The Eighteenth Century

Part one ended on Johnson and Boswell, at the centre of an age that trusted reason. This second part follows the same century as it tests that trust: feeling, melancholy, terror, and what the age's commerce in human beings cost. The unit's governing idea pays off here: the couplet's balance and the graveyard's melancholy belong to the same age. We move in two steps. First, the later works, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Gay on the stage, Gray's Elegy and the cult of sensibility, Equiano's Narrative, Burney and the Gothic. Second, three procedures, for the heroic couplet, for satire and for matching authors to works, before the capstone.

We begin with the later century: its stage, its poets of death and feeling, and new kinds of narrative.

First, a writer in three genres.

ENL 1023 Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith wrote one novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, of seventeen sixty-six; a poem, The Deserted Village, of seventeen seventy, mourning a village emptied for landscape gardens; and the comedy She Stoops to Conquer, in which Kate Hardcastle poses as a barmaid to win the shy Marlow. A vicar, a village, a disguised heroine. Goldsmith worked in three genres.

Sheridan brought back Restoration wit.

ENL 1024 Sheridan and The School for Scandal

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Anglo-Irish playwright and owner of Drury Lane, wrote The Rivals, of seventeen seventy-five, and The School for Scandal, of seventeen seventy-seven, a comedy of manners in which Lady Sneerwell spreads gossip and the Surface brothers are tested for their true characters. Gossips, hypocrites, a test of character. Sheridan revives Restoration wit.

Gay set thieves to popular songs.

ENL 1025 Gay and The Beggar's Opera

John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, of seventeen twenty-eight, is a ballad opera, a satirical play using popular tunes. Set among thieves, with the highwayman Macheath, it mocked the fashion for Italian opera and the Whig statesman Robert Walpole. Thieves, popular songs, political mockery. Low characters satirize high society.

Gray wrote of a country churchyard.

ENL 1026 Thomas Gray's Elegy

Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," published in seventeen fifty-one, meditates among village graves on the obscure, unrecorded poor and on death, which awaits all. Written in cross-rhymed quatrains, it ends with an epitaph and has inspired more imitations than any other English poem, one commentator argues. A churchyard, the forgotten dead. The Elegy honours obscure lives.

Other poets turned to graves and tears.

ENL 1027 The Graveyard Poets and the Cult of Sensibility

The graveyard poets, including Gray, Young and Blair, wrote gloomy meditations on mortality and are seen as forerunners of the Gothic and of Romanticism. The sentimental novel, the novel of sensibility, prized fine feeling and emotional response, in reaction to Augustan reason. Graves, melancholy, tears. Sensibility answers the age of reason.

A freed man wrote his own narrative.

ENL 1028 Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Equiano's Interesting Narrative, of seventeen eighty-nine, tells of his kidnapping in Africa, enslavement, purchase of his own freedom and work for abolition. A bestseller, it helped turn opinion against the slave trade. In nineteen ninety-nine Vincent Carretta published records questioning his African birthplace. Kidnapped, enslaved, free, abolitionist. Attribute the birthplace question to Carretta.

A young lady enters society.

ENL 1029 Fanny Burney: Evelina

Frances Burney published Evelina anonymously in seventeen seventy-eight, an epistolary novel of a young lady's "entrance into the world," a girl raised in rural seclusion who meets London society. Her satirical novels of manners anticipated Jane Austen, who read and enjoyed them. A young lady enters society. Burney links Richardson to Austen.

A haunted castle ends the century's calm.

ENL 1030 The Gothic Novel Begins

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, of seventeen sixty-four, is generally regarded as the first Gothic novel; its second edition was subtitled A Gothic Story. Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis followed, and the Gothic sought extreme emotion, terror and the sublime, which Edmund Burke had theorized. A haunted castle; fear and awe. Gothic delight in fear rejects Augustan clarity.

Now method: three procedures for this century's passages, and the capstone that holds both its moods.

Here is the method for any couplet passage.

ENL 1031 Reading a Heroic Couplet Passage

The heroic couplet repays a method. Read in pairs, because each rhyming pentameter couplet usually completes a thought. Find the caesura, the pause that splits a line into balanced halves. Look for antithesis across the halves: "To err is human; to forgive, divine" sets two clauses against each other, and the meaning lies in the contrast. Notice what the rhyme joins, because Pope often pairs a serious word with a trivial one to satirize, as when epic language describes a card game. Weigh the tone, since balance is not neutrality, and state what the couplet argues.

Here is the method for any satire.

ENL 1032 Reading Eighteenth-Century Satire

Eighteenth-century satire speaks through a mask, so separate the speaker from the author: Swift's proposer is calm and reasonable, and his reasonableness is the target. Identify the method, irony, mock-heroic, or a fictional traveller's report. Find the object attacked: English exploitation of Ireland, aristocratic triviality, human pride. Judge the mode, Horatian and amused or Juvenalian and bitter; the Proposal is Juvenalian, The Rape of the Lock closer to Horatian. Ask what the satirist wants changed, since Dryden wrote that satire's end is the amendment of vice. Never take the mask's proposal at face value.

Here is the method for matching works to authors.

ENL 1033 Matching Eighteenth-Century Authors and Works

Sort by genre first. Verse: Pope's three poems, Gray's Elegy, Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes. Prose satire: Swift's Gulliver and Modest Proposal. The novel: Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney's Evelina and Walpole's Castle of Otranto. Drama: Gay's Beggar's Opera, Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, Sheridan's School for Scandal. Other prose: Johnson's Dictionary and Rasselas, Boswell's Life, Equiano's Narrative. Then use a clue: letters suggest Richardson or Burney, digression Sterne, a calm monstrous proposal Swift. Johnson appears in four columns and Goldsmith in three, so do not assume one author, one genre.

The capstone holds the century's two moods.

ENL 1034 The Age of Reason and Its Limits

The eighteenth century began by trusting reason and ended by questioning it. The Augustans prized order and classical models. Pope perfected the couplet, mocked triviality in The Rape of the Lock, set rules of taste and, in An Essay on Man, declared that whatever is, is right. Swift turned reason into a weapon, and Addison and Steele's Spectator brought moral essays to the coffee-house. The age made the novel, from Defoe's castaway to Sterne's digressions, a story Ian Watt called the rise of the novel. Johnson stood at the centre, and Boswell recorded him. Yet reason had limits. Johnson's own Vanity and Rasselas doubt happiness; Gray and the graveyard poets turned to death and feeling; sensibility prized tears; Walpole's Otranto began the Gothic; and Equiano's Narrative showed what the age's commerce in human beings cost. Finch, Montagu and Burney claimed the pen. Sort the work by genre and ask whether it trusts reason or tests it.

This second part followed reason's limits. We identified Goldsmith, Sheridan's revived wit, and Gay's thieves mocking high society. We described Gray's churchyard, the graveyard poets and the cult of sensibility. We described Equiano's Narrative, Burney's Evelina and the first Gothic castle. We read the couplet for balance and contrast, and satire through its mask. And we matched authors to works by genre and clue, closing on the capstone: the couplet's balance and the graveyard's melancholy belong to one age. Unit twelve, The First Romantics, takes up the feeling this century began.