Adam Rounce

Stuarts without End: Wilkes, Churchill, and Anti-Scottishness

Two separate attempts by Scotsmen on the life of John Wilkes in 1763 suggest the general level of antipathy the Scots felt toward Wilkes and indicate the turbulent nature of an increasingly bitter political quarrel. Yet, as Linda Colley remarks, evidence of such antipathy is “usually omitted from English history books, just as Wilkes’s forthright hostility to Scotland is often marginalised as a regrettable vulgarity of no real relevance to the movement that gathered around him.” The Scottish were correct “in viewing Wilkes as the personifi cation of arrogant English chauvinism,” and his cause as “a celebration of a certain kind of Englishness.”1 The 1762 – 63 campaign, in the North Briton and elsewhere by Wilkes and his friend the poet Charles Churchill, against the administration of John Stuart, Earl of Bute, has indeed often earned a place in “English history books,” but more for its end than its means. That end was a debate on personal liberty and freedom of speech that was to prove of huge symbolic importance in the history of British politics. By 1764 Wilkes was outlawed from Britain (he stayed in exile in France until 1768) and had been expelled from the House of Commons. In November 1763, the publication the North Briton, 45 had been voted a seditious libel against George III in the Commons, and the House of Lords had simultaneously voted that Wilkes’s parody “An Essay on Woman” was blasphemous and obscene.

‘Unassisted Hill’: Churchill’s Satire and the Fate of the Virtuoso

The references to Sir John Hill by Charles Churchill during his short poetic career (from 1761–64) are characteristic of that outspoken satirist: in the The Rosciad (1761), Churchill criticises Hill for being ‘Actor, Inspector, Doctor, Botanist’, with the strong implication that to attempt to cover so many areas of expertise is to be master of none. Later references show more direct antagonism born of the campaign by Wilkes and Churchill against the ministry of Hill’s patron, John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute. In The Prophecy of Famine (1763), Hill is one of many useful idiots supported by Bute—and, it is implied, a plagiarist. In the final part of Churchill’s long, Shandean poem, The Ghost (1763), Hill is akin to a quack doctor. Churchill’s shifting depictions of Hill, from pretentious all-rounder to irredeemable charlatan open up the central argument of this essay: Hill is presented as amateur and dilettante, suggesting Churchill’s adherence to a developing process of professionalism, and specialisation, both cultural and scientific. The essay will look at Churchill’s barbs as ways in which a public life such as Hill’s could be perceived in the mid-eighteenth century, part of a larger narrative where well-known figures were characterised by over-extended ambitions and consistent mediocrity. Churchill’s criticism of the allegedly meretricious nature of his various talents reflects how a certain sort of multi-faceted career was increasingly defined: not to the benefit of figures such as Hill.

The Digital Miscellanies Index and the Canon

This article looks at the reception of a number of seventeenth-century poets in the eighteenth century, using the materials in the Digital Miscellanies Index (DMI). It considers whether the existing reception narrative of the relative neglect of John Donne and George Herbert during the century is borne out by the evidence, and also looks at the ways in which the posthumous careers of Abraham Cowley and Sir Richard Blackmore are affected by posterity, according to the patterns of their reprinting in miscellany culture.

Fame and failure in The Spectator

This paper explores the peculiar contradictions between the content of The Spectator and its ostensible ideas. These include the narratorial stress on solitude and independence of thought, and its contrast with the intended sociability and community of the journals dissemination; and the difference between the intangible value of knowledge and wisdom gained for its own sake, and the Whiggish enthusiasm for trade, wealth-creation or fame. Moreover, its most popular character, Sir Roger de Coverley, is both venerated for representing a nostalgic form of pastoral, and gently satirized as a symbol of a way of life that is necessarily in the past. All these distinctions between the general ideology of the journal and its actual message are a useful way of both understanding its appeal, and the specific nature of its cultural and historical politics.

Cowper’s Ends

The last decade of William Cowper’s life and work has proved an elusive one for criticism; the years immediately before his death in 1800, and the diverse writings they produced, give some indications of the complexity of understanding Cowper’s place in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poetry. It was once possible to see Cowper as singularly antithetical to the emergent Romantic poetics of the 1790s. In such readings, the fact of his demise coming in the first year of the new century was thus explained as something of an accident; what is to be done with this odd figure who strays into a later world to which he does not properly belong? This is the old model of Cowper as the sentimentalized “stricken deer,” more “Augustan” than Romantic, of David Cecil’s account.1 Perceptions of Cowper in the last thirty years have suggested a more involved, politicized, contemporary figure, and have deliberately avoided the older model of defining the nature of his work by periodization, or by over-rigid attention to biography. Vincent Newey, in the most comprehensive modern account of the poetry, makes the important claim that “we should always be wary of casting Cowper simply as a figure of despair and as a refugee from despair.”2 By resisting such biographical fallacies, Newey finds new areas of interpretation in the poetry. Yet all critical accounts have to deal with Cowper’s undoubted masterpiece, The Task, being completed by 1785, leaving the final fifteen years of his life as something of an interpretative puzzle, given a desire for a sense of artistic cohesion.