Augustan literature
This article possibly contains original research. (March 2012) |
Augustan literature (sometimes referred to misleadingly as Georgian literature) is a style of British literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II in the first half of the 18th century and ending in the 1740s, with the deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, in 1744 and 1745, respectively. It was 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 boundary points 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.
While the period is generally known for its adoption of highly regulated and stylized literary forms, some of the concerns of writers of this period, with the emotions, folk and a self-conscious model of authorship, foreshadowed the preoccupations of the later Romantic era. In general, philosophy, politics and literature underwent a turn away from older courtly concerns towards something closer to a modern sensibility.
Historical context
Alexander Pope, who had been imitating Horace, wrote[when?] an Epistle to Augustus that was in fact addressed to King George II (whose middle name was Augustus), 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.[2] 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 the 1730s.[3]
Outside poetry, however, the Augustan era is generally known by other names. Partially because of the rise of empiricism and partially because of the self-conscious naming of the age in terms of ancient Rome, two rather 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. While neoclassical criticism from France was imported to English letters, the English had abandoned their structures in all but name by the 1720s. Critics disagree over the applicability of the concept of "the Enlightenment" to the literary history of this period. Donald Greene argued forcefully that the age should rather be known as "The Age of Exuberance", and T. H. White made a case for "The Age of Scandal". More recently, Roy Porter put forward the notion of a distinctively "English Enlightenment" to characterise the intellectual climate of the period.[4]
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. That was furthered with the establishment of periodicals, including The Gentleman's Magazine and the London Magazine. People in York aware of the happenings of Parliament and the court, but people in London were also more aware than before of the happenings of York. Furthermore, 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 centres like Dublin, which further increased awareness across the whole realm. That was compounded by the end of the Press Restriction Act in 1693, which allowed for provincial printing presses to be established, creating a printing structure that was no longer under government control (Clair 158–176).
All types of literature were spread quickly in all directions. Newspapers began and even 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, which were top selling books. Since dissenting, Establishment and Independent divines were in print, the constant movement of these works helped defuse any region's religious homogeneity and fostered emergent
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 prior centuries so contributions to science, philosophy, economics, and literature came from all parts of the kingdom. It was the first time that 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, which authors of the 18th century felt at every turn, which 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 democratisation 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, as books were increasingly easy to make and buy.
Political and religious context
The Restoration period ended with the
His son, George II, on the other hand, spoke some English and some more French, and his rule was the first full Hanoverian rule in England. By then, the powers of Parliament had silently expanded, and his power was perhaps only equal to that of Parliament.
London's population exploded spectacularly. During the Restoration, it had grown from around 350,000 to 600,000 in 1700 (Old Bailey) (Millwall history). By 1800, it had reached 950,000. Not all of the residents were prosperous, as the
Partially because of the population pressures, property crime became a business both for the criminals and those who fed off of the criminals. Major crime lords like
Increased population 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
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", as authors dealt specifically with the crimes and the vices of their world.
Satire, in prose, drama and poetry, was the genre that attracted the most energetic and voluminous writing. The satires that were produced during the Augustan period were occasionally gentle and nonspecific, commentaries on the comically flawed human condition, but they were at least as frequently specific critiques of specific policies, actions and persons. Even the works studiously nontopical were, in fact, transparently political statements in the 18th century.
Consequently, readers of 18th-century literature now 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 criticised writing that lived for only a day (like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, in The Dedication to Prince Posterity of A Tale of a Tub and The Dunciad, among other pieces) were criticising specific authors, who are unknown to those without historical knowledge of the period. Poetry of all forms was in constant dialogue, and each author was responding and commenting upon the others. Novels were written against other novels (like the battles between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, who, along with Eliza Haywood, wrote a novel satirising Richardson's Pamela, and between Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett). Plays were written to make fun of plays or to counter the success of plays (like the reaction against and for Cato and, later, Fielding's The Author's Farce). Therefore, history and literature are linked in a way rarely seen at other times. On one hand, the metropolitan and political writing can seem like coterie or salon work, but on the other hand, 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
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.
Essays and journalism
English essayists were aware of Continental models, but they developed their form independently from that tradition, and
Dictionaries and Lexicons
The 18th century was a time of enlightenment progression occurring in all intellectual fields. However, the English language was deteriorating into a tangled mess. A group of London booksellers commissioned well-known essayist Samuel Johnson to compile a set of rules governing the English language. After nine years and the help of six assistants the first edition of A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755. Johnson's great knowledge of letters, words and literature brought uniqueness to his dictionary. Each word defined in detail, with descriptions of their various uses and numerous literary quotes as illustrations. This was the first dictionary of its kind, containing 40,000 words and nearly 114,000 quotes packed together with Johnson's personal touch. A warm reception greeted Johnson's Dictionary as it was the first dictionary that could be read with pleasure. The definitions full of wit and depth of thought supported by passages from beloved poets and philosophers, which a reader could be content spending an evening poring over its pages. Johnson's choice of structure and format has certainly shaped future English dictionaries and lexicons and the role they play in language development.
Philosophy and religious writing
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
Also in contrast to the Restoration, when philosophy in England was fully dominated by
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 naïve 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.
After 1750
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 emphasised 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 and was published in more editions than any other works besides Gulliver's Travels (Mullan 252). 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 aspects of the actual life and, from that, generated a fictional life, satisfying an essentially journalistic market with his fiction (Hunter 331–338). 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.
After 1740: Sentimental novel
The
Although there were novels in the interim,
In 1747 through 1748, Samuel Richardson published
Two other novelists should be mentioned, for they, like Fielding and Richardson, were in dialogue 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 clarify 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 also taking place. Women were 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.
Satire
The Augustan era is considered a high point of British satiric writing, and its masterpieces were Swift's Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal, Pope's Dunciads, Horatian Imitations, and Moral Essays, Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes and London, Henry Fielding's Shamela and Jonathan Wild, and John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. There were several thousand other satirical works written during the period, which have until recently been, by widespread consensus, ignored. The central group of "Scriblerians"—Pope, Swift, Gay, and their colleague John Arbuthnot—are considered to have had common satiric aims. Until recently, these writers formed a "school" of satire. After Swift and Pope died, the emergent "Age of Sensibility" discouraged the often cruel and abrasive tenor of the Augustans, and satire was rendered gentler and more diffuse.[6]
Many scholars of the era argue that a single name overshadows all others in 18th-century prose satire: Jonathan Swift.[7] 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.
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
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
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
Pope's friend
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.
A decade after the gentle, laughing satire of The Rape of the Lock, Pope wrote his masterpiece of invective and specific opprobrium in
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 Young.
Precursors of Romanticism
In the year 1726 two poems were published describing landscape from a personal point of view and taking their feeling and moral lessons from direct observation. One was John Dyer's "
These hints at the solitary poet were carried into a new realm with
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
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
Joseph Addison also wrote a play, entitled Cato, in 1713, which concerned the Roman statesman
As during the Restoration, economics drove the stage in the Augustan period. Under Charles II court patronage meant economic success and so 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 the crown stopped taking a great interest in the playhouse. Theatres had to get their money from the audience of city dwellers, and plays that reflected city anxieties and celebrated the lives of citizens drew and were staged (Munns 96–99).
Thus, there were quite a few plays that were 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, and 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 theatres infuriated established literary authors.
Additionally,
- "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
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. The 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 it was the Tragedy of Tragedies, which functioned as a clearly Swiftian parodic satire. Anti-Walpolean sentiment also showed in increasingly political plays. A particular play of unknown authorship entitled A Vision of the Golden Rump was cited when Parliament passed the Licensing Act of 1737.
The Licensing Act required all plays to go to a censor before staging, and only the 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 so any play that passed the licensers was regarded with suspicion by the public. Therefore, the playhouses had little choice but to present old plays and pantomime and other 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 18th century 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 Robert Walpole's death.
See also
Citations
- ^ J. A. Cuddon,A Dictionary of Literary Terms, London: Penguin, 1999, p. 61.
- ^ Thornton 275)
- ^ Newman and Brown 32
- ^ Porter
- ^ J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edition (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p.809; M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th edition (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace,1999), p.283.
- ^ Jack, Ian R.J., Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660–1750, Clarendon Press, 1952, 163 pages.
- ^ Damrosch, Leo. Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World. Yale University Press, 2013. 573 pages.
References
- "Proceedings of the Old Bailey". Retrieved July 1, 2005.
- Edward Yonge on bibliomania.com. Retrieved July 1, 2005.
- Bloom, Edward and Bloom, Lillian (editors). "Addison the Dramatist" in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1995.
- Clair, Colin. A History of Printing in Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.
- Davis, Caroline. "Publishing in the Eighteenth Century: Popular Print Genres". Retrieved June 22, 2005.
- Defoe, Daniel. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church. Retrieved June 20, 2005.
- de Mandeville, Bernard. Excerpts from The Fable of the Bees, 1705. Retrieved June 21, 2005.
- D'Urfey, Tom. Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy. 6 vol. London: Jacob Tonson, 1719–1720.
- "The Contemplator's Short Biography of Thomas D'Urfey (1653–1723)". Retrieved June 27, 2005.
- Fielding, Henry. Tragedy of Tragedies, or Tom Thumb. 1731.
- Fussell, Paul. Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
- Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera. Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell, eds. London: Penguin Books, 1986.
- Gordon, I. R. F. "Pastorals 1709". Retrieved June 29, 2005.
- Greene, Donald. The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth-Century Literature, 1660–1785. New York: McGraw Hill Companies, 1970.
- Huber, Alexander, ed. The Thomas Gray Archive, Oxford University. Retrieved July 1, 2005.
- Hunter, J. Paul. "The 'Occasion' of Robinson Crusoe" in Robinson Crusoe Ed. Michael Shinagel. New York: Norton, 1994.
- Landry, Donna. "Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the literature of social comment" in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650–1740 Ed. Steven Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Macaulay, Thomas Babington. History of England. 1848.
- Law, William. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. 1728. Retrieved June 20, 2005.
- Legouis, Emile. A History of English Literature, trans W. D. MacInnes and Emile Legouis. New York: Macmillan Company, 1957.
- The Millwall History Files, an account of the Great Fire of London. Retrieved June 15, 2005.
- Miller, H. K., G. S. Rousseau and Eric Rothstein, The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). ISBN 0-19-811697-7
- Mullan, John. "Swift, Defoe, and narrative forms" in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650–1740 Ed. Steven Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Munns, Jessica. "Theatrical culture I: politics and theatre" in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650–1740 Ed. Steven Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Newman, Gerald and Brown, Leslie. Britain in the Hanoverian Age, 1714–1837. Taylor & Francis, 1997.
- Pope, Alexander. The Poetic Works of Alexander Pope. John Butt, ed. New Haven: Yale UP.
- Porter, Roy (2000). The Creation of the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton.
- Shelley, Henry C. Inns and Taverns of Old London: Setting forth the historic and literary associations of those ancient hostelries, together with an account of the most notable coffee-houses, clubs and pleasure gardens of the British metropolis. Boston: L.C. Page and Company, 1909.
- Sherbo, Arthur. Studies in the Eighteenth Century English Novel. Michigan State University Press, 1969.
- Seidel, Michael. "Satire, lampoon, libel, slander" in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650–1740 Ed. Steven Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. Retrieved July 1, 2005.
- Sutherland, Donald R. "The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley and Digger Communism", from Essays in History. Retrieved June 20, 2005.
- Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class, 1963.
- Thompson, E. P. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane, 1975.
- Thornton, Francis. Alexander Pope. New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952.
- Ward, A.W., A.R. Waller, W. P. Trent, J. Erskine, S.P. Sherman, and C. Van Doren. The Cambridge history of English and American literature: An encyclopedia in eighteen volumes. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1921.
- Ibid. "'Hudibras' and Hudibrastic Verse", on bartleby.com. Retrieved July 1, 2005.
- Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Los Angeles: U California Press, 1957.
- Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, German original 1904–05, English ed. 1920. Retrieved July 3, 2005.
- Weinbrot, Howard Augustus Caesar in 'Augustan' England.
- White, T. H. The Age of Scandal. Penguin Books, 1964.
- Winn, James "Theatrical culture 2: theatre and music" in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650–1740 Ed. Steven Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Further reading
General history
- Rogers, Pat The Augustan Vision (London: Methuen, 1974) ISBN 0416709702(pbk.) An overview of the literary milieu, major authors, and literary forms.
Literary criticism
- Battestin, Martin C. The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) ISBN 0198120524. Offers a reading of works by Pope, Gay, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift, and Sterne.
- McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988) ISBN 0091729653. A critical response to Watt's 'triple-rise' theory of the novel's eighteenth century origins.
- Nokes, David Raillery and Rage: a Study of Eighteenth-Century Satire (Brighton: Harvester, 1987) ISBN 9780710812315. A detailed exploration of one of the period's most important literary forms.
- ISBN 9780712664271. A major scholarly work, examining the socio-economic conditions that gave rise to the Augustan novel form.
Anthologies
- Price, Martin (ed.) The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Restoration and Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1973) ISBN 0-19-501614-9 (pbk.) 4,500 pages of Restoration and Augustan literature. Major works like Pope's An Essay on Criticism and Swift's A Tale of a Tubare merely excerpted. Annotated with a bibliography.
- Greenblatt, Stephen; Lipking, Lawrence and James Noggle (eds.) The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume C: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006) ISBN 0393927199(pbk.) Offers a more comprehensive selection than the Oxford Anthology, and likewise annotated with a bibliography.