Prospect Poetry’ situates Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society (1764) at the confluence of various literary genres and show how its hybridity contributes to its innovative and influential qualities. Goldsmith’s poem modifies the prospect poem by decoupling the observer from any sense of belonging to the landscape, instead developing the figure of the wanderer that comes to inhabit many prose travelogues as well as Romantic epics. It also develops the political tendencies of its various precursor genres by exploring the relationship between individual, family, nation, and empire.

This chapter defines ‘criticism’, adapting John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, as a judicative, explicative, and appreciative encounter with literature. And in doing so, it sorts the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘essay’ into three rough groupings: (1) digressive essays in the manner of Montaigne; (2) treatise essays like Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie; and (3) periodical essays like The Tatler and The Spectator. Following a thread of allusions to Cato the Younger through the works of Montaigne, Addison, Pope, and Elizabeth Montagu, I show how an important feature of modern close reading, the grammatically integrated quotation, grows out of the eighteenth-century critical essay.

Exchanges between Eastern and Western cultures were central to representations of human-animal relations in the eighteenth century. When in 1713 Alexander Pope published an essay against cruelty to animals, he observed how “Everyone knows how remarkable the Turks are for their Humanity in this kind.” This chapter explains how feeling for fellow creatures was coupled in English minds with Eastern – Ottoman and Arab as well as Persian and Indian – compassion for them. Derived from mercantile, scholarly, and scientific exchanges; travelers’ tales; and widely circulating translations of Eastern beast fables, what Srinivas Aravamudan calls “Enlightenment Orientalism” is examined in relation to a contemporary Ottoman representation of animals, the natural history and storytelling of Evliya Çelebi (1611–c. 1687). It also considers such texts as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Pope’s Windsor-Forest and Essay on Man, James Thomson’s The Seasons, and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. These texts present different versions of multiple species of animal kind as “peoples” in the sense of the Qur’anic verse, explicated by Sarra Tlili, that ‘”there is not an animal in the earth nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are people like you.”

In this chapter Chris Meckstroth explains how Immanuel Kant responded to the urgent political question of the 1780s and 1790s, how to understand the collective agency of the people or nation, with a novel conception of history. Kant thought we must believe progress is possible if we are to sustain a commitment to acting justly. To this end he re-worked arguments of Leibniz and Pope, who had tried to show that we live in the best of all possible worlds, thereby absolving God of responsibility for evil and saving the coherence of moral duty from scepticism. Kant, however, did not pitch his argument to the religious conscience of individuals. He aimed at political rulers whose authority derived from representing the general will of an entire people. His political thought focussed on principles a ruler must respect to count as that sort of representative. To these his philosophy of history added a concern for improvement over time, which he made plausible by drawing on a mechanism of unsocial sociability familiar in authors such as Pope. The result was a new, secular theodicy of progress favouring peace and republican politics, and designed to contain conflict in an age of democratic reform.

‘Cancel culture’ is a new variant of an old phenomenon. The growth or spread that we associate with the contagion of cancellation has ‘making’ at its heart. The initial judgment plants the germ in Inventive mode. Causing the judgment to increase in consequence and extent makes it grow in Creative mode. Giving the judgment the air of publicity makes something new of it in Productive and co-Productive mode. Making a mistake triggers a whole series of making processes, and our language reflects this. The dominance of ‘making’ language in relation to individual errors and collective responses to those errors indicates that in social contexts an individual’s fracture of the social fabric is more than made up for by the fabricating impulses of society at large. The clustering of criticism operates in this sense almost like the cells of a body that rush to heal cuts in skin and breakages of bone – sometimes leaving the re-created tissue stronger than it was to begin with. On the other hand, where judgments are made hypocritically, too quickly, or with an inadequate grasp of the materials, the Product can be as shoddy as the original infraction.

From 1809 to 1816 Byron used his own life experiences, not least their failures and spectacular self-deceptions, to draw up an insidious contract with a readership of secret sharers. Byron learned from Pope how to fashion an array of disturbing verse practices – implicitly addressed to a social order of “The mad, the bad, the useless, and the base” – that called readers to demanding acts of attention and self-attention. The poetry of 1809–1816 unfolds a wide range of “perversifications” to expose the airbrushed language of a canting world, with The Siege of Corinth being the culminating poetic act of dark revelation.

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets are a classic not only of literary criticism but of biography as well. Originally intended as brief prefaces in an anthology of fifty-eight poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they increased in scope as Johnson worked on them, and as one commentator has said, they became “a book of wisdom and experience … a commentary on human destiny.” The lives of Milton, Swift, Dryden, and Pope are really books in their own right, and the earlier Life of Savage is a deeply felt account of someone Johnson knew well in his youth. He made good use of such documentary material as he was able to obtain, and for recent poets was able to draw upon his own memory of telling anecdotes. Above all, the Lives explore the range of human achievement, its failures and also its triumphs.

The small size of old coins and medals attracted the attention of collectors as well as antiquaries throughout the long eighteenth century. Whereas the metallic substance of numismatic objects often provoked narratives of moral decline and decay, the objects’ smallness proved to be a means of reinvigorating the influence they may have exerted on the Enlightenment’s historical imagination. This chapter pays particular attention to the emphasis John Evelyn placed on the smallness of old coins and medals in his influential treatise, Numismata (1697). For Evelyn, the smallness of numismatic objects ensured their historical preservation and enhanced their collectability as well as their usefulness as metaphors of mind, aides-mémoires, and didactic devices. Accordingly, coins’ and medals’ smallness also corresponded to the power they had to circulate and accumulate. The kinds of scale produced by the vast quantities of small numismatic objects that had amassed throughout history stands as a refrain throughout Evelyn’s Numismata, which transforms numismatic objects’ smallness and innumerability into long and far-reaching logics of association.

Satire is often thought to differ in spirit or function from libel, defamation, gossip, and scandal. Many of the traditional ways scholars have defined satire – as a serious, high-minded mode focused on moral reform – enforce this distinction: the more frivolous and gossipy a satire is, the less it appears to be satire. This essay considers Lady Anne Hamilton’s satire, The Epics of the Ton; or, The Glories of the Great World (1807), a poem that challenges the traditional distinction between satire and gossip. Rare among satires in conceding its reliance on gossip, Hamilton’s poem surveys the sexual misdeeds of London’s fashionable classes, cloaking the identities of the targets. In presenting satire as a mode of printed gossip, Epics confounds the usual gender associations of satire. The poem contests the view, since John Dryden at least, of satire as a public, “manly” mode far removed from the furtive, gossipy genres associated with women, such as secret history and roman à clef. Hamilton uses the cloaked identities in her poem to replicate the play of gossip, where one scandalous tale ensnares many victims. By inviting identification of targets, Hamilton entraps readers into creating the gossip that is supposedly antithetical to satire.

Eighteenth-century women writers excelled in the formal satiric style associated by contemporaries with the Roman poet Horace. While formal verse satire was especially fashionable in mid-century, two accomplished poets illustrate the rise and decline of this phenomenon. Anne Finch (1661–1720), writing at the beginning of the satiric vogue, professed to hate satire but incorporated corrective criticism into many poems; she wrote only one formal verse satire and kept it in manuscript. Anna Seward (1742–1809), who identified herself as a poet of sensibility, wrote satirically in prose but rarely produced formal satiric verse. Like Finch, Seward kept her sole formal satiric poem in manuscript until authorizing its posthumous publication. Finch exemplifies how a woman might hesitate to write in the Roman style because Restoration satire was a “masculine” poetic form associated with classical education, public affairs, and personal invective. Seward illustrates why a late-century poet might have moved away from formal verse satire despite a predilection for its tone and purpose. Both poets show how women readily adapted the poetic fashions of their lifetimes to suit their satiric purposes.

Mary Evelyn’s Mundus Muliebris: Or, the Ladies Dressing Room Unlock’d, and her Toilette Spread was written before 1685 and published anonymously in 1690. The poem, accompanied by a preface and a dictionary of “hard and foreign names, and Terms of the Art Cosmetick,” aroused enough interest to require a second issue and a second edition within a year, followed by yet another edition in 1700. Significant textual evidence supports the claim that later male satirists borrowed without acknowledgement from her work. Further, significant evidence from the Evelyn family papers supports the claim that the teenage author, eulogized by her father John Evelyn as exceptional in her piety, demurred from his angelic portrayal. Her published poem about an imaginary dressing room, in combination with unpublished documents found in her actual dressing room, and in contrast to male-authored works that borrowed from her, establishes a perspective on her single but significant contribution to the history of women and satire. Mundus Muliebris ridicules the marriage marketplace and its effects on women’s bodies and minds. Exposed to a prospective husband, the dressing room’s lavish space documents women’s involvement in that marketplace, in all its glittering, dehumanizing, disturbing, and at times disgusting detail.

This chapter examines the double vision of hope, sacred and profane, epitomized in English literature by the jointly authored poem, “On Hope,” in which Cowley’s satire on worldly wishes is interlaced with Richard Crashaw’s encomium on religious hope. Yet religious hope is de-centered in the Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Milton, in Paradise Lost, shies away from hope as a theological virtue, seeing it tied to ambition and original sin. Hobbes, focused on things seen rather than unseen, treats worldly hope as a necessary part of human motivation and the reason, along with fear, for the strictures of civil authority. Hobbes’s naturalism tinges subsequent Christian writers, including Addison, Pope, and Johnson, who alternately satirize worldly hopes and treat them as inevitable and consolatory. In the French Revolutionary era there arises a new, properly political hope, aimed at alleviating or eliminating the structural conditions of poverty via democratic-representative activity. Hope as an anodyne for poverty, and for slavery, is questioned by laborer poets and the former slave and anti-slavery polemicist, Olaudah Equiano.

The book’s final chapter, on the work of Phyllis Wheatley, considers the aesthetics and politics of imitation. Wheatley’s poems both enact and challenge assimilation, by performing a form of Christian whiteness and decorum through acts of imitation for which she has been repeatedly criticised by contemporary readers. But notes of resistance can be heard in her images of chains, oceanic voyages and flight from earthly constraint. Wheatley’s poems transform constraint into ornament, but in a way that ironises her own experiences of capture and enslavement. This introduces a productive incompatibility between the prevailing aesthetic and the experience of bondage that must be overcome if the poem can be written. The chapter argues against contemporary readings of Wheatley as only a ‘sickly little black girl’, for whom whiteness itself was a constraint, and shows how she manages with limited means to particularise dominant poetic traditions to her own experience of enslavement and the Middle Passage.

This essay aims to show that medicine had a deep and dynamic relationship with poetry in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. It uses Dr John Arbuthnot’s poetry to demonstrate how profoundly medical theories affected the idea of the human, and goes on analyse Alexander Pope’s ‘Cave of Spleen’ in The Rape of the Lock to demonstrate the complex effects medical theories and other discourses, including folklore and religion, create in a canonical, and highly gendered, poem of the early period. The essay describes the main medical theories of this ‘long’ century (humouralism, mechanism and (al)chemistry, the nerves and sensibility, vitalism and Brunonianism) and their uneven evolution, and analyses their effects on a variety of poets, including Anne Finch, Mark Akenside, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, and Percy Shelley. It also focuses on the ‘regimen’ poetry of physician-poets Edward Baynard and John Armstrong, arguing that all kinds of discourses are bound up with both poetry and medicine, and that poetry, even of the didactic kind, is not reducible to medical discourse, and is capable of intervening in and shaping medical debates and medical knowledge.

Eighteenth-century British culture witnessed the ascendance of the ideology of proper human form, a belief system interlinking concepts of the beautiful, the natural, and the good with proper bodily configuration. The relatively new discourses of physics, biology, and aesthetics, and the re-emergence of the ancient pseudo-science of physiognomy, contributed to the formation of this ideology. Many of the period’s literary texts endorsed and/or critiqued social expectations of the beautiful and the natural, as these established the popular assumption that a well-shaped and good-looking body instantiated the proper human form. This assumption in turn associated proper form with high moral standards, the possession of which determined an individual’s social respectability and acceptance. Such physiognomic thinking also equated deformity with depravity. However, authors such as Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Sarah Scott, each in their own way, exposed the complexities and contradictions inherent in such reasoning. Moreover, the novel – emerging as a genre during this century – assumed an important role by becoming a vehicle by which the culture of sensibility softened and appropriated certain aspects of the ideology of form by recasting defective and deformed characters as objects of pity and charity.

Begins by examining the career of the publisher Thomas Pavier in order to provide context for a puzzling collection of texts that he issued in 1619. The collection would seem to be the first attempt to offer the public a 'selected works' of Shakespeare, though, in fact, some of the plays included have only a tenuous connection to the playwright. The logistics of the project are considered, as well as the various arguments for why it appears to have been undertaken in a rather clandestine fashion. The chapter then moves on to consider the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, the 'First Folio', published in 1623. The volume is viewed within the context of the overarching career of Edward Blount, its primary investor. The progression of the volume through the printshop of William and Isaac Jaggard is tracked, drawing on the seminal work of Charlton Hinman, who made extensive use of the collection of First Folios established by Emily and Henry Clay Folger. The subsequent set of folio editions issued between 1632 and 1700 is also discussed.

By mid-century, novel readers began to expect a printed framework for reading prose narrative consisting of cues such as page numbers, catchwords, chapter divisions and notes. This chapter tells the backstory of this navigational framework of the eighteenth-century novel that Sterne disrupts, before analysing his experimentation with mise en page. This study of Sterne’s manipulation of seemingly untouchable conventions of the printed page, such as pagination and catchwords, complements an approach to his more widely recognised interference with footnotes and chapters, and reveals the full extent of Sterne’s pioneering disruption of the format of the eighteenth-century book. I argue that Sterne’s innovations with footnotes, catchwords, chapters and pagination combine aspects of Scriblerian satire with more recent but perhaps lesser-known interventions in the codex by Thomas Amory in John Buncle (1756). Unlike Swift and Pope, however, and like Amory, Sterne deploys footnotes in the first edition of Tristram Shandy, encouraging the reader to approach at once all sections of the page in search of meaning and raising questions about literary authority from the outset.

This chapter builds on the framework and context established in Chapter 1, which in many ways shaped the political experience of Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). It provides a revisionist interpretation by demonstrating that, rather than an anti-party writer, Bolingbroke is best understood as the promoter of a very specific party, a systematic parliamentary opposition in resistance to what he perceived to be a Court Whig faction in power. Drawing on all of Bolingbroke’s well-known works, as well as his lesser-known journalism and unpublished sources, the chapter shows how most of his writings were calculated to legitimise opposition in the shape of a specific kind of political party: the Country party.

After his return to Ireland, Swift mixed with brash younger clerics such as Thomas Sheridan and Patrick Delany. Daniel Jackson’s large nose proved to be the unlikely source of profound ekphrastic pieces written by the group. Jovial bagatelles aside, ‘To Mr Delany’ displays a mid-career poet querying his craft. In ‘The Progress of Poetry’ urban hacks and farmer’s geese alike have grown fat and shrill. ‘Advice to the Grub-Street Verse-Writers’ ironically advises how modern hacks might trick a real poet – Pope – into writing original works into the margins of their books. Swift continued to rework British and Irish georgic and pastoral poetry with extraordinary inventiveness in the 1720s, whether in drolly dreary hospitality poems or pseudo-prophecy verses in the voice of St Patrick himself. Swift found new ways to insult his friends, including his hostess Lady Anne Acheson (‘The Journal of a Modern Lady’, ‘Death and Daphne’) and Matthew Pilkington (‘Directions for a Birth-Day Song’), as well as emerging poets for whom he had little taste. Such insults were couched within the unlikely genres with which he engaged, from the Ovidian courtship tale to the royal ode.