryden in Dryden’s Political Poetry (1972), Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: Arts of Disguise (1984), Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (1993); and he has edited John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany (2000) and the Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (2004); and with David Bywaters John Dryden: Selected Poems (2001). With Kevin Sharpe he has edited Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (1987), Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (1998) and Reading, Society, and Politics (2003).