The eighteenth century in English literature has been called the Augustan Age, the
Neoclassical Age, and the Age of Reason. The term 'the Augustan Age' comes from the self-conscious imitation of the original Augustan writers, Virgil and Horace, by many of the
writers of the period. Specifically, the Augustan Age was the period after the Restoration era
to the death of Alexander Pope (~1690 - 1744). The major writers of the age were Pope and
John Dryden in poetry, and Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison in prose. Dryden forms the
link between Restoration and Augustan literature; although he wrote ribald comedies in the
Restoration vein, his verse satires were highly admired by the generation of poets who
followed him, and his writings on literature were very much in a neoclassical spirit. But more
than any other it is the name of Alexander Pope which is associated with the epoch known as
the Augustan Age, despite the fact that other writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe
had a more lasting influence. This is partly a result of the politics of naming inherent in
literary history: many of the early forms of prose narrative common at this time did not fit
into a literary era which defined itself as neoclassic. The literature of this period which
conformed to Pope's aesthetic principles (and could thus qualify as being 'Augustan') is
distinguished by its striving for harmony and precision, its urbanity, and its imitation of
classical models such as Homer, Cicero, Virgil, and Horace, for example in the work of the
minor poet Matthew Prior. In verse, the tight heroic couplet was common, and in prose essay
and satire were the predominant forms. Any facile definition of this period would be
misleading, however; as important as it was, the neoclassicist impulse was only one strain in
the literature of the first half of the eighteenth century. But its representatives were the
defining voices in literary circles, and as a result it is often some aspect of 'neoclassicism'
which is used to describe the era.
'Neoclassicism'
The works of Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison and John Gay, as well as many of their
contemporaries, exhibit qualities of order, clarity, and stylistic decorum that were formulated
in the major critical documents of the age: Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), and
Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711). These works, forming the basis for modern English literary
criticism, insist that 'nature' is the true model and standard of writing. This 'nature' of the
Augustans, however, was not the wild, spiritual nature the romantic poets would later
idealize, but nature as derived from classical theory: a rational and comprehensible moral
order in the universe, demonstrating God's providential design. The literary circle around
Pope considered Homer preeminent among ancient poets in his descriptions of nature, and
concluded in a circuitous feat of logic that the writer who 'imitates' Homer is also describing
nature. From this follows the rules inductively based on the classics that Pope articulated in
his Essay on Criticism:
Those rules of old discovered, not devised,
Are nature still, but nature methodized.
Particularly influential in the literary scene of the early eighteenth century were the
two periodical publications by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Tatler (1709-11), and
The Spectator (1711-12). Both writers are ranked among the minor masters of English prose
style and credited with raising the general cultural level of the English middle classes. A
typical representative of the post-Restoration mood, Steele was a zealous crusader for
morality, and his stated purpose in The Tatler was "to enliven Morality with Wit, and to
temper Wit with Morality." With The Spectator, Addison added a further purpose: to
introduce the middle-class public to recent developments in philosophy and literature and
thus to educate their tastes. The essays are discussions of current events, literature, and gossip
often written in a highly ironic and refined style. Addison and Steele helped to popularize the
philosophy of John Locke and promote the literary reputation of John Milton, among others.
Although these publications each only ran two years, the influence that Addison and Steele
had on their contemporaries was enormous, and their essays often amounted to a
popularization of the ideas circulating among the intellectuals of the age. With these wide-spread and influential publications, the literary circle revolving around Addison, Steele, Swift
and Pope was practically able to dictate the accepted taste in literature during the Augustan
Age. In one of his essays for The Spectator, for example, Addison criticized the metaphysical
poets for their ambiguity and lack of clear ideas, a critical stance which remained influential
until the twentieth century.
The literary criticism of these writers often sought its justification in classical
precedents. In the same vein, many of the important genres of this period were adaptations of
classical forms: mock epic, translation, and imitation. A large part of Pope's work belongs to
this last category, which exemplifies the artificiality of neoclassicism more thoroughly than
does any other literary form of the period. In his satires and verse epistles Pope takes on the
role of an English Horace, adopting the Roman poet's informal candor and conversational
tone, and applying the standards of the original Augustan Age to his own time, even
addressing George II satirically as "Augustus." Pope also translated the Iliad and the Odyssey,
and, after concluding this demanding task, he embarked on The Dunciad (1728), a biting
literary satire.
The Dunciad is a mock epic, a form of satiric writing in which commonplace subjects
are described in the elevated, heroic style of classical epic. By parody and deliberate misuse
of heroic language and literary convention, the satirist emphasizes the triviality of the subject,
which is implicitly being measured against the highest standards of human potential. Among
the best-known mock epic poems of this period in addition to The Dunciad are John Dryden's
MacFlecknoe (1682), and Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714). In The Rape of the Lock, often
considered one of the highest achievements of mock epic poetry, the heroic action of epic is
maintained, but the scale is sharply reduced. The hero's preparation for combat is transposed
to a fashionable boat ride up the Thames, and the ensuing battle is a card game. The hero
steals the titular lock of hair while the heroine is pouring coffee.
Although the mock epic mode is most commonly found in poetry, its influence was
also felt in drama, most notably in John Gay's most famous work, The Beggar's Opera
(1728). The Beggar's Opera ludicrously mingles elements of ballad and Italian opera in a
satire on Sir Robert Walpole, England's prime minister at the time. The vehicle is opera, but
the characters are criminals and prostitutes. Gay's burlesque of opera was an unprecedented
stage success and centuries later inspired the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht to write one of
his best-known works, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928).
One of the most well-known mock epic works in prose from this period is Jonathan
Swift's The Battle of the Books (1704), in which the old battle between the ancient and the
modern writers is fought out in a library between The Bee and The Spider. Although not a
mock epic, the satiric impulse is also the driving force behind Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels (1726), one of the masterpieces of the period. The four parts describe different
journeys of Lemuel Gulliver; to Lilliput, where the pompous activities of the diminutive
inhabitants is satirized; to Brobdingnag, a land of giants who laugh at Gulliver's tales of the
greatness of England; to Laputa and Lagoda, inhabited by quack scientists and philosophers;
and to the land of the Houhynhnms, where horses are civilized and men (Yahoos) behave like
beasts. As a satirist Swift's technique was to create fictional speakers such as Gulliver, who
utter sentiments that the intelligent reader should recognize as complacent, egotistical, stupid,
or mad. Swift is recognized as a master of understated irony, and his name has become
practically synonymous with the type of satire in which outrageous statements are offered in a
straight-faced manner.
The Nature and Graveyard Poets
Neoclassicism was not the only literary movement at this time, however. Two schools
in poetry rejected many of the precepts of decorum advocated by the neoclassical writers and
anticipated several of the themes of Romanticism. The so-called nature poets, for example,
treated nature not as an ordered pastoral backdrop, but rather as a grand and sometimes even
forbidding entity. They tended to individualize the experience of nature and shun a
methodized approach. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, was a rural poet in an urban era,
and the poems of Miscellany Poems by a Lady (1713) were often observations of nature,
largely free of neoclassical conventions. Her contemporaries regarded her as little more than a
female wit, but she was highly praised by the Romantic poets, particularly William
Wordsworth. A further influential poet of this school was James Thomas, whose poetical
work The Seasons, which appeared in separate volumes from 1726 to 1730 and beginning
with Winter, was the most popular verse of the century. In his treatment of nature, he
diverged from the neoclassical writers in many important ways: through sweeping vistas and
specific details in contrast to circumscribed, generalized landscapes; exuberance instead of
balance; and a fascination with the supernatural and the mysterious, no name just a few.
This last was also the major concern of the poets of the Graveyard School. Foremost
among them was Edward Young, whose early verses were in the Augustan tradition. In his
most famous work, however, The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and
Immortality (1742-45), the melancholy meditations against a backdrop of tombs and death
indicate a major departure from the conventions and convictions of the preceding generation.
While the neoclassicists regarded melancholia as a weakness, the pervasive mood of The
Complaint is a sentimental and pensive contemplation of loss. It was nearly as successful as
Thomas's The Seasons, and was translated into a number of major European languages.
The Rise of the Novel
The most important figure in terms of lasting literary influence during this period,
however, was undoubtedly Daniel Defoe. An outsider from the literary establishment ruled by
Pope and his cohorts, Defoe was in some ways an anomaly during a period defined as
'Augustan,' despite the fact that he was a writer of social criticism and satire before he turned
to novels. He did not belong to the respected literary world, which at best ignored him and his
works and at worst derided him. (In 1709, Swift for example referred to him as "the Fellow
that was Pilloryed, I have forgot his name.")
The works of fiction for which Defoe is remembered, particularly Moll Flanders
(1722) and Robinson Crusoe (1719), owe less to the satirical and refined impulse of the
Augustan tradition, and more to a contrary tradition of early prose narrative by women,
particularly Aphra Behn, Mary Delariviere Manley and Jane Barker. Since Ian Watt's
influential study, The Rise of the Novel (1957), literary historians have generally considered
Robinson Crusoe the first successful English novel and Defoe as one of the originators of
realistic fiction in the eighteenth century, but he was deeply indebted to his female precursors
and probably would never have attempted prose narrative if they had not created an audience
for it in the first place.
The English novel was a product of several differing literary traditions, among them
the French romance, the Spanish picaresque tale and novella, and such earlier prose models in
English as John Lyly's Euphues (1579), Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590) and John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress (1684). The authors of these works collectively helped pave the way for
the form of the novel as it is known today. The true pioneers of the novel form, however,
were the women writers pursuing their craft in opposition to the classically refined precepts
of the writers defining the Augustan Age. Particularly influential were Aphra Behn's travel
narrative Oroonoko (1688) and her erotic epistolary novel Love Letters Between a Nobleman
and his Sister (1683). In Oroonoko, Behn provides numerous details of day to day life and a
conversational narrative voice, while with Love Letters she pioneered the epistolary form for
a longer work of fiction, over fifty years before Richardson. The political prose satires of
Mary Delariviere Manley were racy exposés of high-society scandals written in the tradition
of Love Letters, Behn's erotic roman à clef. Manley's novels The Secret History of Queen
Zarah and the Zaraians (1705) and The New Atalantis (1709) were widely popular in their
day and helped create an audience for prose narratives that was large enough to support the
new breed of the professional novelist.
Eliza Haywood also began her career writing erotic tales with an ostensibly political
or high society background. Her first novel, Love in Excess (1719) went through four editions
in as many years. In the thirties, her writing underwent a transformation suitable to the
growing moral concerns of the era, and her later novels show the influence of her male
contemporaries Richardson and Fielding (this despite the fact that she may have been the
author of Anti-Pamela (1741), an early attack on Richardson's first novel). Haywood's The
History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) in particular belongs in a more realistic tradition of
writing, bringing the action from high society into the realm of the middle class, and
abandoning the description of erotic encounters.
Particularly interesting among the work of early women novelists is that of Jane
Barker. Her novel Loves Intrigues: Or, The History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia
(1713) tells in first-person narrative the psychologically realistic tale of a heroine who doesn't
get her man. The portrayal of Galesia's emotional dilemma, caught in a web of modesty,
social circumstances and the hero's uncertainty and indecisiveness, captures intriguing facets
of psychological puzzles without providing easy answers for the readers. Galesia retreats
from marriage, hardly knowing why she does so or how the situation came about, and the
reader is no smarter.
Many of the elements of the modern novel attributed to Defoe -- e.g. the beginnings of
psychological realism and a consistent narrative voice -- were anticipated by women writers.
Defoe's contribution was in putting them all together and creating out of these elements
sustained prose narratives blending physical and psychological realism. His most impressive
works, such as Moll Flanders and Roxana (1724), treated characters faced with the
difficulties of surviving in a world of recognizably modern economic forces. Given his
capitalist philosophy, it is not surprising that Defoe's protagonists are self-reliant, resourceful
individualists who express his middle-class values. In his attempt to balance individualism
and economic realism with a belief in God's providence, Defoe created multi-faceted
characters who combine repentance for past misdeeds with a celebration of the individual's
power to survive in a hostile environment.
Although Defoe and his female contemporaries were looked down upon by the
intellectual establishment represented by Pope and Swift, later developments in literary
history have shown that it was they who would define the literature of a new age, and not the
so-called Augustans. While the novel remains the dominant literary form of the twentieth
century, mock epic is at best an element used occasionally in comedy. Robinson Crusoe and
Moll Flanders are still widely read; The Rape of the Lock is mentioned in history books.
Jonathan Swift produced an enduring classic as well with Gulliver's Travels, but despite his
brilliance it is the merchant Daniel Defoe, a journalist who saw writing as "a considerable
branch of the English commerce" (Essay upon Literature, 1726), who is considered the father
of the English novel.