Abstract
Some years before the Scriblerians brought a comic realism to bear on the themes of prophecy and apocalypse, Mandeville gave millenarians a taste of their own medicine by showing – in the conclusion to The Grumbling Hive – that a land free of the offences decried by the pious would indeed prove to be ruinous. In so doing he inaugurated a tradition of secularised apocalypse that finds one of its most famous expressions in the Dunciad. Both Pope and Mandeville make use of the millenarian motifs of Elkanah Settle’s pageants for Lord Mayor’s day, and though the Williamite politics of The Fable of the Bees was deeply inimical to the Tory wits (as appears in the satires of the Scriblerians), time has exposed a paradoxical congruence between Pope and Mandeville that underlies their official enmity.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for an excellent synoptic account, Paul J. Korshin, ‘Queuing and Waiting: the Apocalypse in England, 1660–1750’, in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance thought and literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Ithaca, 1984), pp. 240–265. For the continental background, Millenarianism and Messianismin in early Modern European Culture, vol. 4 ed. J. C. Lauresen and R. H. Popkin (Dordrecht, 2001). And on the early impact of the Huguenot millenarians, Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: the History of a Millenarian group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1980).
- 2.
Gibson in his Sermon of 1723 quotes from the Causes: ‘The Scandal brought upon Religion, as it was not constructed by the irregularities of one or two persons, but by associated and common crimes, so neither will it be removed by a few single and private Reformations. There must be Combinations and publick Confederacies in Virtue’ (Gibson 1723: Postscript, 2). See also A Letter from a residing member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (London, 1714), p. 47.
- 3.
- 4.
Mandeville 1924: I, 27. All references to the Fable are to the edition by F. B. Kaye.
- 5.
See Ovid’s description of the Golden Age, Amores, III. 8.
- 6.
For Mandeville’s further parody of apocalypse, see I, 231. It is worth noting that the doctrine of passive obedience ranks high in the creed of the Goddess of Dullness in the Dunciad: see The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, Twickenham ed., vol. 5 (London, 1965): ‘The RIGHT DIVINE of Kings to govern Wrong’, (B) IV, l. 188, p. 360; and see especially the note to (B) IV, l. 453, p. 385.
- 7.
I, 28–9. At the close of the seventeenth century Celia Fiennes described the ‘pageants’ – or ‘floats’ as they were later called - in her diary as follows: ‘a sort of Stages Covered and Carryed by men and on ye top many men and boys acting ye respective trades or Employ for Each Company, some in shipps for ye Merchts…’. Quoted by Robert Withington in his English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols. (London, 1920), II, 67.
- 8.
I, 163–5. Mandeville argues in these paragraphs on the Lord Mayor’s show that the chief function of the pageantry of justice is ‘to animate not to deter’.
- 9.
For the positioning of the Sword-bearer, see the detailed description of Lord Mayor’s Day in Guy Miège, The New State of England, under our present monarch King William III (London, 1701), pp. 177–8; for the Sword-bearer’s ‘gown of black damask’, see John Gough Nichols on Lord Mayor’s Day 1697, London Pageants (London, 1837), p. 82. This gown seems consistent with the one worn by the processing Sword-bearer shown in Plate 7 (opposite p. 178) of the 5th edition of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (London, 1710).
- 10.
Indicative here is Allestree’s aversion to ‘Shews and Pageantries of Justice’, and his belief that a ‘pageant like piety’ was a defilement that ‘required no slighter purgation than that of FIRE’, see Causes, p. 207, and Preface, also pp. 28, 147.
- 11.
See An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, pp. 94–6; also Kaye, I, xix.
- 12.
For some account of these see Frank Clyde Brown, Elkanah Settle:His Life and Works (Chicago, 1910), pp. 28–32.
- 13.
Glory’s Resurrection being the Triumphs of London Revived for the Inauguration of the Right Honourable Sir Francis Child (London, 1698). The Chariot of Justice is depicted in Plate III.
- 14.
The Pamphleteers: A Satyr (London, 1703): see, for example, ‘Such was poor Albion’s case, when William came, /Rescue’d our Isle from the devouring Flame’.
- 15.
See the analysis by John Brewer in his The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989), particularly pp. 140–5.
- 16.
These include, for example, the ‘second birth’ of the swallowed gold coins that Annius recovers with the help of a ‘soft, obstetric hand’, see The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, Twickenham ed., vol. 5 (London, 1965), (B) IV, ll. 386, 394, pp. 379–80.
- 17.
See Maynard Mack’s Introduction, pp. xiii–xiv.
- 18.
Stephen Copley and Ian Haywood, ‘Luxury Refuse and Poetry: John Gay’s Trivia’ in John Gay and the Scriblerians, ed. Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood (London, 1988), pp. 68–70, 72, 80.
- 19.
David Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford, 1995), pp. 440–1.
- 20.
- 21.
The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1936), I, 270–1.
- 22.
Compare Montesquieu’s remarks on the aetiology of decline: ‘Fortune never interposes in the Government of this World; and we may be convinced of this truth by the Romans, who enjoyed a continual Series of Prosperity when they regulated their Conduct by one invariable Plan, but suffered an uninterrupted Train of Calamities, when they acted upon different principles. There are a set of general Causes, either Moral or Physical, which operate in every Monarchy, and either raise or maintain it, or else involve it in Ruin. All accidental Conjunctures are subordinate to these Causes; and if the Hazard of a Battle, which, in other Words, is no more than a particular Cause, has been destructive of a State, some General Cause presided, and made a single Battle be the inevitable Ruin of the State. In a Word, the Tendency of the main Principle draws after it all the particular incidents.’ Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Reflections on the causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Romans, trans. from the French (London, 1734), pp. 193–4.
- 23.
The Dunciad, (A) III, ll. 59–114, pp 155–60; (A) III, l. 70, p. 156. The ‘A’ text is based on the quarto edition of 1729.
- 24.
- 25.
Pope first altered this line to ‘That draws some Virtue out of ev’ry Vice’, and finally to ‘That disappoints th’effect of ev’ry vice’ (II, 240). The original is scored out on the last page of Epistle II in the MS of the Essay in the Pierpoint Morgan Library; see Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man:Reproductions of the Manuscripts in the Pierpoint Morgan Library and the Houghton Library, introduced by Maynard Mack (Oxford, 1962), np.
- 26.
See Dunciad, (A) I, l. 26, and 26n, p, 63; also (A) III, l.318, p. 186.
- 27.
See (A) III, l. 246, p. 178; also (A) III, ll. 273–4, p. 183 and note.
- 28.
An Essay on Man, III, ll. 253–4. 257–8, p. 118.
- 29.
See especially III, ll. 122–130, 199–210, 269–282, pp. 104–5, 113, 120–1; and Kaye, II, 132–3. Pope’s account of patriarchal authority invites comparison also with Mandeville’s discussion of ‘reverence’, see Essay III, ll. 215–34, pp. 114–5, and Kaye II, 280–1.
- 30.
See Scriblerus’s note to Dunciad, (A) III, ll. 337, p. 192.
- 31.
Mandeville in his Sixth Dialogue concludes his satire on scholarly myopia and the vagaries of the learned with the admission that learning is soundly established nonetheless, see Kaye, II, 342–4. In the same Dialogue he argues that the unmeritorious are serviceable to society even in the highest office, see II, 324–9.
- 32.
See second paragraph of Scriblerus’s note to (A) III, l. 337, p. 192; and (B) IV, l. 604, p. 403.
- 33.
Dunciad, (A) III, ll. 282–4, p. 183.
- 34.
See (A) III, ll. 211–14, p. 175.
- 35.
Dunciad, (B) IV, l. 271, p. 386.
- 36.
See (B) IV, ll. 150, 219, pp. 356, 364.
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Knox-Shaw, P. (2015). Mandeville, Pope, and Apocalypse. In: Balsemão Pires, E., Braga, J. (eds) Bernard de Mandeville's Tropology of Paradoxes. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 40. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19381-6_6
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