The Augustan Age (1700-1798)

Early in the eighteenth century, many English writers began to think of themselves as Romans. Rome had suffered long civil wars and then found peace under its first emperor, Augustus, who ruled from 27 BC to AD 14. In his reign the poets Virgil, Horace and Ovid wrote works that later ages treated as models of order, polish and good taste.

England had its own memory of civil war. A king had been beheaded in 1649, the monarchy had been restored in 1660, and another king had been driven out in 1688. After so much trouble, the years around 1700 felt calm to many writers. They hoped their own time would become a second Augustan age, and they studied the Latin poets closely to learn how it should be written. That hope gave the age its name. In 1737 Alexander Pope even addressed a poem to King George II under the title Epistle to Augustus, copying a poem that Horace had once written to the emperor himself. Many readers have heard a mocking tone in its praise, since it set a modern king beside a Roman who had been a friend to poets.

The name has never been exact. Some scholars use it only for the reign of Queen Anne, from 1702 to 1714. Others stretch it to about 1745, by which time Pope and Swift had both died. Many cover the whole century down to 1798 and divide it into an Age of Pope and an Age of Johnson. The widest span has the clearest edges. In 1700 John Dryden died, and the old Restoration style began to fade. In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads. Between those two dates English writing learned to be clear, balanced and witty, and then slowly began to feel too narrow for what writers wanted to say.

The world of this age

Political life

The Revolution of 1688 had settled one question. After James II fled the country, Parliament invited his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, to rule, and in 1689 the Bill of Rights placed new limits on the crown. From then on Parliament, and not the king alone, would decide how the country was governed.

A harder question remained: who would rule next? William and Mary had no children. Mary's sister Anne, who followed them, lost every child she bore, and her last surviving son, the Duke of Gloucester, died in 1700 at the age of eleven. Parliament feared a Catholic king from the exiled Stuart family, so in 1701 it passed the Act of Settlement, which gave the crown after Anne to the Protestant house of Hanover in Germany. Anne reigned from 1702 to 1714. In 1707 England and Scotland, which had shared a monarch since 1603 but kept separate parliaments, were joined under the Act of Union as Great Britain.

Her reign was also a time of war. Britain was fighting France over who should inherit the throne of Spain, since a French-ruled Spain would upset the balance of power in Europe. The Duke of Marlborough won a famous victory at Blenheim in 1704, and the war ended with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

At home, two parties, the Whigs and the Tories, quarrelled over the war, the Church and the succession. The Whigs stood for Parliament, trade and the Protestant succession. The Tories stood for the Church and the landed gentry, and some of them secretly favoured the exiled Stuarts. Parties needed good pens and rewarded them with jobs, so writers were pulled into the quarrel. Addison and Steele wrote for the Whigs. Jonathan Swift began as a Whig, changed sides in 1710 and wrote for the Tory government. When Anne died in 1714, her successor George I came from Hanover speaking little English, and the Whigs returned to power. The Tory leaders fell from favour, and Swift went back to Ireland, where he had been Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin since 1713.

From 1721 to 1742 the Whig leader Robert Walpole ran the government and kept the country at peace. Admirers valued his steadiness, and critics attacked his corruption. Pope, Swift, Gay and Fielding all aimed their satire at him. Later in the century Britain's place in the world changed. The Seven Years' War (1756-1763) gave Britain Canada and a strong footing in India, the American colonies broke away in 1776 and won independence in 1783, and the French Revolution of 1789 led to war between Britain and France in 1793.

Social life

Society was a ladder, and rank decided nearly everything. At the top stood a small group of noble and landowning families whose wealth came from rents. Below them came the gentry, then merchants, lawyers, doctors and clergymen, then shopkeepers and craftsmen, and at the bottom the farm labourers and the city poor. A growing middle rank of traders and professional people supplied the age with its readers, its theatre audiences and many of its writers.

Many of them were drawn to London, which was by far the largest city in Britain. There the coffee house became the centre of social life. Men went to read the newspapers, hear the news, argue about politics and meet friends, and each house had its own crowd. Will's was linked to poets, and Button's to Addison and his circle. Talk was prized, and manners and good taste became matters of serious discussion.

The ladder was cruel to those at the bottom. From the 1720s cheap gin spread through London's poor districts, and the damage it did led to a law in 1751 and to William Hogarth's print Gin Lane of the same year. Hogarth, the great painter and engraver of the age, told moral stories in pictures such as A Rake's Progress (1735), as the satirists told theirs in verse. Women had few rights. A married woman could not usually own property in her own name, and the universities were closed to women. Yet women were among the most eager readers, and by the middle of the century some of them formed the Bluestockings, a circle of learned women led by Elizabeth Montagu, who held evening gatherings for talk about books. Some women also began to earn money by writing, mostly fiction.

Economic life

Trade made Britain rich. Ships from London, Bristol and Liverpool carried cloth, sugar, tobacco and other goods across the world, and the Bank of England, founded in 1694, helped the government borrow money for its wars. A new class of investors bought and sold shares in the coffee houses of London.

That world of shares led to a famous disaster. In 1711 the government created the South Sea Company, promised it a monopoly of trade with Spanish South America, and let it take over part of the national debt. In 1720 the price of its shares shot up as thousands rushed to buy, then collapsed within months and ruined many families. This was the South Sea Bubble. Walpole rose to power in the clean-up that followed, and Swift wrote a satire on the madness of the investors.

Land and industry were changing too. Large landowners enclosed open fields and tried new farming methods, which raised the harvest but pushed many small farmers off the land. From the 1760s, new machines for spinning cotton and James Watt's improved steam engine began what is now called the Industrial Revolution, and towns in the Midlands and the north grew fast.

Part of the wealth came from the Atlantic slave trade, which carried enslaved Africans to work on sugar and tobacco plantations in the Americas. Ports such as Bristol and Liverpool grew rich on it. An organised campaign against the trade began in 1787. In 1789 Olaudah Equiano, who had bought his own freedom in 1766, published his autobiography, and in 1773 the poems of Phillis Wheatley, a young woman enslaved in Boston, were printed in London. Both showed that Black writers already belonged to English literature in this age.

Religion

The Church of England was the state church. The Toleration Act of 1689 let Protestant Dissenters, such as Baptists, Quakers and Presbyterians, worship in their own chapels, though they still could not easily hold public office or study at the English universities. Catholics fared worse, living under laws that shut them out of public life. Pope's Catholic family left London for Binfield, in Windsor Forest, around 1700, and Pope, barred from the universities by his faith, taught himself.

At the same time, a new way of thinking was spreading. In 1687 Isaac Newton published his Principia, which showed that planets and falling stones obey the same natural laws. In 1690 John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding argued that knowledge comes from experience. Many educated people concluded that the world is an orderly machine which human reason can understand, and that God, as its maker, could be known through nature. This faith in reason is why the century is called the Age of Reason. Pope's Essay on Man belongs to that mood. Some thinkers went further. In 1748 David Hume argued that reports of miracles are weak evidence.

Many ordinary people found such religion too cold. In 1738 John Wesley, an Anglican clergyman, felt at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, that his heart was warmed by faith. He and his brother Charles began a revival that grew into Methodism. They preached in the open air to miners and labourers, and Charles Wesley wrote thousands of hymns. Isaac Watts, a Dissenting minister, wrote hymns and children's verses for the same hunger, and children memorised his Divine Songs for generations.

Literature in this age

The language

English was still loosely managed in 1700. Spelling changed from one printer to another, grammar had few agreed rules, and many writers feared that the language was changing too fast and would soon be hard to read. In 1712 Jonathan Swift wrote an open letter, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, to the Earl of Oxford, Queen Anne's chief minister. It asked for a body of learned men to fix the language, as the French Academy had tried to do for French. Nothing came of it, partly because Anne died two years later and Oxford fell from power.

The work was finally done by one man. Samuel Johnson, a bookseller's son from Lichfield, signed a contract in 1746 to write a dictionary and spent about nine years on it. Instead of inventing meanings, he gathered thousands of quotations from good writers, from the Elizabethan age onward, to show how words had really been used. When the Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755, it began to act as the standard for spelling and meaning. Johnson had started with the hope of fixing the tongue, but in his preface he admitted that a living language cannot be held still.

Others wrote grammar books, such as Robert Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), which taught correct usage to a growing middle class. Prose style came to prize clearness. Swift said that good style meant the proper words in the proper places, and the best prose of the age, from Defoe's plain narrative to Addison's easy essays, follows that rule. Johnson wrote a heavier, more Latin-sounding prose, but he too aimed at balance and precision.

How writing reached readers

For centuries writers had depended on rich patrons, who gave money in return for praise in a dedication. Patronage did not vanish in 1700, but print slowly gave writers another way to live. In 1695 Parliament had let the old Licensing Act lapse, which ended the system of censoring books before they were printed. Authors could still be punished afterwards, as Daniel Defoe found in 1703, when he was put in the pillory for a pamphlet that mocked the enemies of the Dissenters. The Daily Courant became London's first daily newspaper in 1702, and in 1710 the Statute of Anne became the first copyright law, giving authors and booksellers rights over printed works for a fixed term.

Booksellers, who were also publishers, grew powerful, and a writer could now sell a manuscript to them for cash. Some who did so lived in poverty around Grub Street, a London street of hack writers whose name came to stand for all cheap, hurried writing. Others found a better way in subscription, in which readers paid in advance for a book not yet printed. Pope sold his translation of Homer's Iliad this way, and its success made him rich enough to live on his writing alone, in a villa at Twickenham beside the river Thames.

Johnson's quarrel with Lord Chesterfield showed that the old system was ending. Chesterfield had given the Dictionary no help while it was being written, and then praised it in print when it was about to appear. In a letter of 1755 Johnson asked whether a patron was not someone who watches a drowning man without concern and then loads him with help once he has reached the shore.

Reading itself was spreading. Coffee houses kept newspapers on their tables, The Gentleman's Magazine began in 1731, and from the middle of the century circulating libraries lent novels for a small fee. The reading public now included merchants, shopkeepers' wives and ladies of leisure, and writers began to write for them.

Poetry

Poetry still held the highest rank, and its master was Alexander Pope. He was born in London in 1688 to a Catholic linen merchant. The laws against Catholics kept him out of school and university, and spinal tuberculosis left him small and bent for life. He taught himself Latin, Greek and the English poets, and he wrote with such skill that he was famous in his early twenties. His Essay on Criticism (1711), written in heroic couplets, set out in clear verse what makes good writing and a good critic.

A quarrel gave him his best-loved poem. Around 1711, Lord Petre, a young Catholic nobleman, cut off a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor, a lady from another Catholic family. She was furious, and the two families fell out. A friend of Pope, John Caryll, asked him to write something that would make everyone laugh and make peace. The result was The Rape of the Lock (1712, enlarged in 1714), a mock-epic that tells the story in the grand language of Homer and Virgil, with spirits guarding the heroine and a card game described as a battle. The poem does not mock the old epics. It mocks the small vanities of fashionable life by dressing them in giant clothes.

Pope's fortune came from translation. His Iliad (1715-1720) and Odyssey (1725-1726) were read for the rest of the century. Then a long feud with weaker writers and critics led him to write The Dunciad (1728), a satire in which the goddess Dullness crowns the king of bad writers. In the first version the hero was Lewis Theobald, a scholar who had pointed out mistakes in Pope's edition of Shakespeare. In the version of 1743 Pope replaced him with Colley Cibber, the poet laureate. In An Essay on Man (1733-1734) he turned to philosophy and argued that the universe has an order which humans see only in part, so that the right study for humankind is humankind itself.

Other poets moved away from Pope's manner. James Thomson, a Scot, wrote The Seasons (1726-1730) in blank verse, giving readers long, loving descriptions of weather and countryside. Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742-1745) brooded on death in the dark and began a taste for graveyard poetry. Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) carried that mood to a village burial ground, where it wonders what the buried poor might have become had life given them a chance. It is one of the best-known poems of the century.

In the last decades the voices grew more varied. William Cowper wrote quietly about home and garden in The Task (1785). Robert Burns published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786 and became famous across Scotland. William Blake's Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) used childlike songs to attack cruelty and injustice.

Prose

Prose found its great audience in the periodical essay. Richard Steele, a soldier turned writer, began The Tatler in April 1709, three times a week, at a time when London was hungry for coffee-house news and talk. He wrote as "Isaac Bickerstaff", a name his friend Swift had made famous a year earlier by a hoax. Steele sorted his material by the coffee house it came from: gossip from White's, poetry from Will's, learning from the Grecian, and foreign news from St James's.

In March 1711 Steele and Joseph Addison, his old school friend, launched The Spectator, which gave London one short essay every day. Its imaginary author, Mr Spectator, was a silent observer who watched the manners of the town and teased them gently. Addison claimed that it sold about three thousand copies a day and, counting twenty readers for each copy, reached sixty thousand people. The paper's club of invented members included Sir Roger de Coverley, a kindly, old-fashioned country gentleman whose visits to town made readers smile at their own habits. Addison said he wished to bring philosophy out of libraries and colleges into clubs, tea tables and coffee houses. Years later Johnson advised anyone who wanted an English style that was easy but not coarse, and graceful but not showy, to give days and nights to Addison.

Swift used prose as a weapon. Born in Dublin in 1667, he hoped for a high post in the English Church but ended as Dean of St Patrick's, a place he treated as exile, and his anger and his pity for Ireland fed his best work. In the Drapier's Letters (1724-1725) he wrote as a humble Dublin shopkeeper to protest against a patent that let an Englishman, William Wood, make copper coins for Ireland. The Irish refused the coins, and the patent was withdrawn. In Gulliver's Travels (1726) a ship's surgeon visits four strange lands: the tiny Lilliputians, the giant Brobdingnagians, the floating island of Laputa with its foolish scientists, and the country of the Houyhnhnms, reasoning horses who rule over the brutish Yahoos. Each voyage turns a mirror on some vice of Europe. In A Modest Proposal (1729), written after years of hunger in Ireland, Swift pretended to be a calm planner who suggests that the poor sell their babies as food for the rich. The cold tone is the weapon.

Non-fiction grew strong as well. After his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson edited Shakespeare (1765) and wrote Lives of the English Poets (1779-1781). In 1763, in a London bookshop, he met James Boswell, a young Scot who later wrote the Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), often called the finest biography in English. Johnson's talk was best heard at a dinner club that he founded with the painter Joshua Reynolds in 1764, which later drew in Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and the actor David Garrick. Edward Gibbon began his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) after, as he later recalled, sitting among the ruins of the Roman Capitol in 1764 and listening to friars singing in an old temple. After 1789 the French Revolution turned prose to politics. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) attacked it, Thomas Paine answered with Rights of Man (1791-1792), and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), arguing that women also had rights and needed education.

Drama

The stage had its own troubles. The Restoration comedies of the years after 1660 had delighted audiences with witty, loose-living characters, but in 1698 a clergyman, Jeremy Collier, attacked them in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Audiences were also changing, and the growing middle rank wanted plays that praised virtue. The result was sentimental comedy, which made the audience weep over goodness rather than laugh at folly. Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722) is its best-known example. George Lillo's The London Merchant (1731) brought the same moral seriousness to tragedy by showing an ordinary apprentice led to ruin and the gallows. Addison's Cato (1713) put Roman virtue on the stage and was applauded by both political parties.

The most original stage work was John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). It set sharp words to popular tunes, in what is called a ballad opera, and made thieves and highwaymen behave like lords and ladies, so that audiences laughed at greed in high places and saw Walpole's government in the joke. It was so successful that a joke of the day said it made Gay rich and the theatre manager John Rich gay. Henry Fielding followed with plays that mocked Walpole far more openly. In 1737 the government answered with the Licensing Act, which required every new play to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain before it was performed. This censorship lasted until 1968. Fielding left the theatre, trained as a lawyer and later turned to fiction.

Comedy revived in the 1770s. Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777) brought back laughter and quick wit without losing decency. Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop, who mixes up long words, gave English the word malapropism. The actor David Garrick, who managed the Drury Lane theatre from 1747 to 1776, made acting more natural and helped bring Shakespeare back to the centre of the stage.

The rise of the novel

Long prose stories had existed for centuries as romances, but the modern novel took shape in this age. Readers wanted stories about people like themselves, told as if true. Newspapers, travel books and spiritual autobiographies had prepared the way, since all of them claimed to tell facts.

Daniel Defoe, a journalist, merchant and political writer, understood that appetite. His Robinson Crusoe (1719) grew from the real story of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor left alone on an island off the coast of Chile and rescued in 1709 after more than four years. Defoe told it as a plain, detailed account "written by himself", and the lists of tools and small daily tasks make the invented story feel real. He used the same manner in Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year (both 1722).

In 1740 Samuel Richardson, a London printer then past fifty, published Pamela, told in letters by a servant girl who resists her master's advances and in the end marries him. Richardson had begun by writing a book of model letters, and the letter form let readers enter a character's mind. His Clarissa (1747-1748), a far darker tragic story told in letters, was admired across Europe.

Henry Fielding found Pamela's virtue too convenient and mocked it in Shamela (1741). In Joseph Andrews (1742) he began a different kind of novel, which he called a comic epic in prose. His Tom Jones (1749) follows a warm-hearted foundling through England in a plot admired for its careful design. Where Richardson looks inward, Fielding looks outward at the whole of society. Tobias Smollett wrote rougher adventure stories in the picaresque tradition, such as Roderick Random (1748). Laurence Sterne, a clergyman, then broke the rules with Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), a novel that wanders in every direction, plays tricks with the printed page and has barely brought its hero into the world by the third volume.

Women shaped the novel at every stage. Eliza Haywood and Charlotte Lennox wrote popular fiction early on, and Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), told in letters and published without her name, showed a young girl's entry into society with comic sharpness. In the last decades a taste for terror produced the Gothic novel, beginning with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and reaching a wide audience in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Jane Austen's novels belong to the next age, but she was already a young writer in the 1790s.

Criticism and scholarship

Criticism in this age asked a plain question: by what rules should writing be judged? The usual answer was neoclassical. Writers should follow nature, which meant general human truth, and learn from the ancient Greeks and Romans, who had already shown how nature should be copied. Pope put this view into verse in An Essay on Criticism, where he argued that the rules of good writing are nature put in order, and that true wit is what has often been thought but never so well said. In The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), M. H. Abrams later described this outlook as the "mirror" view of art, in which a poem holds up a likeness of life. He set it against the "lamp" view of the Romantics, in which a poem pours out the light of the poet's own mind.

Addison brought criticism to a wide audience. His Saturday papers in The Spectator in 1712 explained Paradise Lost to ordinary readers, and his essays of the same year on the pleasures of the imagination asked how the mind enjoys beauty. Samuel Johnson then gave the age its most solid criticism. In his Preface to Shakespeare (1765) he praised Shakespeare as a poet of general human nature, admitted his faults, and argued that the rules of unity of time and place were unnecessary, since an audience always knows it is watching a play. In Lives of the Poets, written as short prefaces to the works of more than fifty poets, he mixed life stories with judgement. In the life of Abraham Cowley he used the term "metaphysical poets" for John Donne and his followers, and said that they joined far-apart ideas by force.

Work on the texts themselves began too. Nicholas Rowe produced an edition of Shakespeare in 1709 with a life of the poet, and Pope, Theobald, Johnson and Edmond Malone followed, each correcting the errors of earlier editors.

Some critics began to question the Augustan taste. Joseph Warton's essay on Pope (1756) placed Pope below the greatest poets, because he thought Pope had too much wit and too little imagination. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the sublime and the beautiful (1757) argued that terror and vastness give a special pleasure. Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) said that genius should create and not copy. Much later, Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) argued that the new form grew out of middle-class readers and a style of close, realistic detail.

How the age ends

The change of taste

By the 1760s the Augustan manner had begun to feel worn. Pope's couplets had been copied for half a century, and many readers wanted more feeling and less polish. This new taste is called sensibility, the habit of valuing tender feeling and sympathy. Richardson's weeping heroines, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768) all fed it.

At the same time, poets turned toward an older and wilder past. Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) printed old ballads for a wide public. In the 1760s James Macpherson claimed to have translated the poems of an ancient Gaelic bard named Ossian. Doubters, Johnson among them, said that Macpherson had written much of them himself, and later scholars agreed. The young poet Thomas Chatterton went further and forged poems in medieval English, saying that a monk named Thomas Rowley had written them. He died in 1770, at the age of seventeen.

The shock of events

Then history moved faster. The loss of the American colonies, recognised in 1783, shook the country's confidence. The fall of the Bastille in 1789 made many young writers hope for a better world, and the quarrel between Burke, Paine and Wollstonecraft carried that hope into print. From 1793, war with France brought fear and harsher laws, and the early hopes cooled. Factories and canals were changing the countryside that poets loved. The old giants were passing as well: Johnson died in 1784, Gibbon in 1794, Burns in 1796, and Burke and Wollstonecraft in 1797. Wollstonecraft died days after giving birth to a daughter, Mary, who later wrote Frankenstein.

In 1798 two young poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published Lyrical Ballads without their names. Its poems were about ordinary people and were written in plain language, which turned away from the roundabout poetic diction that Augustan verse had often used. In a preface added in 1800, Wordsworth explained that poetry should come from strong feeling. A new age, the Romantic, had begun.

The change was not a clean break. Many Augustan habits lived on, the novel kept growing, and Lord Byron, a leading Romantic poet, admired Pope above almost every other English poet.

Writers and works

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Sources

• Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1953.
• Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed., Cengage Learning, 2014.
• Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Langford, Paul. A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783. Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Chatto and Windus, 1957.

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English