17-18 century english essayist
The expiry of the Licensing Act in halted state censorship of the press. During the next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert Harley , saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses.
Introduction to 17th- and 18th-Century Literature: Major Authors and Works
Discover in a free daily email today's famous history and birthdays Enjoy the Famous Daily. Search the whole site. Literary life in England flourishes so impressively in the early years of the 18th century that contemporaries draw parallels with the heyday of Virgil, Horace and Ovid at the time of the emperor Augustus.
The new Augustan Age becomes identified with the reign of Queen Anne , though the spirit of the age extends well beyond her death. These two tracts, respectively about literary theory and religious discord, reveal that there is a new prose writer on the scene with lethal satirical powers. The tone of oblique irony which Swift makes his own is evident even in the title of his attack on fashionable trends in religious circles - An Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England, may as Things now stand, be attended with some Inconveniences.
In the following year, , a new periodical brings a gentler brand of humour and irony hot off the presses, three times a week, straight into London's fashionable coffee houses. The Tatler , founded by Richard Steele with frequent contributions from his friend Joseph Addison, turns the relaxed and informal essay into a new journalistic art form.
In Steele and Addison replace the Tatler with the daily Spectator. The same year sees the debut of the youngest and most brilliant of this set of writers. Unlike the others, Alexander Pope devotes himself almost exclusively to poetry, becoming a master in the use of rhymed heroic couplets for the purposes of wit.
In he shows his paces with the brilliant Essay on Criticism the source of many frequently quoted phrases, such as 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread'. He follows this in with a miniature masterpiece of mock heroic, The Rape of the Lock.
Pope is so much in tune with the spirit of his age that he is able, in his mid-twenties, to persuade the British aristocracy to subscribe in large numbers to his proposed translation of Homer's Iliad into heroic couplets. The work appears in six volumes between and , to be followed by the Odyssey The weapon of these authors is wit, waspish in tone - as is seen in The Dunciad , Pope's attack on his many literary enemies.
The most savage in his use of wit is undoubtedly Swift. His Modest Proposal , in , highlights poverty in Ireland by suggesting that it would be far better for everybody if, instead of being allowed to starve, these unfortunate Irish babies were fattened up and eaten.
Yet, astonishingly, a book of by Swift, almost equally savage in its satirical intentions, becomes one of the world's best loved stories - by virtue simply of its imaginative brilliance.
It tells the story of a ship's surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels: Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe , has a genius for journalism in an age before newspapers exist which can accomodate his kind of material.
He travels widely as a semi-secret political agent, gathering material of use to those who pay him. In he founds, and writes almost single-handed, a thrice-weekly periodical, the Review , which lasts only a year. But it is his instinct for what would now be called feature articles which mark him out as the archetypal journalist.
A good example is the blend of investigative and imaginative skills which lead him to research surviving documents of the Great Plague and then to blend them in a convincing fictional Journal of the Plague Year Another work which could run week after week in a modern newspaper is his immensely informative Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain , published in three volumes in But his instinctive nose for a good story is best seen in his response to the predicament of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who survives for five years as a castaway on a Pacific island before being discovered in Just as the plague documents stimulated a fictional journal, this real-life drama now prompts Defoe to undertake the imagined autobiography of another such castaway, Robinson Crusoe Defoe imagines in extraordinary detail the practical difficulties involved in building a house and a boat, in domesticating the local animals, and in coping with unwelcome neighbours.
This is a cannibal island. The native whom Crusoe rescues from their clutches on a Friday becomes his faithful servant, Man Friday. Defoe's interests seem to lie mainly in the theme of man's creation of society from primitive conditions, but meanwhile he almost unwittingly writes a gripping adventure story of survival.
Robinson Crusoe is avidly read as such by all succeeding generations - and has a good claim to be considered the first English novel. Seven years later another book appears which immediately becomes one of the world's most popular stories, and again seems to do so for reasons not quite intended by its author.
Jonathan Swift , a man inspired by savage indignation at the ways of the world, writes Gulliver's Travels as a satire in which human behaviour is viewed from four revealing angles. When Gulliver arrives in Liliput, he observes with patronising condescension the habits of its tiny inhabitants. But in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, he is the midget. When he proudly tells the king about European manners, he is surprised at the royal reaction.
The king says that humans sound like 'little odious Vermin'. Gulliver's next stop, the flying island of Laputa, is run by philosophers and scientists as Plato might have wished ; predictably they make a mess of things. Finally Gulliver visits a land ruled by intelligent horses the Houyhnhnms, Swift's version of whinnying. The hooligans here are brutal and oafish beasts in human shape, the Yahoos.
Once again the sheer vitality of the author's imagination transcends his immediate purpose. Of the millions who enjoy Gulliver's fantastic adventures, few are primarily aware of Swift's harshly satirical intentions.
During a quarter of a century, from , the novel makes great advances in England, with notable achievements in several different styles. Moll's story is more like a conventional novel than that of Robinson Crusoe, being set in the real world of low-life London and the plantations of Virginia. It is full of vitality and incident, but it is basically - as the title states - a sequence of fortunes and misfortunes for the heroine.
Crusoe had his isolation to give focus to the story. Moll has only her vivacious character. Of plot, in the normal sense, there is little. This lack of focus is fully answered by Samuel Richardson, a novelist of much greater influence in his own time than today. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded tells the story of Pamela Andrews trying to ward off the sexual advances of the young man of the house in which she is a maid. The narrative develops in the form of letters - most of them written by Pamela herself.
The ability to unfold a plot through correspondence, spinning out the detail and viewing events from several different angles, is the pioneering discovery of Richardson. He takes it to much greater length in Clarissa 7 vols, , a novel of more than a million words and the longest in the English language. Pamela has a somewhat unconvincing happy ending. Clarissa , an altogether darker account of a relationship between two upper-class characters, ends in disaster for both.
This account of pyschological warfare between the sexes is much read throughout Europe. The brilliantly savage erotic novel by Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses , can be seen as a direct descendant. A more cheerful offshoot of Richardson's efforts is the first novel by Henry Fielding, a magistrate in London's Bow Street court with an intimate knowledge of the city's low life.
Offended by the sentimental unreality of Pamela , he writes Joseph Andrews - the story of Pamela's brother, who is a minor character in Richardson's book.
Fielding finds virtue not in respectability the ultimate yardstick in Pamela but in the warm-hearted honesty of a group of ordinary and often unfortunate characters, in particular the absent-minded Parson Adams. His plot, loose and picaresque though it is in many respects, has its own logic and consistency. The ingredients pioneered in Joseph Andrews are deployed by Fielding with even greater success in Tom Jones The adventures in a vividly wicked world of the lusty but honest Tom, and the survival against all the odds of his love for Sophia Western, provide a novel of romance and adventure which has kept its power ever since - as is evident in its several incarnations on film.
The most original novel of the 18th century, and one of the most chaotically endearing books of any age, is published from by a clergyman on the staff of the cathedral in York. It is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Told as Tristram's autogiography, the book begins - logically but unconventionally - with the scene at his conception. Thereafter, in a series of looping digressions interrupted with sudden surprises such as a page of solid black in mourning for poor Yorick , Sterne dwells upon a small number of quite ordinary characters who come vividly alive thanks to their minor obsessions and eccentricities.
We are well into Vol. Slightly before that event he at last has a moment to write his Preface. Sterne's blend of fantasy and mock-learning owes much to Rabelais , but he adds an easy playfulness, a friendly teasing of the reader, which his contemporaries find immediately attractive.
The success of the first two volumes in is so great that Sterne is able to retire to a quiet curacy in north Yorkshire. Tristram Shandy could go on for ever, but the story ends in the middle of nowhere after Vol. Tristram Shandy - with its amused interest in the relationship between writer and reader, and in the nature of narrative - seems two centuries ahead of its time, resembling a modern demolition of the very idea of the novel. The next English novel to retain a devoted readership through the centuries is, by contrast, firmly in the mainstream of fiction.
Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield tells the story of a simple and good-hearted vicar who puts up stoically with a series of disasters, mainly brought upon him by the vagaries of his children, until he eventually emerges unscathed. The events are more melodramatic than those which drive the plots of Jane Austen, but Goldsmith's unaffected prose and gentle irony prefigure later advances in the English novel.
Between them, the experiments in English fiction in the midth century make almost anything possible. Its heavyweight solemnity, enlivened by the joke at its centre, is the quality which has made Dr Johnson England's best-loved literary character. His cast of mind is known now not from his own voluminous writings but from the devoted account written by his young friend James Boswell and published in as The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Boswell meets Johnson in London in and keeps in touch on his annual visit from Edinburgh, where he is employed as a lawyer. Boswell is a man fascinated by conversation as is revealed in his own extremely vivid journals , and in Johnson he has met the heavyweight champion of this particular art. From early in their friendship he conceives the plan of writing the great man's life, and begins to note down his views and remarks.
It is evident from Boswell's pages that Johnson, like Falstaff, is alarming as well as witty. As Goldsmith observes in Boswell's pages: 'There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.
Boswell's literary efforts on behalf of his friend mean that more of Johnson's curmudgeonly opinions are remembered and affectionately quoted than those of any other Englishman. A frequent butt is Boswell's own country. As it happens this prejudice is particularly inappropriate in Johnson's lifetime when Edinburgh, in particular, is enjoying a period of creativity known subsequently as the Scottish Enlightenment.
But vigorous opinions of Johnson's kind transcend small local realities. Johnson, the devoted Londoner, has little interest in travelling. Asked by Boswell whether the famous Giant's Causeway would not be worth seeing, he replies: 'Worth seeing? This is a region of particular topical interest, for the Celtic fringe of Britain has suddenly become famous as the home of the poet Ossian. His newly discovered epic work excites all Europe - except, almost alone on the issue, Samuel Johnson.
Everywhere in the islands there is talk of Fingal , a supposed poem by Ossian discovered and translated by James Macpherson and published in Johnson tells Boswell that he considers it 'as great an imposition as ever the world was troubled with'. When Johnson's views become public, in his book of , Macpherson demands a retraction and gets the reply: 'What shall I retract?
I thought your book an imposture from the beginning, I think it upon yet surer reasons an imposture still.
For the British general, see Joseph Edward Addison. 17th/18th-century English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician. Joseph Addison. Joseph. Pages in category "17th-century English writers". The following pages are in this category, out of approximately total. This list may not reflect recent.
Discover in a free daily email today's famous history and birthdays Enjoy the Famous Daily. Search the whole site. Literary life in England flourishes so impressively in the early years of the 18th century that contemporaries draw parallels with the heyday of Virgil, Horace and Ovid at the time of the emperor Augustus.
Joseph Addison 1 May — 17 June was an English essayist , poet , playwright and politician. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Lancelot Addison.
The King openly proclaimed his love of parliaments, his devotion to the immemorial constitution of balance and moderation, his Protestant fervor, and his pious hopes for a national church. The Restoration refers to the restoration of the monarchy when Charles II was restored to the throne of England following an eleven-year Commonwealth period during which the country was governed by Parliament under the direction of the Puritan General Oliver Cromwell. This political event coincides with and to some extent is responsible for changes in the literary, scientific, and cultural life of Britain.
Joseph Addison
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