Secrecy and Enlightenment: Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis

Abstract

Delarivier Manley’s partisan secret history, the New Atalantis (1709), was perhaps the most infamous text published in early eighteenth-century England. It was not only avidly read by those on both sides of politics, but also led to the arrest of its author and has been credited with the fall of the Whig oligarchy in the elections immediately following its publication (Trevelyan 1934, p. 38). It is not surprising, then, that its publication has been described as an ‘intervening event in the cultural life of early eighteenth-century Britain’ (Mudge 2000, p. 137). The New Atalantisseeks to revise the history of the court and cabinet since its restoration 50 years earlier with a narrative that depicts prominent political figures — especially the Junto Whigs who had administered the state since the revolution of 1688 — as thinly disguised fictional characters. The text offers a ‘secret history’ of contemporary political events by uncovering the sexual scandals that embroil leading courtiers and politicians and motivate their public actions. In this, the New Atalantis reverses the association of sexual libertinism and the Stuart court that was commonly used in radical political propaganda as an instance and signifier of tyranny; evidence that the monarch indulged his personal desires to the dereliction of his duties and allowed the needs of his personal body to oppress those of the body politic.¹