Abstract
One of my main contentions in this book is that issues of cultural provinciality played a central role in eighteenth-century British literary culture. Writers of the period understood that literature was not just a matter of artistic achievement but of cultural power. Individual achievements, in their view, took place within the space defined by the broader question of the standing of the cultural tradition of which they were a part—and cultural prestige, they knew, was in turn linked to the geopolitical power of the polity whose culture was in question. These connections have been brought under renewed scrutiny through the lense of postcolonial cultural criticism, but they involve an old recognition of the interplay of cultural and geopolitical power in the shaping of cultural status. What is harder for us to recognize is that across the Restoration and the eighteenth century, English-language writers saw themselves as in need of establishing the value of the cultural tradition in which they operated—certainly for the audience constituted by the wider world, but, consequently, to a certain extent for their own eyes as well.
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Notes
Cornelius W. Schoneveld, “Bilderdijk between Pope and Byron: The Paradoxes of His Translation of An Essay on Man into Dutch,” in Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron and Eliot in the Year 88, ed. C. C. Barfoot and Theo D’Haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 219.
Robert Southey, “Epistle to Allan Cunningham?’ in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself, 10 vols. (London: Longman et al. , 1838), 3:305–18, lines 141–47. Line numbers for subsequent references to this poem are supplied in the text.
See Paul Dibon, “L’Universite de Leyde et la Republique des Lettres au XVIIe siecle,” Quaerendo 5 (1975): 4–38; Mordecai Feingold, “Reversal of Fortunes: The Displacement of Cultural Hegemony from the Netherlands to England in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89, ed. Dale Hoak and Mordecai Feingold (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 234–61, 316–22 (notes); E. H. Kossmann, “The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 19–31; Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, “The Dutch Enlightenment: Humanism, Nationalism, and Decline,” in ibid. , 197–223; Mijnhardt, “Dutch Culture in the Age of William and Mary: Cosmopolitan or Provincial?” in The World of William and Mary, ed. Hoak and Feingold, 219–33, 311–16 (notes).
John Adams, Papers ofJohn Adams, vol. 10,June 1780-December 1780, ed. Gregg L. Lint et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 174.
In a letter of December 6, 1828, to William Wordsworth, Southey writes that he has been preparing various essays for the periodicals: “—these and an ‘Epistle to Allan Cunningham’ for his Anniversary, describing some of my portraits, make the main part of what I have done since my return from London. The plan of thus exhibiting myself is borrowed from a poem of Bilderdijk’s, part of which I have translated and introduced, and taken that opportunity of doing what justice I can to one of the most admirable men in all respects whom it has been my good fortune to know” (New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols. [NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1965], 2:329). In 1830, Southey had successfully recommended that Bilderdijk be elected an honorary member of the Royal Society of Literature (Cornelius De Deugd, “Friendship and Romanticism: Robert Southey and Willem Bilderdijk,” in Europa Provincia Mundi: Essays in Comparative Literature and European Studies Offered to Hugo Dyserinck on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Joep Leerssen and Karl Ulrich Syndram [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992], 379).
Cf. the comments of Gunnar Brandell (“Weltliteratur and Literary Nationalism,” in Problems of International Literary Understanding: Proceedings of the Sixth Nobel Symposium Stockholm, September 1967, ed. Karl Ragnar Gierow [Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1968], 109–15) regarding the position of Kierkegaard (Denmark), Ibsen (Norway), and Strindberg (Sweden) in the wider world of European literature: “The fame of all three of them spread through Germany, where the language barrier was easy to overcome, and where reigned at that moment, around 1900, a particular receptiveness for impulses from the North. It is an open question if any of them had held the position they do to-day without the German assistance. And I should think this is not unique: by being important in France or Britain a writer becomes almost automatically part of the international literary scene, whereas a writer from a small country, if he is lucky, may be adopted in one of the great countries and afterwards, with this backing, eventually accepted by others” (113). Brandell also comments, “From around 1500 our world literature is heavily biased in favour of the politically dominating European powers. The idea of an exchange between different literatures is, as a corollary, from now on undefinable without thinking in terms of big and small nations” (113).
Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, ed. James Leheny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 162.
John Florio, His Firste Fruites (1578; repr. , NewYork: Da Capo, 1969), 50.
Milton, Complete Poetry and Major Prose, 668 (see intro. , n. 28).
“The Case of Mary Carleton,” in Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse and The Case of Mary Carleton, ed. Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing (NewYork: NewYork University Press, 1994), 87.
Thomas Rymer, The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1956; repr. ,Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), 9–10.
Much the same is true of England’s geopolitical standing in the European world. Under Charles I, J. R. Jones writes, “Powerlessness, combined with a busy diplomacy and grandiose pretensions, made England contemptible” in the eyes of Continental powers; a similar situation arises in the reign of Charles II. “English historians have described with some satisfaction the speed with which Charles detached himself from the French affiance and the Third Dutch War in 1674, and the way in which the French ambassador was taken by surprise: in reality the lack of French reaction, the absence of a determined attempt to preserve the English alliance, was a true but unflattering estimate of how much it was worth. In terms of French diplomatic activity and expenditure, England mattered far less than Brandenburg or Sweden, and when Louis did later respond to Charles’s appeals for money the amounts which were paid put him on the same level as a minor French pensioner like the Elector of Trier. In 1688 Louis, by his decision to proceed with his aggression in the Rhineland, judged England to be less important than Cologne or the Palatinate” (“English Attitudes to Europe in the Seventeenth Century,” Britain and the Netherlands 3[1968], 39).
TheYale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, 41:152 (see intro. , n. 20).
John Hale comments: “It was Latin that enabled the English, through the writings of such men as Bacon, Camden, the anatomist William Harvey and the physician—and metaphysician—Robert Fludd, to re-enter as intellectuals a continent which had rejected them—with the loss of Calais in 1558—as a political power” (The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994], 152).
Hester Lynch Piozzi, Ancedotes of Sarnuel Johnson, ed. S. C. Roberts (1925; repr. , New York: Books for Libraries, 1980), 180; Bernard Kreissman, Pamela-Shamela:A Study of the Criticisms, Burlesques, Parodies, andAdaptations of Richardson’s “Pamela” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 83, n. 8.
Bernhard Fabian, “English Books and their Eighteenth-Century German Readers,” in The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 172; William Jervis Jones, “‘Spuma Linguarum’: On the Status of English in German-Speaking Countries before 1700,” in Images of Language: GermanAttitudes to European Languagesfrom 1500 to 1800 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1999), 171.
George Crabbe, Selected Poems, ed. Gavin Edwards (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 463; Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, ed. Robin Gilmour (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 168.
Brief discussions of the frontispiece to The Universal Visiter are found in Trevor Ross, The 1Vlaking of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 3–4, and in Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 58–59.
Lady Mary Chudleigh, “To Mr. Dryden, on his Excellent Translation of Virgil,” in Poems on Several Occasions. Together with the Song of the Three Children Paraphras’d (London: Bernard Lintot, 1703), 25–28. References to this poem will be given by line number in the body of the text.
Ironically, though, Chudleigh’s own poem, like many such critiques of rhymed verse, is itself written in rhyme. For a broad survey of the debate over rhyme in English poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Arthur Melville Clark, “Milton and the Renaissance Revolt against Rhyme,” in Studies in Literary Modes (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1946), 105–41; and Morris Freedman, “Milton and Dryden on Rhyme,” Huntington Library Quarterly 24 (1960–61): 337–44. The debate is of interest here because it is construed by its participants as an issue not simply of literary style or aesthetics, but of English cultural independence and cultural identity—much like the debate over the popularity of Italian opera in Britain, which I discuss in chapter 3.
Sir John Denham, “On Mr. Abraham Cowley, his Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets,” in Poems and Translations (London: H. Herringman, 1668), 89–94; John Oldham, “Bion. A Pastoral, in Imitation of the Greek of Moschus, Bewailing the Death of the Earl of Rochester,” in The Works of Mr. John Oldham (London: Jo. Hindmarsh, 1684), 73–87; Knightly Chetwood, “To the Earl of Rosconimon on his Excellent Poem,” and John Dryden, “To the Earl of Roscommon, on his Excellent Essay on Translated Verse,” both prefixed to An Essay on Translated Verse. By the Earl of Roscommon (London: Jacob Tonson, 1684), unpaginated; John Dryden, “To My Dear Friend, Mr. Congreve” (1694), in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 4, Poems 1693–1696, ed. A. B. Chambers and William Frost (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 432–34; Joseph Addison, “An Account of the Greatest English Poets,” The Works of the Right Honourable JosephAddison, Esq., 4 vols. (London:JacobTonson, 1721), 1:36–41 Samuel Cobb, Poetae Britannici (London: A. Roper and R. Basset, 1700); Samuel Wesley, An Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (London: Charles Harper, 1700); Jabez Hughes, “Verses Occasion’d by Reading Mr. Dryden’s Fables,” in Dryden: The Critical Heritage, ed. James Kinsley and Helen Kinsley (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 248–53; Elijah Fenton, “An Epistle to Mr. Southerne,” in Poems on Several Occasions (London: Bernard Lintot, 1717), 67–83; George Sewell, “To Mr. Pope, on his Poems and Translations,” in A New Collection of Original Poems, Never Printed in any Miscellany (London: J. Pemberton and J. Peele, 1720), 58–62; Leonard Welsted, “Epistle to His Grace the Duke of Chandos,” in The Works, In Verse and Prose, of Leonard Welsted (London: Printed for the Editor, 1787), 73–75; John Dart, WestminsterAbbey. A Poem (London: J. Batley, 1721); Judith Cowper Madan, “The Progress of Poesy,” in The Poetical Calendar, ed. Francis Fawkes and William Woty, 12 vols. (London:J. Coote, 1763–64), 3:17–28;William Mason, “Musaeus, a Monody to the Memory of Mr. Pope,” in The Works of William Mason, 4 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), 1:1–15; Thomas Gray, “The Progress of Poesy” (1757), in Thomas Gray and William Collins, Poetical Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 46–51.
Cf. the chapter on “the progress-of-poesy poem” in Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781, 35–62, esp. 49–57 (see n. 18).
Jones, The Triumph of the English Language, 183 (see intro. , n. 11).
I draw the concept of the “apparatus of languages” from the work of Renee Balibar: see her L’Institution du frantais: essai sur le colinguisme des Carolingiens a la Republique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985).
Thomas Hobbes, “Answer to Davenant,” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Joel E. Spingarn, 3 vols. (1908–09; repr. , Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 2:65.
Swift, A Proposal for Correcting. the English Language, 32 (see intro. , n. 7); Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose, 334, 336 (see intro. , n. 34).
Edmund Waller, “Of English Verse,” in Silver Poets of the Seventeenth Century, ed. G. A. E. Parfitt (London: Dent, 1974), lines 5–6, 13–16. Subsequent references to this poem are given by line number in the text.
Sir William Temple, “An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Spingarn, 3:63 (see n. 25).
Pope, “Essay on Criticism,” lines 482–83 (see intro. , n. 7); Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:566.
Tickell, On the Prospect of Peace, lines 249, 251, 265–66 (see intro. , n. 7).
Thomas Sheridan, British Education: or, The Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (1756; repr. , Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1971), xvii.
I cite Boileau’s original (“L’Art poetique”) and the Soame—Dryden translation (“The Art of Poetry”) from the parallel printing of the English and French works in The Continental Model: Selected French Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, in English Translation, ed. Scott Elledge and Donald Schier, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970). References to these works will be given by line number in the body of the text. (The quotation from Jacob Tonson is from The Continental Model, 386.)
A few years later, in 1686, the East India Company, under Sir Josiah Child, did send troops to India and declared war on the Mughal Empire. Despite military and naval support from James II, they were driven out of Surat, imperiled in Bombay, and defeated in Bengal. In September 1687, the Company was able to sue for peace, by agreeing to pay “a large sum in reparations. ” Only in 1690 was the Company allowed back into Bengal, “after a grovelling apology from it as well as a fine of 150,000 rupees (about £15,000 sterling)” (Bruce P. Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars 1550–1688 [London: Longman, 2001], 209–11).
It is noteworthy that the American colonies do not seem appropriate to these authors to invoke at this juncture. The imperial fantasies of British literary culture were oriented toward the Old World of the East, even though the so-called first British Empire was constructed in the “New World” of the West, with the gap between these two orders creating a space ofimperial anticipation and design that accompanies and shapes British expansion in the East.
Samuel Johnson, The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (London: J. and P. Knapton et al. , 1747), 10.
Richard Bailey has gathered much material that bears on this topic in the chapter on “World English,” in his Imaqes of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 93–121.
Samuel Cobb, “Of Poetry,” in Poems on Several Occasions. To which is Prefix’d A Discourse on Criticism and the Liberty of Writing, 3d ed. (London: James Woodward, 1710), lines 672–81.
John Dryden, “To My Honor’d Friend, Dr. Charleton,” lines 21–22, in The Works ofJohn Dryden, vol. 1, Poems 1649–1680, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956). Subsequent references to this poem will be supplied in the text.
Welsted, “Epistle to. Chandos,” lines 11, 17–22 (see n. 21).
“Some Thoughts on the English Language,” The Universal Visiter (January 1756): 6 (the author of this essay was probably Christopher Smart); The Present State of the Republick of Letters (November 1728): 399.
C. Lennart Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of the Gentleman’s Magazine (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1938), 81.
James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 41, 51, 409. Macpherson’s comment about the “metropolitan” function of the English language as a medium for international cultural exchange reiterates a claim made some years earlier, in 1756, by the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), which sought “to introduce among the Highlanders a knowledge of the English language, to fit them for understanding and being understood by the rest of the world” (Present State of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge [Edinburgh, 1756?], 40, quoted in Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing, 40 [see intro. , n. 8]). We see in these remarks the interdependence between claims about English’s international standing and claims about its metropolitan function within the British Isles.
Thomas Sheridan, A Discourse. Being Introductory to His Course of Lectures on Elocution and the English Language (1759; repr. , Augustan Reprint Society, no. 136, Los Angeles:William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1969), 12.
Adams, Papers ofjohn Adams, 10:128.
Ibid. , 170.
David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:170–71.
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1994), 2:514, n. 8; Samuel T. Coleridge, Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), 1:254–55.
Francis Turner Palgrave, The Golden Treasury, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1991), 8; James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922; repr. , New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 40.
Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 112.
Edwin Guest, A History of English Rhythms, ed. W. W. Skeat (1838; London: George Bell and Sons, 1882), 703, quoted in Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (London: Longman, 1994), 99.
Rev. James George, The Mission of Great Britain to the World, or Some of the Lessons Which She Is Now Teaching (Toronto: Dudley and Burns, 1867), 6, quoted in ibid.
United Kingdom, Committee on the Legal Status of the Welsh Language, Report, 1965, 9.
“W. R. ,” Wallography (1681), quoted in Prys Morgan, The Eighteenth-Century Renaissance (Llandybie,Wales: Christopher Davies, 1981), 20. See also, in this context,Thomas Rymer’s comment in 1692 onTaliessin and Merlin as early Welsh poets: “had they not written in Welch, [they] might yet deserve an esteem among us” (quoted in Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781, 134 [see n. 18]).
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1984), 151. Subsequent references to this work are given in the text.
Samuel Johnson, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992–94), 1:151–52. Johnson is evidently asking for a continuation of the kind of work begun in Edward Lhuyd’s Archaeologia Britannica (Oxford, 1707), in which Lhuyd investigated the affinities of Welsh with other Celtic languages, such as Breton.
Charles O’Conor, Dissertations on the Ancient History of Ireland, rev. ed. (London, 1766), iv, quoted in ibid. , 1:151, n. 4.
Thomas Watts, “On the Probable Future Position of the English Language,” Proceedings of the Philological Society 4 (1850): 209. Subsequent references are given in the text.
Pope, one might note, cited these two lines in Peri Bathos (1728) to illustrate the bathetic effect produced by anticlimax: the first line of the couplet, with its imperial conceit, raises expectations that are disappointed by the paltry success commemorated in the second line (Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams [Boston, MA: Houghton Mifllin, 1969], 416).
Thomas B. Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” in Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 243.
John Hughes, An Essay on the Ancient and Present State of the Welsh Language (London: Privately printed, 1822), 52. Subsequent references are given in the text.
For a discussion of this “renaissance,” see Saunders Lewis, A School of Welsh Augustans: Being a Study in English Influences on Welsh Literature during Part of the Eighteenth Century (Wrexham, UK: Hughes and Son, 1924) and Morgan, The Eighteenth-Century Renaissance (see n. 54).
Roland Mathias, Anglo-Welsh Literature. An Illustrated History (Bridgend, UK: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), 53–54.
[John Wolcot], The Poetical Works of Peter Pindar, Esq. A Distant Relation to the Poet of Thebes (Dublin: A. Colles et al. , 1791), 96 and unnumbered note.
This seems to me to mark the major limitation of the otherwise compelling recent scholarly work by Robert Crawford, Leith Davis, Janet Sorensen, and others on Anglo-Scottish literary and cultural relations since the Union of 1707. By focusing its attention on domestic “British” contexts, such work fails to assess the intersections of domestic hegemony, European rivalry, and overseas imperialism in the construction of the empire of English.
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Yadav, A. (2004). The Progress of English. In: Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981158_2
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