‘The Ravished Organs of the Attentive Audience’: John Hill and Christopher Smart

Abstract

The 1751–1753 ‘paper war’ between Sir John Hill, Henry Fielding, Christopher Smart and others, set alight a London print world uneasily positioned between two models of literary success: the old one of aristocratic patronage, and the newer, powerful one of profiting from the public appetite for drama, sex, flattery and nonsense in print. Taking place in newspapers and periodicals, the ‘war’ has been documented from different angles by Lance Bertelsen, Chris Mounsey and George Rousseau. This chapter takes a close look at one of the war’s most effective salvoes, Christopher Smart’s little-known prose parody of Hill from a 1752 number of his periodical the Midwife. Smart’s attack is examined as satire—satire which is variously gendered, scatological, downright ferocious and drawing on Scriblerian antecedents. The literary and the scholarly are Smart’s chosen fields of attack, but driving them are imperatives of class, politics and patronage; of religion, and of the spiritual versus the material. Central to this febrile quarrel is the question of what credentials you need in order to be allowed to ‘ravish the organs’ of the reading public. Smart, a former don, arraigns Hill for his literary pretensions and ignorance of the classics—but Hill’s worst crime here is less his snobbery, vanity or truculence than his orotund obscurity which always sells his readers short: ‘that Author, whose Writings we are obliged to read twice, does not deserve to be read once.’