This essay considers how Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) assesses the function and limits of ‘ideas’ in two ways: by focusing on how ideas (plural) can be reduced, through the operations of power, to an idea (singular); and by investigating how people can be turned into abstractions through the work of ideology. Attending throughout to the form of Orwell’s most famous novel, the essay positions Nineteen Eighty-Four in relation to Wyndham Lewis’s critique of Orwell in The Writer and the Absolute (1952); traces the origins of Orwell’s account of power and truth to his experiences in the Spanish Civil War; and compares Orwell’s writing with the work of H. G. Wells, a key precursor. The essay concludes with some reflections on Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ambiguous ending and on the ingenious yet problematic critical strategies through which a tincture of hope is discovered in this bleakest of bleak satires.

Samuel Butler sharply divides critics, some seeing him as a relativist and thus a precursor of modernism, others as a purveyor of outdated scientific and philosophical dogma. This essay situates him as a transitional figure, straddling modern and Victorian paradigms in the tradition of the novel of ideas. Butler’s relativistic tendencies emerge through distinctive formal techniques, his chief influence on the modern novel: enigmatic use of satire; rapid, dissonant tonal shifts; defamiliarization of commonplace ideas; and fierce iconoclasm – techniques that fuel his radical questioning both of rationality and of ideas themselves. But Butler also affirmed common sense, instinct, and faith – in opposition to rationality – by conceiving them in Lamarckian evolutionary terms: that is, as repositories of intellectual choices made over the course of millennia and preserved in collective unconscious memory. Butler thus believed that ideas always fall short of truth, even as they facilitate an open-ended, interminable progress toward it.

The fourth chapter introduces several ‘personal voices’, immediately complicating our understanding of how personally to take them: the authors discussed here seem to offer us an unmitigated look at their inner lives, but Latin literature does not, for the most part, work like that. Through discussions of Lucilius, in-depth treatment of Catullus, and exploration of the letters of Cicero, we show the public nature even of what seems most personal.

This chapter investigates the reception of Lucian in Voltaire’s works and Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali. I argue that Lucian’s contamination of codified genres, especially clear in his Prometheus es in verbis, into a new satirical genre provided the two modern authors with a useful tool to innovate the literary conventions of their times and to create a hybrid, polemical, humorous prose – a previously uncanonised form of philosophical critique. Voltaire is influenced, directly and indirectly, by Lucian not only in his dialogues, but also in the creation of his conte philosophique as a form of mélange and in the use of defamiliarising devices such as cosmic travel and the dialogue of the dead. In Leopardi’s works, where Lucian is the most present ancient author and his influence is openly acknowledged, the imitation of Lucian is clearly part of a global effort by Leopardi to reform Italian culture and its literary conventions. Nevertheless, together with the problematic status of Lucian, the canonical status and literary reception of Voltaire and Leopardi in their national cultures helped eclipse Lucian’s model, as the two modern authors took his place in exerting their influence, while absorbing and innovating on Lucian’s hybridised writing.

The ninth chapter finishes what was started in the fourth, covering personal poetry of the Augustan period. It begins with Vergil’s Eclogues, first explaining why.The majority of the chapter focuses on the varied works of Horace, his long career, and his relationship with power. It ends with Ovid’s exile poetry, which is the last literature of the republic.

As a temporal form, irony directs narrative toward self-critique at the scale of both the individual narrator’s personal memory and the nation’s or empire’s cultural heritage. Chapter 4 parses the threefold irony in William Thackeray’s travel writing, which critiques heritage discourse in contemporary British engagements with Greece. It then analyzes Thomas Hardy’s poem “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” which scales up the irony and the critique as it looks back from the early twentieth century to the nineteenth-century acquisition of Lord Elgin’s collection. The result of the universalism that accumulates ancient Greek antiquities in the British Museum, Hardy shows, is not preservation but dislocation and tragedy – a disillusionment that threatens the stability of British heritage discourse.

Chapter Nine explores Rogers’ humor, which was the common denominator in his wide-ranging endeavors as a public figure . It argues that he was the heir of a homespun, cracker-box tradition of comic commentary dating back to Benjamin Franklin and continuing through Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, Mr. Dooley, and Mark Twain. Rogers presented a comic persona composed of common sense, a puncturing of pretense and pomposity, and a head-shaking, chuckling exposure of the absurdities of modern values and traditional prejudices alike. He did not tell jokes but offered witty reflections on the conundrums of modern life, appearing as a rustic sage cracking wise at the local general store. Moreover, while Rogers took pains to present his humor as spontaneous, it was actually meticulously prepared. Ultimately, by joking about the tensions, incongruities, and dislocations of a rapidly modernizing society, he helped Americans come to terms with enormous changes affecting their lives. Their rapturous reception made Rogers the leading American humorist of early twentieth-century America.

This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

From the outset, food and the essay have shared a kinship, given that one of the original senses of the word ‘essai’ meant the ritual of tasting the French king’s food and drink. From metaphor to content, food has permeated the essay form; in turn, the essay became the vehicle for the emerging field of gastronomy. This chapter constellates several important moments of interaction between literal and literary taste, consumption and appetite, cultural criticism and culinary knowledge in essays by Michel Montaigne, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, William Kitchiner, Launcelot Sturgeon, Charles Lamb, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell. As cosmopolitan practices of discretionary dining became more widespread, these gastronomic essayistic writers often satirised the burgeoning bourgeoisie and their cultural milieu. Given its flexibility, the essay remains paramount to food writing, in its many forms and genres.

This chapter makes an argument that two of the most successful Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens and R. S. Surtees, those new men of the 1830s (Surtees was twenty-five when he begins Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities; Dickens twenty-four at the conception of the Pickwick Papers), were both marked deeply by what came before in the late Georgian period’s popular-cultural print culture, notably its sporting comicalities. Though they took that tradition in very different paths – Surtees stayed in the sporting groove throughout his career, while Dickens very soon abandoned it – both were fashioned by it, and both initially positioned themselves within it. Both joined the key post-Napoleonic tradition of picaresque evident in the work of ‘Cockney’ humourists, in the fiction of Pierce Egan, and, indeed, in the poetry of Lord Byron. The chapter reads both men’s early writing against the wider context of late-Georgian print culture, addressing their relationship to the Romantic-era popular-cultural literary forms that inform their early work. The chapter brings to light this vibrant culture, focussing on Dickens and Surtees but also addressing such figures as Pierce Egan, Robert Seymour, and Thomas Hood.

Swift is one of the best-known and most highly venerated satirists in the English language. But the precise forms of his satires often seem to defy categorisation. This chapter explores how Swift used, appropriated, and invented his own satirical norms. The first section examines how he parodied form, both in his mock versions of specific genres such as pastoral and elegy, and also in his treatment of the printed book, in the parodic paratexts of A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In his mock-treatises, Swift repeatedly yokes unthinkable subjects to refined style. The second section of the chapter shows how Swift uses the same technique in the Travels to defamiliarise the world. The third and final section focuses on Swift’s verse, where his mixed forms and intertwined rhymes and rhythms provide a commentary on the crumbling world he portrays.

Swift was not the first satirist and parodist to explore science and its texts and technologies, but his works demonstrated an acute sophistication in how they assimilated and imaginatively transformed natural knowledge, as often a vehicle as a target of satire, and with a recognition of science’s increasing cultural power. The first section of this chapter reconstructs the sources and systems that influenced Swift’s allusions to contemporary science, and how they shaped his early prose. The second section looks at the influence of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions and other scientific and ethnographic writings on the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels.

This chapter explores how Swift used hoax and parody in his satirical writings and pamphlets. An opening section looks at the five short pamphlets that constituted the 1708–9 Bickerstaff hoax, in which Swift predicted and then falsely confirmed the death of the Whig astrologer John Partridge. The second section shifts the focus on the Drapier’s Letters, where Swift similarly created a mock-author, albeit to very different ends. The chapter argues that such vividly realised personae are characteristic of Swift’s writing and sometimes result in works that are neither straightforward hoax nor parody.

Much of Swift’s work is informed by an interest in food, together with a sharp awareness of how it might be spoiled, adulterated, or withheld. This chapter investigates the degree to which Swift uses food as an index of honesty and generosity. In his writings, continental cookery is associated with moral and aesthetic perversity of a distinctly modern flavour. The chapter shows that, in both A Tale of a Tub and A Modest Proposal, the common sense associated with English Protestantism (and emblematised by pudding and roast meat) is pitted against modern, continental slipperiness (emblematised by food whose true identity is suppressed or withheld).

This chapter considers Swift’s uses of philosophy – his use of the word, and the uses to which philosophy can be put, good and (mostly) bad. It looks at Swift’s uses of the term ‘philosophy’, its cognates, and some related terms (‘speculative’), and at his references to philosophers, to suggest he can use the term in a restricted positive sense as well as a more definitively negative sense, particularly in A Tale of a Tub, where hubristic claims towards systematic description characterise philosophical speculation allied with natural philosophy. The chapter concludes with a reading of Gulliver’s Travels, suggesting that Swift’s capacity for fable and invention enabled him to practise a literary philosophy.

The chapter is dedicated to the active career of the eighteenth-century printseller Jane Hogarth, widow of the painter and engraver William Hogarth. It looks at the means Jane employed to face competitors, namely by turning to copyright law in an effort to protect her property. In doing so, she set an important precedent in copyright law, whereby she obtained a special provision that would grant her the exclusive right to sell her husband’s prints. Letters, newspaper advertisements, legal reports, and even satirical prints by contemporaries offer insight into Jane’s commercial dealings, her powers of persuasion and the impact of her achievements.

In the early stages of Thomas Rowlandson’s printmaking career, at least ninety of his prints are known to have been issued by women publishers, including Elizabeth Jackson, Hannah Humphrey, Elizabeth d’Achery, and Eleanor Lay. Of these, Jackson in particular had an important role in establishing his printmaking. The full extent of her production, for a long time obscured by the later sale of her plates to Samuel Fores, is only just emerging; several recent new discoveries suggest an even wider involvement by her in Rowlandson’s early non-satirical prints. While there is relatively little to be found in the historical record about these enterprising women, evidence from the prints shows the women were successful entrepreneurs, commissioning their own caricature output and collaborating commercially with other printsellers. Another figure of particular interest is Rowlandson’s younger sister Elizabeth, who, after her separation from her husband, the artist Samuel Howitt, also operated as a printseller for over twenty years. She was also an artist and even made a few caricature prints herself after her brother’s drawings, some of which are identified here for the first time.

This chapter traces the career of the printseller Hannah Humphrey and her long association with James Gillray, with whom she lived in some form of partnership from 1794 until Gillray’s death in 1815. Brought up in a shop that sold shells and other curiosities, Hannah’s brother George became the leading commercial expert on shells while her sister Elizabeth married the world’s most important dealer in minerals. As for Hannah, by the time she was twenty-eight, she ran a shop selling prints, and, by the time she died, was the best-known caricature printseller in London. She and her brother William worked with Gillray from the outset of his career, but Hannah ultimately became Gillray’s sole publisher and even a collaborator who likely took part in the creative process as well as the business.