Ian McGowan

Jonathan Swift 1667–1745

Swift, a cousin of Dryden, was born in Dublin, and educated beside Congreve at Kilkenny School and Trinity College, Dublin. A period as secretary to the statesman-author Sir William Temple having failed to win him advancement, he was ordained in Ireland (1694). Back in Temple’s household at Moor Park, he wrote The Battle of the Books (1697), part of the debate on the superiority of ancient or modern learning, and A Tale of a Tub (1696; both works published 1704), a combination of religious allegory and intellectual virtuosity. Here too he first met ‘Stella’, Esther Johnson, recipient of many of his writings, with whom his relationship remains unclear. After Temple’s death, he returned to Ireland, receiving church offices, but visiting London often, and writing pamphlets of varying irony (An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 1708). The Whigs’ favouring dissenters led to his support of the Tories, on whose side he wrote political works (The Conduct of the Allies, 1711; The Public Spirit of the Whigs, 1714). He was a leading member of the Scriblerus Club with Pope (see p. 205).

William Cowper 1731–1800

The son of a Hertfordshire clergyman, Cowper attended Westminster School alongside the future satirist-cleric, Charles Churchill. Always mentally delicate, he attempted suicide when involved in a dispute over a public appointment: a religious melancholy which led to belief in his own damnation was stayed by a hope of salvation arising from evangelical Christianity. In 1765, he found protection with a clergyman, Mr Unwin, and his wife, Cowper’s spiritual companion until 1796. Further mental attacks and another suicide attempt left him convinced of his own rejection by God. With the evangelical clergyman, John Newton, he had written the Olney Hymns (1779), including ‘God moves in a mysterious way’. Collections of poems in 1782 and 1785 produced satires and the comic tale John Gilpin; he also translated Homer (1791). His long blank verse poem The Task (1785) developed from a work of mental relief into tender description and meditation centred on his quiet rural life. In his writings, charm and humanity contrast sadly with images of destruction or isolation associated with his deeper fears (‘The Castaway’, 1799).

George Crabbe 1754–1832

Crabbe was born in the fishing-village of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, about which he often wrote. After practising there as a doctor, he sought a poetic career in London, but was only rescued from destitution by Edmund Burke, who encouraged him to take orders and provide himself with security (he was not a very active clergyman). Burke helped him publish The Library (1781), and introduced him to members of The Club, notably Johnson, who gave advice on The Village (1783), a grimly realistic antidote to conventional pastoral poetry, which made his name. Following his marriage, he published little for twenty years, although he wrote and burned three novels. The Parish Register (1807) was followed by The Borough (1810), a descriptive and narrative poem based on Aldeburgh, including the tale of ‘Peter Grimes’, used for Benjamin Britten’s opera. Tales in Verse (1812) and Tales of the Hall (1819) were further collections of narratives. Although he wrote well into the Romantic period, Crabbe usually persisted with the heroic couplets of an earlier age, and offered unadorned views of nature: his conservatism found sympathetic responses in such admirers of the ‘Augustan’ manner as Byron and Jane Austen.

Alexander Pope 1688–1744

After a retired childhood in Windsor Forest, under the double disability of retarded growth from chronic ill-health and of Catholic parentage in an age of civil penalties, Pope showed precocious talent in his Pastorals (1709) and Essay on Criticism (1711); The Rape of the Lock (1714, enlarged version) placed him at the forefront of contemporary poetry, while he became associated with the wits and satirists of the Scriblerus Club (Gay, Swift, Arbuthnot). His translation of Homer’s Iliad (1715–20) established his financial security, permitting his long residence at Twickenham (then well outside London), where by the river he built up his famous garden and grotto, which show his interest in the visual arts. Despite his friendships with literary men, and with Martha Blount and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (see p. 256), his growing fame and his collaboration in the Scriblerian ridicule of bad writing increasingly involved him in literary warfare: Theobald criticised his edition of Shakespeare and was enthroned in The Dunciad (1728; revised in four books with C. Cibber as hero, 1743). Partly under the influence of the former politician Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Pope produced An Essay on Man (1733–4); the four Moral Essays (1731–5) are epistles to friends on appropriate topics. Also in the 1730s, he cultivated Imitations of Horace, in which he fruitfully exploits the parallels between his situation and the Roman satirist’s, to criticise the decay of morality and literature, opposing the life of retired contemplation and friendship to the money-grubbing and corruption of business and public life: the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot stands as the prologue to these satires.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The son of an Irish actor, Sheridan was educated in England. His elopement with the singer, Eliza Linley, whom he eventually married, and duels with another suitor, provided hints for The Rivals, a great success at Covent Garden in 1775. It was followed by St Patrick’s Day and The Duenna. He bought Garrick’s half-share in the Drury Lane Theatre, which he ran, eventually as sole owner. The School for Scandal (1777) is one of the century’s great comedies, and made a fortune; the burlesque rehearsal-play The Critic (1779) shows his awareness of theatrical absurdities. He became a member of Johnson’s Club. His later career was mainly devoted to politics: a supporter of Fox and friend of the future George IV, he held various government offices and was a spectacular parliamentary orator, leading the impeachment of Warren Hastings for corruption in India. Financial difficulties followed the demolition of Drury Lane and the burning-down of its successor (1809); his last years were spent mainly in poverty.

Colley Cibber 1671–1757

The son of a well-known sculptor, Cibber (pronounced ‘K’) became an actor and dramatist, best known for genteel sentimental comedy and a popular adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III. He was made Poet Laureate in 1743, in preference to many better writers, and was duly satirised by Pope, his old antagonist, as the epitome of literary dullness in the revised Dunciad of 1743. Insensitive and egocentric though he was, his Apology for his life (1740), an autobiography, is a valuable document of theatrical history, and often reveals a pleasant, common-sensical personality.

Robert Burns 1759–96

The son of a small farmer from Ayrshire, Burns spent much of his life trying to solve his financial problems by working the land, finally becoming an excise officer in 1789. As a youth, he was well aware of classic English poetry as well as the Scottish vernacular tradition of Ramsay and Fergusson, and in his own work the extent of dialect usage varies greatly. His first collection of Poems, which appeared at Kilmarnock in 1786, led to his Konisation by intellectual Edinburgh society, which chose to regard him inaccurately as a ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’. (His unorthodox way of life and entanglements with women long distorted views of his career as a whole.) Burns’s interest in the native tradition led him to collect and write many poems for The Scots Musical Museum, such as ‘O my luve’s like a red, red rose’. An early supporter of the French Revolution, Burns has remained popular for his pleas for human equality and his celebration of humble worth. More solemn works like The Cotter’s Saturday Night are complemented by comic narrative in Tarn o’Shanter and vigorous satire of complacency in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’.

Daniel Defoe 1660–1731

The son of a London butcher of dissenting views called Foe, Defoe travelled widely on the Continent before becoming a hosiery merchant. He supported the accession of William III in verse (The True-Born Englishman, 1701) but suffered in prison and the pillory for the misreading of his ironic The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702). After the failure of several business ventures, he travelled the country as a Tory secret agent (1703–14), and later put his observations to good use in his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6). He wrote and edited many hundreds of books and pamphlets on social, religious and economic questions (The Complete English Tradesman, 1726); these show more learning and a wider range of styles than might be suspected by casual readers of the novels on which his fame depends: Robinson Crusoe (1719); Moll Flanders (1722); A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Roxana (1724). Often regarded as the first real novelist, he presents fictional material with the appearance of authenticity through his detailed, realistic style, which creates a solid world.

Edward Gibbon 1737–94

The Memoirs or Autobiography pieced together from various drafts after Gibbon’s death are a major if selective source of information. A learned fourteen-year-old, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, which he found sunk in indolence and prejudice in his fourteen-month stay. An intellectual convert to Catholicism, he reconverted to Protestantism on being sent to Lausanne, where he formed a romantic attachment which his father persuaded him to break. His study of ancient and modern literature produced a French Essai on the topic (1761). Meanwhile he served as captain in the Hampshire Militia. On a visit to Rome in 1764, he decided to write the History of the Decline and Fall of the city, later extended to the empire. After years of research, he published his great work in six volumes, 1776–88. During much of this period he was an MP, and for several years a minor official, but he was never a prominent politician; in 1774 he became a member of Johnson’s Club; from 1783–93 he lived mainly in Switzerland. Gibbon’s vast learning and magisterial prose made the Decline and Fall the greatest English history, though its ironic, sceptical manner caused offence to many with its implications that Rome fell as much through Christianity as barbarian attack: his enlightenment belief is in the progress of a rational civilisation.

Adam Smith 1723–90

Smith was educated at Glasgow University and at Balliol College, Oxford. His academic and literary career, at the start of the Scottish Enlightenment’s leadership of Europe, shows the range and versatility of learned men of the period. Having lectured on rhetoric and belles-lettres, he became Professor of Logic and then Moral Philosophy (1752) at Glasgow, and published his Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759. Leaving his chair, he travelled as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch on the Continent, where he developed his interest in political economy, later given its fullest expression in his major work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). He wrote also on aesthetic topics, and was a member of Johnson’s Club. In Smith’s view, individual self-interests accumulate to the public benefit: here he demonstrates the value of the division of labour in an apparently simple manufacturing process.