THE AGE OF REASON (1650-1780)
The Cultural and Historic Background
This period is often referred to as the age of intellectual revolution – the phrase describes an emphasis on change of attitudes and beliefs. For centuries people had believed that natural phenomena were the result of God’s will (comets and eclipses, earthquakes and plagues were omens). After publication of I.Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica” the Nature appeared a system governed by laws which are simple in form, apply uniformly; everything, it seemed, could be expressed in mathematical language. The ideal was systematic, rational thought based upon empirical fact.
This period in English literature coincides with Restoration period; and a writer’s life during Restoration was not easy. He couldn’t yet make his living through the selling of his books – there were too few readers – so he needed an aristocratic patron. Secondly, the literary fashion was changing: Restoration readers were no longer interested in the complicated syntax and lofty themes of Elizabethian prose. A prose style required “ a close, naked, natural way of speaking”. Poetry shifted from the intensely personal subject matter and the complex imagery of Metaphysical poets to a poetry about public issues and frequently the new heroic couplet.
The Augustans.
The writers of the era of Queen Anne and George 1 styled themselves as Augustan Age, drawing a parallel between political and social stability of the Roman Empire under Caeser Augustus. They wrote epics, satires, elegies and tragedies and exercised great care in paralleling the form and content of their work with ‘the Ancients’.
Much of their prose, however, is written in the middle-class point of view. The bitter satire of Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’, the gentler moral persuasion of ‘The Spectator’, even Johnson’s defiant letter to Lord Chesterfield are all directed against aristocrats. Writers gradually turned from the demands of aristocratic patrons to the open market. The middle-class preferred to read about themselves, which resulted in a remarkable change of setting, characters and message. Much of Augustan literature is set in London, not some overseas counteries. The characters are no longer idealized – they are normal people, products of their social and economic sorroundings. The works have a strong didactic accent – there is a strong moralizing tendency reflecting the authors’ concern about causes of religion and virtue.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is considered father of the English novel and one of the greatest masters of realistic narrative long before Dreiser or Hemingway.
He was born Daniel Foe, probably in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, London. Both the date and the place of his birth are uncertain. His father, James Foe, though a member of the Butchers' Company was a tallow chandler. Daniel later added the aristocratic sounding "De" to his name and on occasion claimed descent from the family of De Beau Faux. His parents were Presbyterian dissenters. After leaving school and deciding not to become a dissenting minister, Defoe entered the world of business as a general merchant, dealing at different times in hosiery, general woollen goods, and wine. Though his ambitions were great and he bought both a country estate and a ship, he was rarely free from debt. In 1692 he was arrested for insolvency. His protests were loud, and he always defended unfortunate debtors, but there is evidence that his financial dealings were not always honest.
Following his release, he probably travelled in Europe and Scotland. Defoe's pamphleteering and political activities resulted in his arrest and placement in a pillory on July 31, 1703, principally on account of a pamphlet entitled "The Shortest Way with Dissenters", in which he satirised the High church Tories. The publication of his poem Hymn to the Pillory, however, caused his audience at the pillory to throw flowers instead of the customary harmful and noxious objects, and to drink to his health.
After his three days in the pillory Defoe went into Newgate Prison. Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, obtained his release in exchange for Defoe's co-operation as an intelligence agent in France.
For more than 25 years, Defoe earned his living writing for newspapers. He produced his own periodical, “The Review”, single-handedly for 9 years. At times he was secretly writing for the Whig Party in one paper and for the Tories in another. He is unique in the quantity and variety of his works. No fewer than 545 titles, ranging from satirical poems, political and religious pamphlets and volumes, works in economics and geography have been ascribed to Defoe.
Defoe's famous novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) written at the age of 59, tells of a man's shipwreck on a desert island and his subsequent adventures. The author may have based his narrative on the true story of the shipwreck of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk.
Defoe's next novel was Captain Singleton (1720), amazing for its portrayal of the redemptive power of one man's love for another: Quaker William's love turns Captain Singleton away from the murderous life of a pirate, and the two make a solemn vow to live as a male couple happily ever after in London, disguised as Greeks and never speaking English in public, with Singleton married to William's sister as a ruse.
Defoe wrote an account of the Great Plague of 1665: A Journal of the Plague Year. He also wrote Moll Flanders (1722), a first-person narration of the fall and eventual redemption of a lone woman in 17th century England. She appears as a whore, bigamist and thief, commits adultery and incest, yet manages to keep the reader's sympathy. Both this work and Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724) offer remarkable examples of the way in which Defoe seems to inhabit his fictional (yet "drawn from life") characters, not least in that they are women. There is a basic similarity in his characters: they are real persons determined to get ahead in life and gain financial security, then they repent their sins and lead a life of virtue. His characters, though, are rather static, and the psychological insight is limited.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is a politician and a Protestant Churchman who became a hero in Roman Catholic Ireland.
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, to an English mother. In 1682 he attended Trinity College, Dublin, and he moved to live with his mother, Abigail Erick, at Leicester. Soon afterwards an opening to work for Sir William Temple presented itself. In 1689 Swift went to live at Moor Park, Surrey, where he read to Temple, wrote for him, and kept his accounts. Growing into confidence with his employer, he "was often trusted with matters of great importance." Within three years of their acquaintance, Temple had introduced his secretary to William III, and sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial Parliaments.
By 1694 Swift had grown tired of his position, and finding that Temple, who valued his services, was slow in finding him preferment, he left Moor Park in order to carry out his resolve to go into the Church.
In May 1696 Temple induced Swift to return to Moor Park, where he was employed in preparing Temple's memoirs and correspondence for publication. During this time Swift wrote The Battle of the Books, which was, however, not published until 1704.
In the summer of 1699 Temple died. Swift was offered and accepted the post of secretary and chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices. As chaplain to Lord Berkeley, he spent much of his time in Dublin. When Lord Berkeley returned to England in April 1701, Swift, after taking his doctor's degree at Dublin, went with him, and soon afterwards published, anonymously, a political pamphlet, A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome.
Swift was politically active between 1707 and 1710. As a result he became more and more intimate with the Tory leaders and increasingly cool towards his older acquaintances.
Swift received the reward of his services to the Government the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin in April 1713. He was soon back again in the political strife in London in September.On the fall of the Tories at the death of Queen Anne, he retired to Ireland, not to return again for twelve years.
In 1723 Swift became engrossed in the Irish agitation for independence which led to the publication of the Drapier's Letters, and in 1726 he paid a long-deferred visit to London, taking with him the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels. Scholars are still trying to discover all the ways in which real people, institutions and policies are reflected in this novel.
In years to come he continued to produce pamphlets that reflected a growing misanthropy, epitomized by A Modest Proposal (1729), in which he "suggested" the Irish unburden themselves of their numerous children and break the cycle of poverty in the process, by selling them to the rich as food. It should be noted however, that this was not an actual proposal, but a satire of those who viewed people as simple statistics. Despite his irony, however, he showed many kindnesses to people who needed help. A Tale of the Tub, is another well known allegory: it is a story of three brothers arguing over their father’s last will, whish is actually a clever attack on certain religious beliefs.
There is no general agreement whether Swift was a misanthropist or a devout and courageous Christian. The Irish at least will never forget Swift for his concern about welfare of the nation and his efforts to protect the Irish from the English administration. Swift as depicted on a Banknote of the Central Bank of Ireland.
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) – a printer by profession, once he was asked to write a volume of model letters to be used on various occasions by ‘country readers’. While preparing the letters he hit upon the idea of pursuing the same story line from one letter to another. Basing himself on the real case of a serving maid whose virtue had been unsuccessfully attacked by an unscrupolous man, he started writing Pamela, his first epistolary novel, at the age of 50. Pamela describes "virtue" in an 18th-century way that is foreign to our times. Pamela Andrews is a young maidservant in a wealthy household. The son of the household, Mr B., conceives a passion for her and repeatedly schemes with his servants to have his way with her. She protects her virtue successfully and B., moved in her favour when he reads the journal she has been keeping in secret, is forced to propose to her if he is to have her.
The popularity of Pamela was mainly due to the effective technique of revealing the story through letters written by the protagonist. Because this was combined with the moralistic nature of the story, which made it acceptable for the century's rapidly growing middle class, the book became a publishing sensation. Nevertheless, many contemporary readers were shocked by the more graphic scenes and by some questionable behaviours of the characters; it was easy to regard Pamela, for example, as a scheming young woman trying to gain higher social status by making a nobleman marry her. Henry Fielding parodied Pamela twice: once anonymously using the same epistolary form in Shamela, and again with Joseph Andrews, which tells the story of Pamela's brother Joseph and his efforts to protect his virtue.
Like the two novels that followed Clarissa Harlowe (1747-1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753-1754), it was a great success with reading public.
Of the three, Clarissa has generally been the most highly regarded by critics; in it, Richardson uses the epistolary form with great effectiveness, creating characters that are psychologically convincing while reflecting on some of the most important moral questions of the 18th century. Sir Charles Grandison is Richardson's attempt to create a male model of virtue.
Many modern critics have found that he was less successful here, noting that Sir Charles is not a very interesting or sympathetic character and that his confident sense of virtue can be cloying to the modern reader. In addition, the plot is relatively less eventful and the moral lessons less ambiguous than in Clarissa. However, in its own time Sir Charles Grandison was again a success.
Set in a domestic middle-class environment, all the three novels proved immensely popular with the reading public and especially with women of leasure – a growing section of reading public. There is a heavy moralizing tendency within the novels; in his didactic concerns Richardson resembles Defoe, in the development of plot and psychological characterisation he represents a step forward, since there is a strong element of psychological analysis. In contrast to the majority of previous fiction, there is also individual development within the confines of the story: characters are far from static snd the reader is a priveleged witness of their sharply detailed evolution. The epistolary technique was largely a reflection of active letter-writing of the period and was later to be taken up by Rousseau and Goethe. Like ‘memoirs’ it is another example of fiction posing as truth to placate the demands of Puritanism.
Richardson was widely considered one of the most important novelists of his age, influencing writers such as Jane Austen, Goethe, and Rousseau.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754) wrote a History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, in which he did more than create a humorous adventure story. He skillfully incorporated the many twists of the plot into a unified structure, beginning each of the novel’s 18 books (chapters) with a brilliant and related essay. He filled the story with unforgettable characters whom he described in a sophisticated and lively style. These techniques greatly influenced later novelists, as did Fielding’s realistic, basically unsentimental attitude towards life. He ridiculed hypocrites and selfish people but avoided a preaching tone. His tongue-in-the-cheek irony makes Tom Jones an outstanding satire on society.
Early in his career, Fielding supported himself by writing plays; Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 attack the PM Robert Walpole. These satires helped to bring about the Licencing Act of 1737, which resulted in strict control and censorship of the literature and theatre. In 1748 Fielding became a Justice of Peace. Throughout his life, he fought for social and legal reforms, both as a writer and a magistrate.
Fielding’s narrative prose has a number of peculiarities:
1. The reader is never under illusion that he is reading anything but fiction, a work of art;
2. He described ‘not man but manners, not an individual but a species’ – there is certain typification of the character;
3. There is a variety of characters, drawn from all classes – which allowes for an extensive social panorama.
4. His chief novel is ‘an engineering masterpiece’ structurally;
5. Fielding is generous in his judgement of ordinary human weaknesses.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) – an Irish dramatist and politician. During his briaf writing career, he produced several sparkling comedies. In later life, he was a brilliant speaker in the British Parliament, a gifted orator. The School of Scandal, Sheridan’s finest play, is full of glittering wit; it exposes society people who love malicious gossip. It also contrasts a careless but kind young man, Charles Surface, with his scheming and selfish brother Joseph.
Brothers Joseph and Charles Surface, and their cousin Maria, are orphans in the care of their uncle, Sir Peter Teazle. Both brothers wish to marry Maria. Lady Sneerwell, a malicious gossip and founder of The School for Scandal, wants to marry Charles and spreads false rumours about an affair between Charles and Lady Teazle in an attempt to make Maria reject Charles. Meanwhile, Joseph is attempting to seduce Lady Teazle. The brothers have a rich uncle, Sir Oliver, whom they have never met, and who visits them both incognito to test their characters before deciding which of them shall inherit his fortune. He finds that Joseph is a sanctimonious hypocrite, and that Charles is a generous libertine, and prefers Charles.
In a farcical scene involving characters hiding behind furniture, Sir Peter learns of the plotting between Joseph and Lady Sneerwell, that the rumours about Charles and Lady Teazle are false, and that his wife is merely a victim of Joseph's flattery. He is therefore reconciled with his wife, and decides that Charles deserves to marry Maria. Lady Teazle, who has had a narrow escape from ruin, delivers an epilogue warning of the dangers of scandal-making.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744).
Pope directly addressed the major religious, political and intellectual problems of his time. He developed the heroic couplet beyond the achievement of any previous poet, and major poets after him used it less than those before, as he had decreased its usefulness for them.Pope also wrote the famous epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton:
"Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light."
to which Sir John Collings Squire later added the couplet
"It did not last: the devil, shouting 'Ho.
Let Einstein be' restored the status quo."
Pope had a friend and ally in Jonathan Swift. In about 1713, he formed the Scriblerus Club with Swift and other friends including John Gay. Pope's works were once considered part of the mental furniture of the well-educated person. One edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes no less than 212 quotations from Pope. Some, familiar even to those who may not know their source, are "A little learning is a dangerous thing" (from the Essay on Criticism); "To err is human, to forgive, divine" (ibid.); "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread" (ibid); and "The proper study of mankind is man" (Essay on Man). Pope's reputation declined in the 19th century, but has recovered substantially since then. Some poems, such as The Rape of the Lock, the moral essays, the imitations of Horace, and several epistles, are regarded as highly now as they have ever been, though others, such as the “Essay on Man”, have not endured very well, and the merits of two of the most important works, the Dunciad and the translation of the Iliad, are still disputed. The 19th century considered his diction artificial, his versification too regular, and his satires insufficiently humane.
It should, however be born in mind that the poet of early to mid XVIII century was a more skilled craftsman well-versed in his trade than an intuitive visionary. Every kind of poetic form – odes, pastorals, comedies, tragedies, satires and epics – was governed by rules and directions as to the kind of language, style, rhetoric and tone appropriate to the genre.
Pope’s translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad were in part responsible for the kind of diction which was to become the norm; Latinate constructions and an elevated vocabulary predominated, and rather than describe an object in more prosaic terms, poets resorted to periphrasis: fish became finny tribes and birds – featherd choirs. Personification was another commonly employed device. A number of adjectives ending in –y also plagued diction of the time. Pentameter couplet was most common: it often contained within its two lines a complete statement; antithesis, and parallelism were often instrumental in creating an epigrammatical quality of the verse.
THE AGE OF REASON TEST 1
1. Translate into English: цитата, место действия, приписывать кому-либо авторство,роман в форме переписки, разоблачать, угодить вкусам (требованиям), идея (послание) книги.
2. Explain: What is ‘periphrasis’? Give your example.
Pope’s works are part of ‘mental furniture’... What is meant?
3. Answer in 1 sentence: What was the literary ideal for the Age of Reason?