the literature of 18th century

Enlightenment in English Literature | Definition, ideas, meaning | The age of Enlightenment

Enlightenment was a wide academic and intellectual movement in the 18th century that promoted science and rationality and defied superstition. This intellectual movement was supported by the famous minds of Europe and America like Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, John Lock, Newton, Leibniz, Montesquieu, Voltaire , etc.

Immanuel Kant said that Enlightenment was mankind’s escape from his self-imposed tutelage, in other words, earlier the man had somehow wrapped himself up in a mental straightjacket but with Enlightenment developing a sense of intellectual freedom ceasing to be depended upon authorities such as kings, priest, God, etc. and was at last thinking for himself. Enlightenment was a wide academic and intellectual movement in the 18th century that promoted science and rationality and defied superstition . This intellectual movement was supported by the famous minds of Europe and America like Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, John Lock, Newton, etc. The Enlightenment thinkers envisioned themselves as beginning an age of altruistic, rational, and advancement of society backed by the growing capability of human reason. They wanted to free society from superstitions, feudalism, political despotism, and religious intolerance.

The Enlightenment thinkers envisioned themselves as beginning an age of altruistic, rational, and advancement of society backed by the growing capability of human reason. They wanted to free society from superstitions, feudalism, political despotism, and religious intolerance.

Table of Contents

Characteristics of Enlightenment:

The main idea of Enlightenment is to promote reason and rationality. People of that time (i.e. 18th century) believed that it was important to think for themselves. They could not simply get the truth out of books or from institutions like the church. They have to criticize existing authorities . Instead of looking at faith as traditional Christendom and as the ultimate truth about things, they had to use their own reason on the evidence that was provided. After Newton had discussed the laws of gravity and discovered the laws of mechanism, Newton became one of the great kings of Enlightenment thought, and people look back to Newton and said if Newton had discovered the laws of the universe on the basis of reason, experiment, and observation, they can also go forward understand nature, change nature for human benefit by using their own reason.

Enlightenment marks the change from an essentially religious outlook. If we go back to the age of Milton , people still believed in Satan, in witches and demons, in burning in hell in everlasting perdition, etc. By the end of the 18th-century people were still Christian and religious but they had a naturalistic and secular view about religion because of the growing tendency of Enlightenment. People were thinking in terms of what men could do for themselves by using their own reason.

Dependence on reason was nothing novel; the ancient thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato had advocated reason as the power whereby we could acquire universal truths. Medieval Christian philosophy recognized that reason was an essential element of a genuine spiritual frame of mind but it was only a mere component and required to be leveled by faith and revelation. But during the 18th century, what was new to the Enlightenment was its emphasis on reason as the central capacity whereby we could obtain knowledge. For Enlightenment thinkers, reason does not need any faith or divine revelation. More importantly, the reliance on reason weakened dependence on any kind of authority like Church, state, politics, or of any influential individual.

The important Enlightenment thinkers:

Three important forerunners of Enlightenment belief were the English intellect Francis Bacon , French philosopher Descartes, and the Dutch thinker Spinoza. If we talk about the important works of Bacon , then they were “The Advancement of Learning ” and “The New Organon” in which he expressed the technique of induction through which we establish truth or knowledge on the ground of real observation of several experiences or occurrences. An example of induction is that

Shyam likes literature;

Today’s lecture is about T.S Eliot;

Shyam will like today’s lecture.

Bacon maintained that induction, as the technique of modern science, was a more constructive way to understanding than the medieval dependence of deduction. The example of deductive reasoning is that

All sports bikes must go over 100 KMPH;

The Yamaha R15 is a sports bike.

Therefore Yamaha R15 can go over 100 KMPH.

So according to Bacon , the only means through which we can reach true knowledge or truth is inductive reasoning.

John Lock as an Enlightenment thinker:

In the 18th century, there was a development of intellectual tendency and print tradition. Lock is an all-around intellect at the end of the 17th century. He is also important in politics because it’s he who came up with the idea that the state is not God-given via the Divine Right of the king but is something created by men for their own benefit. Locke also comes with a notion of modern man. Man, he says, is not created with original sin in him and he is not inherently wicked; rather man is born as a blank sheet of paper, you can create whatever sort of man by environmental influences, by education, by experiences, and what this means is that education became important. So, Man became a creature of indefinite possibility for progress.

Conclusion:

To conclude we can say that Enlightenment brought the whole vision of the improvement of the individual person.

Critical Appreciation of Tennyson’s “Break, Break Break”
Tennyson as a representative poet of Victorian age
Short note on elegy
Justify the title Pride and Prejudice
The use of irony in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Restoration and Eighteenth Century English Literature: 1660-1789

Hampton Court in the mid-1600s.

English Literature of the Enlightenment

This extremely rich period of English literature is covered on our timeline in three sections. Scroll down for all eras, or click an index link, just below, to go directly to a particular section.

To learn more about the cultural background, authors, and styles from this era, read this post:

Reading Restoration and 18th Century English Literature

Restoration Literature: 1660-1700

Augustan age: 1700-1750.

Age of Johnson and Sensibility: 1750-1789

Literary Classics Timeline: Authors, Works, and Trends

Reading Resources—Find Free Texts Online:

Eighteenth Century Poetry Archive

Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry from 1579 -1830

Gutenberg.org

PoetryFoundation.org

Significant Historical Dates:

1660: Charles II restored to the throne. Reopening of theaters; women begin acting in women’s parts.

1665-66: Great Plague of London.

1666: Great Fire destroys city of London.

1668: John Dryden becomes the first Poet Laureate.

1672: Charles II issues Declaration of Indulgence to decriminalize Catholicism and Dissenters.

1673: Test Act requires office holders to swear Allegiance to Anglicanism.

1678: Popish Plot—a hoax that inflames anti-Catholic feeling.

1685: Charles II dies; James II, Catholic brother, assumes throne.

1688-89: Glorious Revolution. Catholic James II exiled and succeed by Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. (English people who continue loyalty to James II and his son Charles Edward called “Jacobites.” Some continue to engage in plots of rebellion.)

1690: John Locke publishes “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”

1695: Licensing Act expires, ending censorship of the press.

English Literature 1660-1700: Major Authors and Highlights

John Dryden. “A Song for St. Cecelia’s Day,” 1687; “Alexander’s Feast,” 1697; “Mack Flecknoe,” 1682.

Dryden was a significant Restoration writer. As England’s first official Poet Laureate, he wrote plays, verses, and essays that comment on every important event of his day. In addition, he played a huge role in formation of literary taste and poets’ reputations through his criticism in verse, and by editing anthologies of contemporary poems he considered worthy.

The first two works in this reading list were poems written to be performed to music at the London Musical Society annual concert, held in celebration of St. Cecelia. St. Cecelia was a Roman saint regarded as patroness of music and supposed inventor of the organ. Both poems are lovely and thoughtful considerations of the power of music and other arts, both to evoke emotion and to motivate people’s actions.

I especially like “Alexander’s Feast.” This poem creates a scene of Alexander the Great sitting at a feast celebrating a victory over the Persians. Dryden describes flautist and lute player Timotheus playing before Alexander. His music alone evokes a series of different powerful emotions within Alexander.

“Mack Flecknoe.” If you want to know how to insult someone thoroughly and elegantly, “Mack Flecknoe” can show you a thing or two. This very funny mock heroic poem makes fun of a second-rate dramatist Thomas Shadwell, who annoyed Dryden by continuing to insist that he was the true heir of the late great Ben Jonson. Not at all, says Dryden in this poem; Shadwell is actually the true son of Flecknoe, one of the greatest hacks and cliched writers of the time. The poem wittily describes the dying Flecknoe anointing Shadwell as his one true heir, with a well-placed dig in every couplet. Enjoy!

If you are a history buff, you might also take on “Absalom and Achitophel,” 1681 , in which Dryden discusses the struggles of Charles II to maintain control of the succession to the throne in favor of his brother James against the pretensions of his illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth, championed by the new Whig party of the Earl of Shaftesbury, Parliament, and the City of London.

The situation of a son threatening to usurp his own father’s throne brought to Dryden’s mind the biblical story of Absalom, who rebelled against his father, King David. In this poem Dryden attempted to support the rights of Charles while allowing for the just quarrels of his opponents, a delicate task that most serious readers say he achieved. Use an edited edition with notes and read up on your Restoration history before you begin, so all the references make sense.

See also Marriage a la mode , 1673 , below in Restoration Comedies.

The Great Fire of London as depicted by an unknown artist in the 1670s. London Bridge and the Old St. Paul’s can be seen.

Samuel Pepys, “The Great Fire” from The Diary [of London] 1660-1669.

Samuel Pepys (pronounced “Peeps”) was the son of a tailor who was helped to a Cambridge education, eventually becoming a successful Secretary of the Admiralty (in the Navy). A lifelong Londoner, he loved every aspect of its culture, especially the nightlife and beautiful ladies.

If you are interested in Restoration cultural history, you can pick and choose any of the over 1.3 million words he wrote about all the details of his life in London, from big events to mundane details to intimate domestic situations.

At least check out the entries for September 1-3, 1666. These describe the Great Fire that decimated four-fifths of the central city. Find the diary entries here at Pepysdiary.com . If you like, you can go to this site’s main page every day to see an entry that was written on today’s calendar date.

Restoration Comedies

With the Puritans out of power as of 1660, theaters were allowed to open again. Charles II granted licenses to two theater companies and specified that, unlike in Shakespeare’s day, women’s roles should be played by women rather than by adolescent boys.

Restoration Comedy was replete with smart witty dialogue, bawdy humor, clever rakes and the ladies they pursued, both those who had “lost their honor” (their virginity) and those who were still trying to maintain it. Libertine men seduce, then cast off, their mistresses. Ladies thwart unacceptable men who want to marry them for their money while pretending not to lure the men they really care for. Hypocritical friends swear loyalty in one scene and betray behind the back in the next one.

In Restoration Comedies, characters are not celebrated for simple virtues like kindness, courage, or morality, but rather for their ability to survive and thrive in the social realm. Admired most are qualities like beauty, grace, charm, cleverness, and above all, wit. In dialogue, sex and double entendre of all sorts abound. All of these elements make for sparkling comedy and great repartee, along with lots of dramatic irony and plot twists, all giving audiences a fun evening at the theater. Machinations of the characters are enjoyable to watch, and the witty dialogue is very funny.

Personally, though, I find it a little disheartening to read Restoration Comedies because they present such a worldly and satirical view of human nature. In this world, no one means what they say; almost no marriage is happy; almost no one is to be trusted. Of course these negative qualities could be taken as critiques not of humanity as a whole, but merely of Court values and behaviors.

Also on the plus side for the Restoration Comedy: these plays suggest that 18th century marriage was a bad bargain for most women, who spend their time in most of them devising stratagems to level the playing field with the men who pursue or possess them. By the end of the 1600s, this recurring theatrical theme may have helped enlarge the conversation about how to make marriage more equal for both men and women.

For more on Restoration Comedy, see this introductory article.

King Charles II reopened English theaters after their long closure during Puritan rule.

Famous Restoration Comedies

John Dryden, Marriage A La Mode, 1673.

This play features a double plot, contrasting an idealized love relationship between two noble and simple-hearted young people, Leonidas and Palmyra, with a sillier plot suggesting how the false glamour desire and courtly intrigue leads to mistakes in love relationships, as Rhodofil and Palamede start affairs with each other’s beloveds, Doralice and Melantha.

William Wycherley, The Country Wife , 1675.

A satirical comment on the state of love in the world of the court, The Country Wife features the libertine character Harry Horner, who has a clever stratagem for seduction: he gets his doctor to spread the rumor that Horner is impotent, so men are not afraid to leave their wives alone with Horner. Enter from the country the character Jack Pinchwife, a doddering old fool who has married a pretty, young, lusty wench who likes the look of Horner when she meets him at the play. Neither has heard the rumor about Horner; will Jack be able to bed the fair country wife in spite of Pinchwife’s jealousy?

The play also has an entertaining subplot: Alethea is set to marry Mr. Sparkish for worldly comfort, not for love. Enter Horner’s friend Harcourt, who falls for Alethea and wins her heart right in front of Sparkish, who misses the implications of all his double entendres.

George Etherege The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter , 1676

In this play, Dorimont, in the starring role as rake (a sophisticated playboy), finally meets the woman who makes him want to reform: the beautiful, smart, witty, and satirical Harriet Woodville, a young heiress. Unfortunately for Dorimont, there are obstacles. Harriet is under control of her old lovelorn aunt, Lady Woodville, whom Dorimont must pretend to court in order to get at Harriet. Also, his two past mistresses are still around to cause trouble. Sir Fopling Flutter, a character newly arrived in town is desperate to become the most fashionable man at court; Fopling provides much satirical humor and another subplot.

Aphra Behn, The Rover , 1677

Aphra Behn, the first professional English woman writer. Portrait by Mary Beale.

Aphra Behn, said to be England’s first professional woman writer, wrote this Restoration Comedy from a woman’s perspective, featuring a group of engaging young women who vocally reject the roles expected of young women of the time. Florinda wants to marry Belvile, a dashing English colonel, whereas her father wants her to marry an old rich man while her brother wants her to marry his best friend. Her sister Hellena is intended to become a nun, but she seems much more interested in love and sex.

The libertine Rover Willmore captures the heart of prostitute Angelica, but ends up captured by the enchanting Hellena. This bold group of young women and a rowdy group of young men all end up mingling in disguise at the Carnival in Naples. Hilarity, drunkenness, fights, and mistaken identities ensue. In this play I particularly enjoy the lively Hellena character.

The Rover was not much acted after the Restoration, if at all, until it was revived in the late 20th century at the Williamstown Theater Festival in New York in 1987. Take a look at this review of the play, which featured Christopher Reeve i n the role of Rover.

For more on Aphra Behn and influence on work of Daniel Defoe, see this post.

William Congreve, The Way of the Worl d ,1700.

Congreve’s plotline in this comedy seemed too complicated to be well-received by audiences in its time, but today’s critics often point to this play as the most brilliant and polished Restoration Comedy. It is well worth reading for the extremely witty and surprisingly honest interchanges between the play’s hero Mirabell, a reformed rake, and the heroine Millamant, a virtuous young heiress, a polished wit and lovely coquette who is attracted, in spite of herself, to Mirabell.

Of course there is an obstacle to their marriage: Millamant’s aunt Lady Wishfort controls half her fortune, and she hates Mirabell for having pretended to court her in order to get close to Millamant. There are other villains in the plot who have it in for Mirabell, specifically Fainall, who had been tricked into marrying Mirabell’s former mistress, and Fainall’s current mistress, Mrs. Marwood, who thwarts Mirabell’s romance with Millamant because she secretly wants to marry him herself. It all seems to come right in the end, but not before Congreve gives his characters much dialogue that goes a little deeper into the realities and values of love and marriage than some other Restoration Comedies might do.

Restoration Fiction

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress , 1677.

The subject matter of The Pilgrim’s Progress is about as far is it could be from the standard topics of Restoration Comedy. Written by Dissenting Baptist preacher John Bunyan during his long years of imprisonment for refusing to stop his unauthorized preaching outside the Anglican Church, Pilgrim’s Progress is probably the most famous allegory written in English. An allegory is a narrative in which the characters, events, and physical objects represent ideas that can be applied in other settings and circumstances outside those within the narrative.

Pilgrim’s Progress illustration: Christian enters the final gate, opened by Good Will.

The subtitle of Pilgrim’s Progress explains what Bunyan’s allegory is about: “From This World to That Which Is to Come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream.” The main character is Christian, who represents an ordinary man who becomes convinced God will condemn him as a sinner. Inspired by the man named Evangelist, he sets out on a difficult journey to reach the Celestial City, where God dwells and will welcome all penitent souls.

He meets many obstacles on the way that represent emotional and spiritual perils in the life of a Christian. One famous obstacle is The Slough of Despond, a swamp of discouragement into which he falls while walking heedless on the path. Much later on the journey, he passes through Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair displays every worldly value as precious and tempting, but Christian knows such worldly goods and achievements are only distractions from true eternal values.

Christians for generations read this book to gain wisdom and support as they sought to walk a godly path. Louisa May Alcott enshrined it as the favorite book of her Little Women, depicting the four sisters forming a Pilgrim’s Club to encourage each other to live up to their Christian values.

You can read a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress here, at the Gutenberg Project site.

Aphra Behn, The Rover, 1677 (see Restoration Comedies above); Oroonoko , 1688

The first English woman to make a living by writing, Aphra Behn has caught more current readers’ attention since the beginning of the 21st century. In her book blog in The Guardian , Belinda Webb says Behn is a Restoration combination of Dorothy Parker and Mae West. That alone makes her intriguing. A further endorsement comes from Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own , where she wrote, “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

Socializing easily in both Court and intellectual circles of her time, Mrs. Behn was known as witty and intelligent, but poor. Needing to make a living, she wrote every genre, from plays to poetry to fiction, becoming the first professional English woman writer. Her works are witty and clever, often melodramatic, and full of romance that was sexually frank for its day. Her works depict women as well as men suffering and acting upon extremes of love and sexual attraction.

Oroonoko is of interest today for multiple reasons. It is the story of a Black African prince, almost godlike in his physical strength and prowess in battle, as well as in his refined intelligence, moral feeling, and extreme loving devotion to his chosen mate, Imoinda. Behn’s melodramatic tale begins with the story of how Oroonoko falls in love and then loses his mate, then narrates how he is captured and sold into slavery in Surinam, then a West Indian colony of England.

Behn tells in detail how Oroonoko wins the high opinion of the white slave owners by his intelligence and moral delicacy. But impatient for his freedom, he attempts escape, then is captured and tortured, ultimately to death.

Over the years, Oroonoko seems to have awoken many readers to the horrors of the institution of slavery, as suggested by this quote from poem written by Hannah More, an anti-slavery activist, in 1788, a hundred years after Oroonoko’s publication.

From More’s “Slavery: A Poem:”

For no fictitious ills these numbers flow, But living anguish, and substantial woe; No individual griefs my bosom melt, For millions feel what Oroonoko felt: Fired by no single wrongs, the countless host I mourn, by rapine dragged from Afric’s coast. –Hannah Moore

Restoration Literature: 1660-1700 Augustan Age: 1700-1750 Age of Johnson and Sensibility: 1750-1789

Background on Reading Restoration and 18th Century Literature

View of St. Paul’s Clock Tower, designed by architect Christopher Wren and constructed in 1675.

This era is often named the Augustan Age after a period in Roman history when Augustus Caesar ruled. It was a rich era for Rome when the arts flourished. Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, favorite models for 18th century poets, were writing at this time.

1702: Death of William III. Succeeded by Anne, Protestant daughter of James II.

1707: Act of Union with Scotland.

1710: Tories take power.

1714: Death of Queen Anne. George I, great-grandson of James I, is first Hanoverian king. Whigs assume power over Tories.

1720: South Sea bubble investment scheme collapses.

1721: Robert Walpole comes to power.

1727: George I dies. George II succeeds.

1737: Licensing Act censors the stage.

1742: Handel’s Messiah has first performance, in Dublin.

1746: Charles Edward Stuart’s defeat at Culloden; ends Jacobite Rebellion.

English Literature of the Augustan Age, 1700-1750: Major Authors and Highlights:

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism , 1711; The Rape of the Lock , 1712; An Essay on Man , Epistle 1 and Epistle II, lines 1-18, 1734.

Alexander Pope is a towering figure in the literary world during this period, among the most famous writers of his day. He became allied with other writers like Swift and Gay, all championing traditional values based on reason, learning, and good taste. These values seemed to these writers to deteriorate as moneyed interests gained political power over Royal, traditional Anglican, and landed ones.

Like many other writers of his time, Pope honored the Classics, particularly Horace, Virgil, and Homer, adapting classical form and style to English poetry. As a Catholic, he was not allowed to go to college or obtain a government position. Instead, he was one of the first English writers to make a living solely through literature, his first commercial success being a popular translation of The Iliad .

The Rape of the Lock. Long poems in carefully balanced meter might not seem like your preferred reading, but if you give Pope’s poetry a try, I think you will be pleasantly surprised at its clarity, humor, wisdom, and pointed satire. The Rape of the Lock is about an incident that started a feud between two families, when the son of one family, without permission, cut a lock of hair from a daughter of the other family as a keepsake. Pope’s poem retells this incident in “mock heroic” style, where the people in the story are attended by miniscule gods and sprites who try to guard or influence their actions. Pope pokes fun by elevating mundane rituals into heroic actions, for instance when he describes Belinda’s getting dressed to go out as a heroine preparing for battle.

An Essay on Criticism. Even a brief foray into An Essay on Criticism conveys the qualities Pope, and most of his fellows, admire in literature: poetry should be composed by rule—following a particular form and meter—but the rules should all be based on the patterns and forms in Nature: “Those rules of old discovered, not devised, / Are Nature still, but Nature methodized” (Part I.88-89).

An Essay on Man. This later, more philosophical work discusses the strange position between God and beast in which people find themselves. The excerpt in this list ends with these lines, which sum up Pope’s observation about Man’s curious position within Creation:

Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! –Pope, An Essay on Man , Epistle II, lines 15-18

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 1721.

Jonathan Swift was an important and respected writer of his day, a friend of Pope, a Tory loyal to the Royals, and a staunch supporter of the Church and religious principles. His most frequent writing mode is satirical, painting a fairly critical view of personkind. His narrow view of humanity is certainly on display in the famous Gulliver’s Travels .

Though now often presented as a children’s story, readers of Swift’s day perceived immediately that Gulliver’s Travels was anything but a child’s tale. In fact it was a pointed satire against the wily, rising Whig Prime Minister Robert Walpole, as well as an excoriating critique of political and religious follies of Swift’s time. If you want to unravel all of those while reading, I recommend you get a good, edited edition with notes.

Even without knowing those references, Gulliver’s Travels is really fun to read, as we follow salt-of-the earth adventurer Lemuel Gulliver on four different voyages to strange lands. In one land, where everyone else is tiny, he is a physical giant; in another, where everyone else is huge, his is miniscule. In another land, impractical scientist-types hover in the sky over an island, doing pointless investigations and issuing impractical laws to the people they rule. In a fourth land, ruled by rational talking horses, Gulliver finds himself physically akin to the barbaric Yahoos, ape-like animalistic humans.

In each land, Gulliver observes a different basis for justifying the rule of others, whether of physical might, claimed moral superiority, dedication to scientific discovery, or placid rationality. All of these adventures give readers a radically different perspective to assess human character; on the whole, the picture is not flattering.

Though Gulliver prefers the company and rule of the rational but emotionally cold horses, it’s not clear that Swift would say the same. Swift doesn’t seem to give any human overmuch credit, suggesting the limit of any kind of claim to moral superiority over others. Perhaps he is showing that basic human decency and common sense is the best basis for social order.

Read it yourself and see what you think Swift is saying.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “This painting combines the two genres: the imaginary foreground is inspired by antiquity, while in the background is a view of the north bank of the Thames with St. Paul’s cathedral, the Tower of London, and Old London Bridge.” Painted in late 1740s.

John Gay, The Beggar’s Oper a, 1728.

John Gay was another companion of famous writers Swift and Pope who held similar political views, loyal to the crown and dismayed at the apparently corrupt ascension of Whig politicians like Robert Walpole, who seemed to win political power by exploiting money and greed. The Beggar’s Opera was a new thing at the time but was immediately acclaimed: a satire of the lavish Italian opera, very popular during these years. Instead of high-born beautifully dressed characters who sing elaborate passionate arias found in Italian opera, Gay’s characters are lowborn thieves, killers, and criminals who sing clever songs to popular tunes. In operas, characters dialogue in “recitative,” half-spoken and half-sung words; in The Beggar’s Opera , characters just talk normally in working class accents.

Gay satirizes Whig politician Robert Walpole as the character Peachum, a double-dealing crook who works with thieves to fence their goods, but then turns the less profitable ones in to the authorities for money. Gay also borrows from a real incident about two famous opera divas whose rivalry once led them to come to blows on the stage. In The Beggar’s Opera , these singers are redrawn as young lowborn Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit, who quarrel over the notorious but gallant highwayman MacHeath.

Though Gay wrote his work to comment directly on eroding social values he observed in his own time, readers over the years continue to see the play as an apt picture of the corruption they observe in their own societies. Wherever the poorest criminals are punished while the rich criminals remain free, even honored in the highest echelons of society, The Beggar’s Opera seems relevant. Two hundred years later, Brecht and Weill adapted Gay’s work for their famous “Threepenny Opera” as a comment on corruption in 1920s Germany.

Interesting fact: The gallant criminal character MacHeath eventually evolved into the subject of the famous 1 960s Bobby Darin song “Mack the Knife.” You can hear it here.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “The Lover: A Ballad” 1747; “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to her Husband” 1724.

Daughter of a wealthy Whig peer, the intellectual Lady Mary Wortley Montagu taught herself Latin as a teen, a rare accomplishment for a woman of the 18th century. She is known today for her letter writing, but as a poet, she can hold her own with the famous men poets of the day. Her poems are polished and full of barbative wit, arguing in a worldly and amusing way for women’s right to respect and equal say in their destinies, including their sexual lives.

“The Lover: A Ballad” takes a frequent theme from the popular male libertine poets of the day: disappointment when they can’t perform in bed. But this poem relates this situation from the woman’s point of view.

“Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to her Husband” addresses a real situation. Mrs. Yonge had an affair and was sued for divorce by her husband, losing most of the money she brought to the marriage. The poem points out that her husband had affairs as well, so why is the woman punished differently from men for the same behavior?

Fiction in the Augustan Age

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe , 1719; Journal of the Plague Year, 1722;_ Moll Flanders , 1722.

See this post to learn about Defoe’s contribution to Realism in Fiction.

Daniel Defoe was an endlessly inventive author and entrepreneur, dabbling in business enterprises, doing a stint as a spy for the government, writing pamphlets (he was even thrown in jail for a time for something he wrote), and starting a unique genre of political journalism in his Review , which reported on current affairs 2-3 times every week. He is remembered as writer who could cater to the growing middle class English readership amidst a new media explosion. More women, business people, clerks, and upper servants had skills and enough leisure to read, and Defoe kept evolving new kinds of things for them to read.

Robinson Crusoe. With Robinson Crusoe , Defoe sought to capitalize on the popular memoir genre by writing a fiction as if it were a real memoir. He succeeded so well that Crusoe’s first readers thought Crusoe was a real person. Read it to enjoy how Defoe deploys detail to build up a real-feeling experience of a man trying to survive in an unfamiliar world.

Journal of the Plague Year is a combination of fiction and real-life reporting. The plague occurred when Defoe was only four years old, but he had an uncle who lived through it. He interviewed him along with others who were there, and investigated other documents on the plague year as well. This account is written as if he were an eyewitness; it is fiction based on fact.

Moll Flanders. Lovers of novels, myself included, owe a debt to Defoe for inventing so many features of the genre that was to flower so abundantly in the 19th century. See “ Defoe and the Invention of Realism in the Novel ” to learn how Moll Flanders showcases Defoe’s evolution in writing technique, beginning with pure narrative that mimics real-life memoir, and gradually adding more drama and scene painting, gesturing toward more depth in character development.

In the end, though, read Moll Flanders for more than just technique; Moll is a fun and memorable character, a pickpocket with a heart of gold, who leads an adventurous life moving up and down through many sectors of 18th Century society.

Epistolary Novelist Samuel Richardson with Family

Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 1740; Clarissa Harlowe: Or, The History of a Young Lady, 1748.

Before becoming a famous novelist, Richardson was a well-regarded printer and bookseller. His popular “epistolary” novels, in which a story is told through a series of letters, became significant to literary history in demonstrating how intimately a fictional narrative could portray the inner psyche of its characters. His innovations began when he was commissioned to write a book of sample letters to help less educated readers learn the proper forms of letter-writing.

Pamela . Eventually Richardson began carrying on a story from one letter to another, the tale of a young upper servant girl writing to her parents about how her male employer was trying to seduce her. This emotional story told in letters became the novel Pamela . Very popular in its day, its readers thrilled to Pamela’s emotional and harrowing tale of how she manages to keep her virtue, falls in love with her would-be seducer, and eventually marries him.

Pamela was not universally acclaimed, however; many critics pointed out that though the tale was meant as moral, the undertones seemed rather lewd. Furthermore, Pamela could be viewed not as virtuous but as a manipulator, playing her cards right to catch a rich man. Henry Fielding wrote Shamela as a humorous response, recasting Pamela’s role from this viewpoint, and later Joseph Andrews , about a young footman whose virtue is attacked by Lady Booby, a reversal of the situation in Pamela.

Clarissa . I don’t expect that many of today’s readers will make the effort to read the vast and weighty Clarissa . I don’t blame them—the current Penguin edition of the book is over 1500 pages long!

However, I have read it and can testify that they are 1500 rather astonishing pages. I have never read any other novel that gets so intimately into the heads and lives of its characters. Indeed, I can think of no other novelist who has actually become his own characters to the extent that Richardson has. Therefore I say this:

I dare you to read it! I dare you to read at least some of it.

This epistolary novel (told completely in the form of letters written to intimate friends) focuses on the story of a lovely and innocent young woman, Clarissa Harlowe, and her attempted seduction by rich libertine Robert Lovelace. Clarissa writes letters back and forth to her best friend Anna Howe, and Lovelace writes to his friend and fellow playboy John Belford.

Clarissa is attracted to Lovelace; she accepts what she believes is his honorable help to escape from a loveless marriage her parents have arranged to a nasty old man. But accepting his offer to convey her to a safe place merely gets her out of the frying pan into the fire, because now she is at his mercy.

In her letters to Anna, she discusses at length all her struggles and reasons for resisting his advances, and Anna returns with lively advice and shrewd perceptions about Clarissa’s blind spots about herself. Lovelace discusses his strategies and reasons to seduce Clarissa with his fellow libertine Belford. But as the pages wend on, all the characters develop and evolve with great subtlety and detail.

The novel provides readers a truly unique total submersion experience. It has also shown later writers how fictional characters can assume the dimensions and contradictions inherit in actual living psyches.

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749.

Henry Fielding as 18th Century novelist is Samuel Richardson’s foil. Where Richardson is earnest, Fielding is playful; where Richardson is didactic, Fielding is satiric; where Richardson is melodramatic, Fielding is sentimental. Fielding is just a lot of fun, but he does indeed have serious points to make, and uses plenty of words to make them.

Fielding began his writing career as a playwright; that ended when a play too bluntly satirized Robert Walpole, the powerful Whig Prime Minister. Walpole oversaw passage of a new Licensing Act, which required plays to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain before production. Fielding, on the wrong political team, was out. To make a living, he turned to writing fiction.

Tom Jones , together with Richardson’s work, helped define the two poles the novel genre was to become in future times. While Richardson’s fiction is intense and psychological, told through intimate letters, Fielding’s Tom Jones is built with dramatic scenes, both comic and sentimental, all told by a friendly, chatty omniscient narrator. With not infrequent pauses to address the reader directly, especially to discuss how a story should be told and how readers should judge it, Fielding’s narrator tells the amusing story of a young illegitimate boy adopted by rich, kind Squire Allworthy.

Adoptee Tom is a kind-hearted, impulsive person who always stands up for the underdog and hates to turn down a lady, so to speak. (He doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings!) Fielding celebrates Tom for his “sensibility” and true kindness of heart, but shows how he needs to learn to act with more discretion, reason, and forethought.

Helping Tom to learn this wisdom is his great adoration for Sophia Western (a lovely virtuous girl representing a kind of Wisdom Goddess). Following Tom’s tale is a lot of fun, but there are many more comic characters, both villains and heroes, who convey Fielding’s views on current 18th century society along with what qualities of character are eternally valuable.

Reading Restoration and 18th Century Literature

Age of Johnson and “Sensibility” 1750-1789

Samuel Johnson, the man of letters whose work sums up the 18th Century. Portrait by Joshua Reynolds.

1757: Indian Provinces of Bengal pass into British control after Battle of Plassey

1760: George II dies. George III becomes King.

1771: Opening of Britain’s first cotton mill.

1772: Slavery effectively outlawed in England

1774: Methodist founder John Wesley publishes “Thoughts on Slavery,” with moral arguments against it

1776: American rebellion/”War for Independence” (depending on what side you’re on) James Watt produces steam engines.

1780: Gordon Riots (for rights of workers) in London.

1789: French Revolution.

English Literature in the Age of Johnson, 1750-1789: Major Authors and Highlights:

Samuel Johnson, Quotes and Excerpts from anything that he wrote; or, try these: “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” 1749; Quotes and excerpts from A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755; “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia,” 1759; scan the “Preface to Shakespeare, 1765,” “On Idleness” from Idler , 1758; “On Fiction,” from T he Rambler , 1750; any verses dedicated to “Stella.”

Johnson is a writer who towers over the 18th Century; living as he did toward the end of the era, and writing in so many genres with reasoned criticism about every important topic, he can almost be taken as a commentator on the entire era. His writing is dense, not because it is muddy or hard to understand, but because every single sentence is so packed with meaning. I seldom make quick progress through his texts, not because they are obtuse or unclear, but because I keep pausing to think over the sentence I have just finished reading.

For that reason, I think best way to get acquainted with Johnson is just to read a page of his most magnificent quotations! Here is a sample from a great webpage to start exploring the wit and wisdom of Samuel Johnson:

“I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.” “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.” “I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.” “Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.” —Samuel Johnson

Dictionary of the English Language , 1755.

After enjoying some great quips and quotations, go on to sample the most famous dictionary ever written. Though not the first dictionary written in the English language, Johnson innovated many scholarly aspects adopted by most dictionaries to come, such as providing quotations that showed words in use and how their meanings changed over time.

According to the British Library, “the comparable French Dictionnaire had taken 55 years to compile and required the dedication of 40 scholars.” By contrast, Johnson’s Dictionary took him only about eight years to research and write, with the aid of six clerks to help with copying. This work is a towering achievement by a genius of the English language.

You wouldn’t think a dictionary would be fun to read, but it is! The easiest way is to explore excerpts. Start here with this article by Paul Anthony Jones writing on Mental Floss about funny definitions from the dictionary.

You can also browse this website, where the whole of Johnson’s dictionary can be found online !

“The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Take this in next, an elegant, serene, and readable poem about the things humans think they want vs. the things that really matter.

After that, for a view of his tenets of what made great literature, read his thought-provoking “Preface to Shakespeare,” or just some excerpts from it. You can also try this abridged online version by Jack Lynch.

Want more? The next move could be to “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, ” a philosophical tale in which a young prince, born into a perfect society that is walled-off from the rest of the world, longs to see and explore the world outside. This is the story of his thoughts and efforts, what he learns from this quest, and what eternal truths about life he discovers.

If you want more Johnson, but something a little lighter, just flip through any of the essays from his essay collection “The Idler,” such as “On Idleness,” or from his own magazine “The Rambler.” Anyone interested in the development of fiction and novel in the era should read “On Fiction.”

I am also fond of all the verses he wrote to women , many of them dedicated to “Stella,” such as “An Evening Ode: To Stella,” or “The Natural Beauty, to Stella.”

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D , excerpts, 1791.

James Boswell was an intimate friend of Samuel Johnson in his later years, not to mention acquainted with most of the famous writers, artists, and thinkers of the era, including Rousseau and Voltaire. In his biography of Johnson, he recounts in detail his many, many meetings with his hero. The work paints a thorough picture not only of Johnson’s life, ideas, and conversation, but of the entire English intellectual scene at the time.

Poetry in the Age of Johnson

William Collins, “Ode to Simplicity,” “Ode to Evening,” and “Ode on Poetical Character,” 1746.

Like most poets of the 18th Century, William Collins followed classical models, as well as Milton, in the form of his poems, but his subject matter was similar to what would preoccupy romantic poets to come later in the 1790s and early 1800s.

Johnson complained that Collins was too fond of the supernatural side of Classical works, populating his poems with nymphs and fairies and the like. But the overall character of the works is serene, peaceful, and simple.

Critics have pointed out that “Ode to Simplicity” is patterned on the form of Milton’s “Nativity Ode.” Collins’s Ode praises the ancient poetry that had been written in the simplest style, before later more elaborate styles came in to vogue. Like Romantic poets to come, he suggests that Nature is the source of true Poetry and inspiration.

Also check out the lovely “ Ode to Evening ” and “ Ode on the Poetical Character. ”

Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat,” 1748; “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 1751.

“Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” is a sweet little poem marking the death of his friend Horace Walpole’s pet. He imagines the cat in human terms and draws a moral from the episode. See this post for more discussion of this work .

“Elegy in a Country Churchyard” is written in somewhat formal, regular meter, but its themes, like those of Collins, presage themes to come from the Romantic poets in the 1790s. This poem celebrates the lives of ordinary working people of the country who live simple lives out of sight of the great city world, “far from the madding crowd.”

This is such a lovely, serene, thoughtful, memorable poem with many famous lines. Two examples: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” and “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

If you read no other poem from this era, read this one.

Brading Church Graveyard, Isle of Wight

Charles Wesley, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” Come, O thou Traveler Unknown,” “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” (ca. 1740s).

In 1739, Charles’s brother John Wesley, an Anglican minister, preached his first open-air sermon to a group of miners near Bristol. Thus began the Methodist movement, which emphasized personal holiness, a personal relationship with God, and outreach to working class people, who were urged to become literate, read the Scripture, improve their lives and behaviors, and become lay leaders among their own circles. This movement was to have a huge influence on the temper of Victorian culture, and helped fuel the success of the abolitionist movement in England.

Charles’s role in this movement was to write hymns. He is thought to have written over 6,500. Some of them, including the ones I list here, are good poems, as well as hymns that explain the essence of the Methodist approach to the Christian faith.

“Love Divine” first appeared in Wesley’s Hymns for those that Seek, and those that Have Redemption (Bristol, 1747). See the downloadable pdf text of this work here . Wikipedia entry has links to words to these hymns and other sources on Charles Wesley .

Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village,” 1770; She Stoops to Conquer, 1771; The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766 (see description below under “Fiction”).

Oliver Goldsmith, painted by Joshua Reynolds.

Goldsmith was a struggling writer from Ireland who became Johnson’s protégé. He was a versatile writer in the sentimental mode, writing poetry, plays, and novels. “The Deserted Village” reminisces about the sweetness and simplicity of life in English agricultural villages.

This way of life was disappearing because of “Enclosure Laws.” These laws allowed estate owners to enclose vast amounts of property that used to be open grazing lands for yeomen farmers. Rich landowners wanted their land unused for grazing in order to preserve hunting fields, and Goldsmith was writing to criticize this practice, which made it impossible for small farmers to earn a living.

She Stoops to Conquer is a piece of post-Restoration theater that is quite different in tone and temper from the Restoration earlier plays. Restoration plays are satirical and witty; She Stoops to Conquer is just fun and silly. There are still pranks and schemes, but no villain looks too evil and it all comes out fine in the end.

William Cowper “Light Shining out of Darkness,” 1773; “The Shrubbery,” 1773; “ “Epitaph on a Hare,” 1785; “The Poplar- Field,” 1785; “On Receipt of My Mother’s Picture,” 1798; “The Castaway,” 1799.

I really love reading William Cowper. His style brought a fresh simplicity to poetry of his day and was popular then, and still well-known now among poetry lovers. His poetry is gentle, winsome, sweet, often melancholy.

Cowper struggled with depression and mental illness over the years, which affected his outlook on life. He was religious, although he struggled with faith and intermittent fears that he was damned. Yet his poetry is often touching and hopeful. To read some, search the listed titles online—texts of the poems listed are easy to find. You may recognize some of the famous lines.

Interesting note: at one time Cowper was friend of John Newton, the reformed slave-trader turned curate; he cooperated with Newton on his substantial hymn collection, Olney Hymns . ( Read the whole collection here ). This work contains Newton’s very famous hymn “Amazing Grace.”

George Crabbe, “The Village,” Book I (1783)

Crabbe’s “The Village” is in part a rejoinder to Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village.” Crabbe believed Goldsmith’s picture of village life was too rosy and sentimental. Crabbe’s “Village” contrasts the Augustan pastoral view of village life with what he believes to be the hard truths of rural poverty. Find Book I here , or here .

Fiction in the Age of Johnson

Oliver Goldsmith, Vicar of Wakefield , 1766.

I had the pleasure of teaching this sentimental gem several times in my course on The English Novel. It tells the story of simple soul Dr. Primrose, a vicar with a large family that undergoes many vicissitudes. They lose all their money, spoiling the marriage of his oldest son to a beloved girl. His wife leads their girls into vanity and bad company in their new parish. The oldest daughter is seduced by the immoral local nobleman, their house burns down, and Dr. Primrose is imprisoned for debt.

Through all, Dr. Primrose maintains his upright and (some might say) blind faith that God will provide. In the end, everything comes right at the hands of someone they thought was untrustworthy, proving that Dr. Primrose might be faithful but not necessarily perceptive.

The book sounds overly sticky sweet, but it’s not. Many critics have discussed how Goldsmith undercuts the sentiment with gentle irony throughout, lending some complexity to this simple tale.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 1759.

How do I describe Tristram Shandy ? I find it a delight to read, though not all of my reading friends agree. To start with, the novel overall is an elaborate joke about, but also a semi-serious exploration of, John Locke’s theories of mind. Sterne wants to examine how people come to be who they are.

The first-person narrator, Shandy himself, sets out to write the story of his life, but he is compelled to constantly interrupt himself to explain some previous chain of events that brought the situation to the point he wishes to describe. Thus by the end of the book, he has described his own life only up to the age of four years old!

What he does describe throughout the work are his progenitors, and all the characters who had input into who Shandy himself was to become. The focus is on his father Walter, a sharp and irritable person, and his Uncle Toby, a gentle and sentimental lover of humanity. A lot of the humor comes from the contrast between these two brothers.

To enjoy this book, you have to just relax and go with the flow, laughing at farcical humor, double-entendres, random philosophical discussion, and even occasional blank pages—just following the mind of a charming and interesting man wherever it happens to go. It is a tour de force; you will either hate it, or, as I do, adore it. Give it a try.

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto , 1764.

Eighteenth century culture regarded the Middle Ages as largely barbaric until Horace Walpole, son of notorious politician Robert Walpole, became fascinated with its architecture and (as he saw it) mystique. He bought a large country manor house and began to remodel it according to his idea of a Medieval Castle, christening it Strawberry Hill.

One night at Strawberry Hill Walpole had a dream of a giant helmet magically appearing in the grand hall. From that dream sprung this work, The Castle of Otranto , which was to become the very first Gothic novel. The short work tells the tale of how supernatural events interfere with Prince Manfred’s plan to secure ownership of his castle and estate by marrying his son to Princess Isabella. That goes wrong when a huge helmet mysteriously appears to crush Conrad to death. What is going on? Apparently, an old prophecy is magically coming true.

You can read the book here for free to find out what happens:

Engraving of Strawberry Hill as it looked in Horace Walpole’s day.

William Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 1771.

William Smollett was one of young Charles Dickens’s favorite writers, and Humphrey Clinker may have been a model for his breakout hit Pickwick Papers . In Clinker, Smollett uses the epistolary technique (story told through letters) to recount the travels around England and Scotland of the family of Squire Matthew Bramble.

The country travelers consist of generous though irritable wealthy squire Bramble, his unmarried man-hungry older sister, her serving maid, his young pretty niece, his college-age nephew, and their servant Humphry Clinker. Smollett produces humor as well as social critique by having each different person recount the same incident from their own personal perspective. Naturally their accounts don’t all agree.

Fanny Burney, Evelina, 1778.

Fanny Burney is an important author to those of us who love Jane Austen, who would be writing about 30 years later. Burney led the way in showing that “nice” women could write for money. Her brand of domestic comedy in Evelina, focusing on a young ingenue’s encounters with high society, provided a model for Austen’s plots and subject matter.

In this novel, a well-cared for orphan country girl Evelina visits the city for the first time along with her aunt who offers to chaperone. She makes multiple etiquette mistakes while meeting young men that she hates, as well as one man she comes to love. Her kindly adopted father has not told her about her true parentage, so she must also navigate the various relatives she meets who want to influence and control her.

The scene and situation of this epistolary novel allows Burney to critique current 18th century culture and mores through an innocent’s eyes. The picture of a culture over-dependent on arbitrary rules that do nothing to stop unsavory people from attempting to control an innocent girl is not 100% flattering.

Fanny Burney, painted by Edward Burney

Index to all Literary Timelines and Reading Lists

Photo Credits:

Hampton Court in mid-1600s. Hendrick Danckerts, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons .

Great Fire of London. Museum of London, Public domain , via Wikimedia Commons.

King Charles II. Jacob de Wet II, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Aphra Behn. Mary Beale, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pilgrim’s Progress illustration. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

St Paul’s clocktower. Public Domain via Wikimedia commons.

Alexander Pope. ByJonathan Richardson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

London river view. Museum of London, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons .

Samuel Richardson and Family. See Credits on this article .

Samuel Johnson. By Joshua Reynolds, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Graveyard on Isle of Wight. Wikimedia Commons .

Oliver Goldsmith. By Joshua Reynolds, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons .

Strawberry Hill.

Fanny Burney. By Edward Francis Burney, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons .

Never Miss a Post!

CLICK HERE to sign up for a newsletter alerting you to our latest posts. Newsletter is sent no more than once per week. Unsubscribe at any time.

Email Required. First and Last Name are optional.

Click here for a sample of what you will receive: Sample Weekly Email

Search the Site

Reading Fiction
Reading Poetry
Uncategorized

Privacy Policy: Click Here

Cookie policy: click here, newsletter sign-up.

Get email alerts of our latest posts.

Click HERE to sign up.

Author Login

Entries feed
Comments feed
WordPress.org

Email Read Great Literature

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any of the content on this site without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts of four sentences or fewer and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Read Great Literature with appropriate and specific direction to the original content, including a link to the content on this site.

Read Great Literature is written for the purpose of informing readers about classic literature and helping them enjoy it more. All views expressed on Read Great Literature are those of M. J. Brown and guest writers only, representing our own knowledge, opinions, and research. They do not represent the views of any other entity with which we may be associated.

The authors of this site are not to be held responsible for misuse, reuse, recycled and cited or un-cited copies of content within this site by others.

Contact: [email protected].

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑

DON’T MISS A POST!

Get EMAIL ALERTS with links to OUR LATEST.

An open book lying on the grass, surrounded by fallen leaves, brings to mind the widespread focus on nature in the works of many writers during the American Romantic era.

Delivered no more than once per week.

First and Last Name Optional. Unsubscribe at any time.

CLICK HERE for SIGN-UP FORM

Link to Privacy Policy in Website Footer.

Privacy Overview

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

The Best Eighteenth-Century Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The eighteenth century was the great Age of Enlightenment, but also Romanticism. The Augustan or neoclassical poetry of Alexander Pope and others eventually gave way to the Romantic meditations of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Below, we introduce ten of the greatest and most emblematic poems of the eighteenth century. We’ve confined ourselves to poems written in the English language here, to make the task even vaguely achievable.

1. Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock .

The neoclassical return to the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome – coupled with a desire for rationalism and order – dominated the first half of the eighteenth century in English verse. And nobody better personified this neoclassical ideal than Alexander Pope (1688-1744), who made his name while still in his early twenties with this mock-heroic satire on the vanity of upper-class society in the early eighteenth century.

When a lock of Belinda’s hair is cut off, a ‘war’ ensues, taking in the whole epic cast of supernatural entities (Sylphs and the like):

Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel A well-bred lord t’ assault a gentle belle? O say what stranger cause, yet unexplor’d, Could make a gentle belle reject a lord? In tasks so bold, can little men engage, And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty rage?

2. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘ Hymn to the Moon ’.

Montagu (1689-1762) was a remarkable eighteenth-century woman: as well as her writing, she is also credited with introducing smallpox inoculation to Britain, half a century before Edward Jenner developed vaccination against the disease.

‘Hymn to the Moon’ is a wonderful lyric about the moon which shows that eighteenth-century poets weren’t always writing in a satirical vein. Indeed, in many ways Montagu’s poem prefigures the Romantic poems written at the end of the eighteenth century:

By thy pale beams I solitary rove, To thee my tender grief confide; Serenely sweet you gild the silent grove, My friend, my goddess, and my guide.

3. Samuel Johnson, ‘ The Vanity of Human Wishes ’.

Samuel Johnson (1709-84) embodies much of the eighteenth century with its determination to define, categorise, and classify: he is best-remembered for his monumental 1755 Dictionary of the English Language . But he was also a poet: much of Johnson’s poetry is written in the heroic couplets (iambic pentameter rhyming couplets) used in Pope’s poem above.

Much of it also contains a strong element of moral instruction, as here, in his poem about vanity:

The teeming mother, anxious for her race, Begs for each birth the fortune of a face: Yet Vane could tell what ills from beauty spring; And Sedley curs’d the form that pleas’d a king. Ye nymphs of rosy lips and radiant eyes, Whom Pleasure keeps too busy to be wise, Whom Joys with soft varieties invite, By day the frolic, and the dance by night, Who frown with vanity, who smile with art, And ask the latest fashion of the heart, What care, what rules your heedless charms shall save, Each nymph your rival, and each youth your slave?

4. Thomas Gray, ‘ Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ’.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds …

Of course, this classic eighteenth-century poem had to feature in our list of the best churchyard poems! The ‘country churchyard’ referred to in the poem’s title belonged to St Giles’ parish church at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire.

‘Gray’s Elegy’ (as it’s often known) was partly inspired by the death of another poet, Richard West, in 1742, but became a grand meditation on death and the simple memorials left behind by rustic village folk rather than statesmen and celebrated figures. The poem also gave Thomas Hardy the phrase ‘far from the madding crowd’ for use as the title of his fourth published novel.

5. Phillis Wheatley, ‘ On Being Brought from Africa to America ’.

’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew …

Wheatley (c. 1753-84; pictured right) was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 when she was probably still in her early twenties.

Wheatley had been taken from Africa to America as a young girl, but was freed shortly after the publication of her poems; the short poem ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’ reminds her (white) readers that although she is black, everyone – regardless of skin colour – can be ‘refined’ and join the choirs of the godly. The poem betrays its eighteenth-century context and the attitudes towards race at the time, but Wheatley’s voice is an important one in eighteenth-century American – indeed, world – poetry.

6. Robert Burns, ‘ A Red, Red Rose ’.

Possibly based on a traditional lyric, this poem – also called ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’ – is one of the most widely anthologised love poems in English. Bob Dylan called it his single biggest inspiration. And did the final two lines inspire The Proclaimers to write ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’? One cannot choose but wonder.

7. Charlotte Smith, ‘ Sonnet on being Cautioned against Walking on a Headland ’.

Is there a solitary wretch who hies To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow, And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes Its distance from the waves that chide below; Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf, With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies Murmuring responses to the dashing surf …

English Romanticism wasn’t entirely dominated by men, although it’s true that names like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and so on tend to dominate the lists. But as Dorothy Wordsworth’s role in inspiring ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ demonstrates, Romanticism wasn’t quite an all-male affair.

This poem by Charlotte Turner Smith, a pioneer of Romanticism in England who was born before Wordsworth or Coleridge, is that rarest of things: a Gothic sonnet. This needn’t surprise when we bear in mind that the sonnet’s author, Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) was associated with English Romanticism and was also a key figure in the revival of the English sonnet.

8. William Blake, ‘ The Tyger ’.

The opening line of this poem, ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright’, is among the most famous lines in all of William Blake’s poetry. Accompanied by a painting of an altogether cuddlier tiger than the ‘Tyger’ depicted by the poem itself, ‘The Tyger’ first appeared in Songs of Experience in 1794. Framed as a series of questions, ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright’ (as the poem is also often known) sees Blake’s speaker wondering about the creator responsible for such a fearsome creature as the tiger.

The fiery imagery used throughout the poem conjures the tiger’s aura of danger: fire equates to fear. Don’t get too close to the tiger, Blake’s poem seems to say, otherwise you’ll get burnt. This is one of the most famous poems of the late eighteenth century and an important example of English Romanticism, although Blake stands separate from the next two poets on this list…

9. William Wordsworth, ‘ Tintern Abbey ’.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur.—Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky …

This poem was not actually composed at Tintern Abbey, but, as the poem’s full title reveals, was written nearby, overlooking the ruins of the medieval priory in the Wye Valley in South Wales. Well, actually, according to Wordsworth, he didn’t ‘write’ a word of the poem until he got to Bristol, where he wrote down the whole poem, having composed it in his head shortly after leaving the Wye.

The poem is one of the great hymns to tranquillity, quiet contemplation, and self-examination in all of English literature, and a quintessential piece of Romantic poetry written in meditative blank verse. We have analysed this classic Wordsworth poem here .

10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner .

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink …

Coleridge’s classic 1798 poem first appeared in Lyrical Ballads , the volume Coleridge co-authored with William Wordsworth. Wordsworth disliked The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , a long narrative poem inspired by a story Coleridge had heard from a Somerset sailor, and only reluctantly allowed it to be included in reprints of the collection. Coleridge’s poem, which is now recognised as a classic, contains perhaps the most famous poetic lines about water in the whole of English literature: ‘Water, water, anywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.’

Discover more classic poetry with these birthday poems , short poems about death , and these classic war poems .

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

1 thought on “The Best Eighteenth-Century Poems Everyone Should Read”

Bound to be! I’ve seen The Proclaimers in concert twice, and they’re very keen on promoting Scottish culture – I’m sure they’ve read Burns!

The Restoration and the 18th Century

King Charles II

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 Longman Anthology of British Literature

Those RULES of old discover’d, not devis’d, Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d . ~ Alexander Pope

Background: The Augustans and the Age of Reason

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.

During this time, a premium was placed on the importance of human reason and on an empirical philosophy that held that knowledge about the world was through the senses and by applying reason to what we take in through our senses. Reason was an unchanging, uniquely human characteristic that served as a guide for man. Thus this time is often also called the Age of Reason or Enlightenment. Characteristics of this period included observing human nature and nature itself which were considered unchanging and constant.

The age is also known as the Neoclassical period. Writers of the time placed great emphasis on the original writings produced by classical Greek and Roman literature. The literature of this period imitated that of the age of Caesar Augustus, writers such as Horace and Virgil, with classical influences appearing prevalent in poetry with the use of rhyming, and in prose with its satirical form. The Augustans deemed classical literature as natural, that these works were the idealized models for writing. The Neoclassical “ideals of order, logic, restraint, accuracy, ‘correctness,’ decorum,. . . would enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or reproduce the structures or themes of Greek or Roman originals” (Victorian Web). Alexander Pope furthers this idea as he says “Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; To copy Nature is to copy them” ( Essay on Criticism ). The way to study nature is to study the ancients; the styles and rules of classical literature. Closely allied with the emphasis placed on the classics and the unchanging rules of nature was the belief that reason was an unchanging and unique human quality that served as a guide for man.

An Age of Satire

Literature during this period was often considered a tool for the advancement of knowledge. Writers were often found observing nature in their attempts to express their beliefs. Human nature was considered a constant that observation and reason could be applied to for the advancement of knowledge. Within these circumstances, the Age of Satire was born. Satire was the most popular literary tool that was utilized by writers of the time. With the help of satire, writers were better able to educate the public through literature. Its function was to acknowledge a problem in society and attempt to reform the problem in a comical manner while still educating the public. Its effectiveness can be seen in literary pieces by Jonathan Swift such as A Modest Proposal where he addresses and criticizes the problem of a growing famine in Ireland. Playwrights of the time were also known to incorporate satire in their plays. Through the use of satire, they were able to expose and critique social injustices. “Over the thirty years of its triumphs, Restoration comedy, in an astounding fugue of excesses and depravities, laid bare the turbulence and toxins of this culture” (Longman). Satire was a highly successful literary tool that worked to promote social awareness through literature, the theater and periodicals of the time.

1660: Restoration–Charles II, Stuart monarchy
1662: Royal Society established
1685: James, Duke of York, succeeds his brother Charles II
1688: Glorious Revolution–James II deposed, William and Mary share the English throne
1689: Bill of Rights–limits crown, affirms supremacy of Parliament
1689: Toleration Act–religious freedom for dissenters
1690: John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1707: Act of Union–England and Scotland for Great Britain
1745: Last Jacobite uprising

For more details see Restoration Politics

Cultural and Literary Contexts

Newspapers and Periodicals
The Coffeehouse Culture
Classical Education in the Eighteenth Century
Eighteenth-Century Grammars
Religion, Politics, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama
The Royal Society and the Enlightenment
Social and Family Life in the Late17th & Early 18th Centuries
Jonathan Swift
Alexander Pope
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Richardson
Henry Fielding
Oliver Goldsmith
Thomas Gray
John Dryden

Damrosch, Daivd, and Kevin J.H. Dettmar. The Longman Anthology of British Literature . 3rd ed. United States: Pearson Education, Inc., 2006.

Damrosch, Daivd, and Kevin J.H. Dettmar. “Essay on Criticism.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature . 3rd ed. United States: Pearson Education, Inc., 2006.

Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews . 1st ed. United States: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1987.

“Neoclassicism: An Introduction.” The Victorian Web . http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/nc/ncintro.html 16 Mar. 2008.

“Restoration Drama”. Theatre History . 2 Mar. 2008 < http://www.theatrehistory.com/british/restoration_drama_001.html>.

Contributors: Diane Aiken, Lindsay Milbourne

English 101: English Literature

Introduction to 17th & 18th-century literature: major authors and works.

If the above player doesn't work, try this direct link .

After you watch the video and know the material, click HERE for the quiz.

A lot can happen in 200 years, as you'll see on our lesson that introduces you to British literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Go from Shakespeare to the invention of the novel to the introduction of a prominent dictionary in our video below!

200 Years of Literature

Two hundred years of literature - no big deal, right? As you might have guessed, during the 17th and 18th centuries, a whole lot happened in the world of English lit. It would be impossible to cover everything that went down in this intro lesson, but we're going to take a quick tour of the broad movements that defined these two centuries of the written word in the U.K.

If you, like me, struggle with what '17th century' means as far as what the years actually were, 17th century: 1600s; 18th century: 1700s. I mix those up all the time; let's just put that out there right now.

Basically, this period of English literature can be broken down into three smaller eras, each of which has their own little sub-eras, so take these designations loosely. It's not like they're set in stone, but they're just meant to give a sense of context. So, today we're going to be looking at:

The Renaissance - or really, the back end of it. The early 17th century is also known as the 'Jacobean era' in England.
The Caroline, Interregnum and Restoration periods that filled up the latter half of the 17th century. By the way, these names basically just refer to what was going on politically at the time. ('Caroline' is the Latin word for 'Charles,' and King Charles I had an on-again/off-again relationship with the throne during this time.)
The Neoclassicism of the 18th century. The first half of this century is also known as the 'Augustan era'.

So, alright, let's dive right in!

The Renaissance

We're not going to spend a whole lot of time on the Renaissance since we've already got a few lessons covering that period and its main authors in detail. But we can't rightly talk about the 17th century of British literature without mentioning William Shakespeare , the biggest name in the field. He's the big daddy - the big cheese. He wrote plays and poems that were immensely popular, and we've got videos that cover a lot of them. Some of the most important pieces that he wrote are the stand-outs, like Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet . If you study literature, he's often the figure to which all other writers are compared - so, totally important guy.

Of course, he wasn't the only writer to make a name for himself in the early 17th century. There was also his frenemy, Ben Jonson , a fellow dramatist and poet. Jonson's most famous for satirical stage productions that illuminated human flaws via darkly comedic plots. Some famous Ben Jonson works include - and this one, I say 'Vol-pone', I've heard 'Vol-poh-nay', you call Volpone what you will, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair . Jonson was also known for his masques , or elaborate stage plays produced in the royal court, kind of like the ancient version of a Lady Gaga concert.

One other important part of literary culture in the early 17th century was the appearance of metaphysical poets , like John Donne . These poets were extremely clever and crafty with their words, but they also really meditate on some heavy subjects, like 'What is religion?' and 'What is love?' Their poetry is marked by their intricate phrasing and extended metaphors; if it helps, you can think of them as poetic show-offs; although that shouldn't detract from the fact that they were often talking about really important things.

Before we moving on from the Renaissance, let's just mention a couple other cultural landmarks from that time. A little bit prior to the 17th century, the printing press kicked into high gear in England, and this allowed literature to be mass-produced for the first time, and that's huge - so it's not just available to the elite. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the printing press was the Bible. In particular, the King James Bible was completed in 1611; this was more or less the definitive English-language Bible and a massively important piece of literature at the time. The Bible's influence is everywhere in English literature; it's almost impossible to overstate how influential it is.

Also, other disciplines, like the sciences, really began to jell during this period, and that was led by major thinkers and essayists, like Francis Bacon, whose work brought about the scientific method - which hopefully you're familiar with from science classes. So, we owe a lot to Bacon.

Caroline/Interregnum/Restoration

A lot of the trends from the late Renaissance continued into the latter part of the 17th century, known as the Caroline, Interregnum and Restoration periods. For example, metaphysical poetry kept going and got one of its most famous practitioners in someone named Andrew Marvell , whose poem 'To His Coy Mistress' is really one of the most celebrated in our language. You might be familiar with the opening couplet of 'To His Coy Mistress.' It goes:

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime .

He's basically saying, hey, we don't have forever, but let's get together while we can - so, he's smooth. It's a great poem; you should really check it out.

Another important thing to remember here is Restoration literature , particularly Restoration comedy , is so-named because it's what resulted after King Charles II was restored to the English throne after almost two decades of boring Puritan rule. Restoration comedy is marked by its incredible sexual explicitness; it would even make some modern audiences blush. This was also the first time in history that there were female actors (or you know, 'actresses') and female playwrights. The times, they were a-changing. We've got a whole lesson on Restoration comedy you can watch if you want to learn more about this crazy time in English theatrical history, and I recommend you do.

However, in the later half of the 17th century, some of the biggest splashes were being made by three guys who were all conveniently named John, and we're going to talk about each of them. We've got:

John Milton
John Dryden
John Bunyan

Of the three, I'd say John Milton is the big one; you've probably heard his name before. When it comes to English lit, he's usually placed as the second most important writer, after Shakespeare, so he was a big deal. Again, we've got a whole lesson on Milton if you want to know more about him, but here are the basics: He was a noted essayist, poet and dramatist who produced popular but controversial work leading up to and during the Puritan regime (during which he actually held a political office). Exemplifying his work from that period is an essay called 'Areopagitica' (you can read it on the screen; that's not a word I'm familiar with). It's a 1644 tract about the dangers of censorship that helped develop the concept of freedom of the press. So, that's huge.

But what he's probably most known for, and what you've probably heard in conjunction with Milton's name, is the poem Paradise Lost from 1667. It's a Homeric-style epic that dramatizes the story of Satan's rebellion from God and the fall of Man. Maybe that doesn't sound that appealing but it's a kickin' poem. You should really check it out. It's one of the most celebrated works of literature in the English language; it's long - it's over 10,000 lines long, but it's really worth the investment of time. It's fascinating and also another huge influence on literature.

But let's not neglect the other Johns. As important as John Milton was to long-form poetry, John Dryden was also the most celebrated poet of his age, to the point that some literary circles referred to Restoration England as 'the Age of Dryden.' While you may or may not have heard of his individual works, he racked up a couple accomplishments that are really hard to ignore. First, he was the first guy to formally hold the position of England's 'poet laureate' - so, good on him. Second, he established the heroic couplet as the dominant form of English verse. For an example of a heroic couplet, take these two lines from Mac Flecknoe , his celebrated satire:

All human things are subject to decay,

And when fate summons, monarchs must obey

So basically, heroic couplets are just pairs of rhyming lines in iambic pentameter. You can see this used all throughout English literature, from John Keats to Alexander Pope to even modern pop music (which some might consider literature - not me, but some). Anyway, Dryden's influence is hard to downplay; there are heroic couplets everywhere.

Last, we'll talk about John Bunyan , one of those Puritans we mentioned earlier - who is not Paul Bunyan, no matter what I say. Bunyan wrote one of the major examples of religious literature, The Pilgrim's Progress , in 1678. This is a lengthy allegory in which the lead character, conveniently named Christian, tries to make his way through the world while fending off characters like Beelzebub, Lord Hate-good and Atheist. This may not be the most subtle piece of work ever written, but it was incredibly popular and has never gone out of print since its release. It's also one of the most prototypical examples of the early novel. It's over 100,000 words and split into two parts with no chapter breaks, so it's not quite the literary form we know yet, but that will come quickly. We have a video on The Pilgrim's Progress if you want to learn about it in more detail.

Neoclassicism

One of the most defining features of 18th-century British literature is the rise of the novel . During this time, authors like Daniel Defoe (who wrote Robinson Crusoe ) and Jonathan Swift (who wrote Gulliver's Travels ) began to write in the lengthy, chapter-divided form that today we consider the standard for consuming literature. Obviously, though, this standardization wasn't always the case. What happened? Well, in addition to writers like Bunyan, Defoe and Swift paving the way (all three had serious successes with their works), the Licensing Act of 1737 encouraged more controversial thinkers, who would typically write plays to fire up the masses, to instead turn to novels. This was a huge act of censorship that neutered drama for some time in England, but it ended up working out okay for people who enjoy reading novels, like myself.

Besides novels, poetry was still going strong in the 18th century. One of the major figures working in the form was one of my favorites, Alexander Pope , a noted satirist and classicist who produced popular works, like The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad , mock epics that scrutinized what he saw as the failings of his time by casting them in a very serious, heroic light a la Milton or Homer. Really funny guy; his stuff is great. Check out Pope.

One other important literary figure of the time is Samuel Johnson , a celebrated essayist, poet and critic who helped define and push the boundaries of English literature with his work - like an influential annotated edition of Shakespeare's plays and, most importantly, one of the first major dictionaries, simply titled A Dictionary of the English Language . Who needs something fancier? In fact, until the famed Oxford English Dictionary was published in 1895, Johnson's was the preferred dictionary of choice among writers and scholars. So, that's a really impressive contribution.

A few other aspects of 18th-century literary culture began to look quite a bit like our own. Also, in the mid-1700s, writer John Newberry made children's literature a popular thing or a real thing that people took seriously. (You may be familiar with the children's literature award now named after him, the Newberry Medal.) Finally, during this period an illustrator named William Hogarth pioneered sequential art - what we now refer to today as comics or graphic novels. Although in his time this much more resembled political cartoons or newspaper strips than the graphic novels you may think of today, like Maus or Persepolis.

Lesson Summary

So that's 200 years of literature condensed down into just a few minutes. Of course, there's a whole lot I wasn't able to cover, and there are a lot of lessons to help fill in the gaps, but let's just do a basic recap. We divided these 200 years into three major periods:

The Renaissance , which really started in the 16th century and took up roughly the first third of the 17th, depending on who you're talking to. During this period, writers like Shakespeare , Ben Jonson and John Donne left their marks, particularly in the worlds of theater and poetry.
The Caroline, Interregnum and Restoration eras - Those took up roughly the remainder of the 17th century and saw important work from the three Johns: Milton , Dryden and Bunyan .
And finally, the Neoclassical period that took up much of the 18th century. This was marked in large part by the rise of the novel and featured luminary creators such as Daniel Defoe , Jonathan Swift , Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson , the guy who created the first English-language dictionary.

And that, my friends, is 200 years of literature in a nutshell.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Early Eighteenth Century British Literary Criticism

Early Eighteenth Century British Literary Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 27, 2020 • ( 0 )

Literary criticism developed in the early eighteenth century as part of a broader cultural discourse that included moral philosophy, politics, aesthetics, science, and economics. For critics otherwise as different as Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Joseph Addison (1672-1719), and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the study of literature offered a means to promote the moral education of its readers; however, what that education entailed varied from critic to critic. Although the first half of the eighteenth century is often termed the “neoclassical” or “Augustan” age for its fascination with championing the moral and literary models of ancient Greece and Rome, the criticism of the period was ultimately less concerned with establishing rules of literary composition based on classical precedent than with promoting literature as a standard of civilized taste to which all educated men and women could look for guidance. In this respect, criticism from the time of John Dryden to the death of Pope was concerned primarily with moral—and sociopolitical— issues rather than with establishing methodological procedures or analyzing individual texts.

Debates among eighteenth-century critics, particularly the “Battle of the Books” between the so-called ancients and moderns, should be seen within the context of the changing conditions of publication and the professionalization of criticism. During the early eighteenth century the reading public became increasingly large and diverse. Prior to 1700, literary critics, such as Dryden and the playwright William Congreve (1670- 1729), perceived themselves as writing primarily for an educated elite. “Poetry,” Congreve says, “is sacred to the Good and Great,” that is, to those who are morally and socially privileged (392). But by 1709, when Richard Steele (1672-1729) and Addison began the triweekly paper the Tatler, criticism assumed the ideological function of promoting civilized values among a wide and diverse readership, including tradespeople, women, and readers in the country. For Addison and Steele, literary journalism offered a way to promote values of educated taste, good breeding, refinement, and decorum among the middle classes, who previously had been excluded or ignored by critical formulations that made literature the domain of “the Good and Great.” For Addison and Steele, particularly in their second paper, the Spectator (1711-12, 1714), criticism provided a means to mediate potentially divisive conflicts between the middle and upper classes; the language of “taste” and “refinement” offered the opportunity to forge what Terry Eagleton calls a “historical alliance” between bourgeois conceptions of virtue and propriety and aristocratic principles of birth and honor (10-11). This yoking of morality and manners testifies to the cultural importance that criticism assumed in the early eighteenth century. The appreciation of literature, at least according to Addison and Steele, became a way to bring together potentially antagonistic elements of society by emphasizing the shared principles and values that support the union of art and morality.

To the extent that critics in the early eighteenth century shared an ideal vision of literature as a means of moral education, their critical vocabulary of order, stability, and virtue may seem consistent. But this common vocabulary cannot mask the debates that raged about what its terms—”wit,” “judgment,” and “nature,” among others—can and should mean. As James William Johnson argues, neoclassicism in the eighteenth century was not a doctrine but a series of attempts to explore and to resolve the internal contradictions that arose from efforts to model English critical and literary practice on the examples of the ancients. As Johnson notes, eighteenth- century neoclassicists were frequently devout Christians who celebrated pagan writers as authorities on morality as well as art. Also, they promoted the cultural and political example of the Roman Empire as a model for England’s own “Augustan” age, yet they took as their heroes defenders of the Roman republic, including Cato (the subject of a popular tragedy by Addison performed in 1713) and Cicero (xi). If these problems resist simple solutions, they should focus our attention on the ideological and cultural implications of neoclassical rhetoric.

Alexander Pope/Universal History Archive

Precisely because criticism was viewed in the eighteenth century as part of larger moral and political discourses, controversies about literary tastes and aesthetic principles reveal often fundamentally different assumptions about the values and practices of English society. As the debates between Pope and John Dennis (1657- 1734) illustrate, criticism often seemed to its contemporaries little more than invective. But the no-holds-barred rhetoric of the era reveals the intense passions unleashed by an ongoing struggle for a common vocabulary. What was at stake in early eighteenth-century criticism was competing views of civilization, history, and social order as well as of wit and the efficacy of the Aristotelian “rules”: the antagonists in the debate were, on the one hand, those critics and philosophers who saw English civilization progressing toward new conceptions of individual ism and economic prosperity founded upon the accumulation of capital and, on the other, those who resisted such changes and saw in eighteenth-century British culture a fall from classical ideals of morality, prudence, and moderation. This confrontation between the moderns and the ancients was, however, immensely complicated and involved multiple loyalties on the part of its participants. In some respects, it was less a battle of diametrically opposed intellectual camps than a struggle to define the moral value of a civilized, literary education.

On one level, the battle between the ancients and the moderns centered on the question whether the classical unities of time, place, and action—the “rules”—should be followed rigorously or be subordinated to the writer’s imagination. But its implications are much larger. Dennis identified the neoclassical unities with the moral purpose of art. In The Impartial Critick (1693) he declared that the “rules of Aristotle are nothing but Nature and Good Sence reduc’d to a Method” (1:39), and in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) he argued that “if the End of Poetry be to instruct and reform the World, that is, to bring Mankind from Irregularity, Extravagance, and Confusion, to Rule and Order” (1:335), then the rules were essential to this purpose. Similarly, Charles Gildon (1665- 1724) in The Complete Art of Poetry (1718) maintained that art is “Nature reduc’d to Form” (1:94). Other critics, however, including Addison, Leonard Welsted (1688-1747), and Henry Felton (1679-1740), disagreed, arguing for a flexibility in applying the rules. Dennis’s argument, as he makes explicit in A Large Account of the Taste in Poetry (1702), is based on the need for a strict adherence to authority, given the decline in the quality of theater audiences (and by implication of all consumers of literature) since the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Whereas in those days “a considerable part of an Audience had those Parts, that Education and that Application which were requisite] for the judging of Poetry .. . there are [in the early eighteenth century] three sorts of People now in our Audiences, who have had no education at all”: “younger Brothers, Gentlemen bom, who have been kept at home, by reason of the pressure of the Taxes”; war profiteers, “who from a state of obscurity, and perhaps of misery, have risen to a condition of distinction and plenty”; and “a considerable number of Foreigners” (1:291,293). All three categories of unqualified spectators are products of England’s unpopular involvement in a series of wars on the Continent that Dennis, a staunch Tory, opposed. In this regard, “judging Poetry” is a sociopolitical as well as a critical act, one of the skills that gentlemen of “Parts” and “Education” must acquire. For Dennis, the rules are not simply formal principles of composition but part of the structure of cultural authority— moral, political, and theological as well as literary— that informs his vision of an ordered society.

On another level, critical conflicts about whether the rules guided or hindered the artistic imagination were manifestations of efforts to define the individual’s relationship to both artistic and social convention. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke (1632-1704) held that ideas formed from sensory impressions constitute the only legitimate basis for a theory of knowledge or language. Although language may be a socially contrived system, it is arbitrary and contractual. Only the individual’s ideas, which Locke discusses as though they were personal possessions, can be represented, and knowledge therefore is also the product of each individual’s sensory experience. The individual, in Locke’s philosophy, becomes paradoxically both isolated and free from the sorts of social determinations that underlie contemporary critical debates about the representation of a transhistorical and unchanging Nature. Shaftesbury, a former pupil of Locke’s, perceived the threat to the established social order that Locke’s view posed and sought to bring the imaginative faculty within the bounds of aristocratic views of an ordered, stable, and hierarchical society. “To philosophize ,” Shaftesbury maintains, “is but To carry Good-Breeding a step higher. For the accomplishment of Breeding is, To learn whatever is decent in Company, or beautiful in Arts: and the Sum of Philosophy is, to learn what is just in Society, and beautiful in Nature, and the Order of the World” (3:161). In seeking to counter the individualistic emphases in Locke’s Essay, Shaftesbury creates a unified vision of art, morality, philosophy, and social stability that emphasizes the creative power of the imagination, what he calls “enthusiasm.” His aestheticized view of an ordered and harmonious world influenced a number of contemporaries, including Addison and Steele, and subsequent critics, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge .

Literary Criticism of S.T. Coleridge

In contrast to Locke, Shaftesbury, and Addison, the Tory satirists, particularly Pope and Jonathan Swift (1667- 1745)/ sought to preserve classical ideals of civilization and viewed most modern innovations—from the verse of their political enemies to the scholarship of Richard Bentley (1662-1742), who argued that many ancient texts were corrupt or spurious—as a threat to the classical idea of civilization the ancients represented. For Pope and Swift, history was a process of corruption and decay, a fall from ancient virtues to the degenerate standards they repeatedly associated with the Whig prime minister, Horace Walpole. The role of literature is to recall society to sanity and stability, often through satiric at tacks on literary and political enemies, as in Pope’s poem The Dunciad (1728, rev. ed., 1743), a savage satire of writers who in one way or another abandoned neoclassical ideals. Similarly, the function of criticism is to guide readers to establish sound principles of aesthetic judgment that will reunite morality and art. Unlike Shaftesbury, however, Pope’s view was Christian as well as classical; his stance, like Swift’s, was that of the isolated moralist who recognized the corruption of his age and used satire as his weapon both to attack vice and to point the way toward a restoration of virtue.

Pope’s critical principles are fully articulated in his Essay on Criticism (1711), a work that implicitly rejects Lockean accounts of language and society in favor of an aesthetic that seeks to define the relationships between the imagination and social convention. Despite his poem’s title, Pope’s chief theoretical interest lies in defining “wit,” a problematic term for English critics since the seventeenth century. In the years prior to writing his essay, Pope was engaged in revising the poems of the aging playwright William Wycherley (1640-1716). Wycherley, the leading dramatist of the 1670s and still a considerable literary figure in the early eighteenth century, resisted Pope’s efforts to regularize his verse, disparaging “method” in favor of an unfettered wit. In responding to Wycherley, Pope developed a sophisticated argument for wit as a mediating force between the imagination and poetic convention that is fully laid out in the Essay (Hooker 46-50). Pope defines wit as “Nature to advantage dress’d, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d” (11. 297-98). Wit is the individual’s imaginative recreation of general human experience, his or her unique expression of nature’s “clear, unchanged, and universal Light” (1. 71). Pope’s description of the relationship between individual imagination and literary conventions steers carefully between Lockean individualism and the reliance on the rules by critics such as Dennis, who offer “dull receipts how poems may be made” (1.115). For Pope, the rules were “discover’d, not devised”; they are “Nature still, but Nature methodized” (11. 88-89). To explicate these lines, Pope uses a political image: “Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain’d / By the same laws which first herself ordain’d” (11. 90-91). Nature, then, functions in the poem as both an absolute standard against which all literary works must be judged and a kind of contractual entity that acts as a regulative force on art. Later in the poem, Pope argues that “Nature and Homer [are] the same” (1. 135). This identification underlies the values of neoclassicism. Homer and ancient civilization in general are idealized as representations of a golden age in which poets had seemingly an unmediated access to nature. For modern writers, art becomes a recreative as well as a creative endeavor, an attempt to embody the principles that the ancients had known and used to “methodize” Nature, to represent it as fully as possible.

Analysis of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism

Pope’s Essay on Criticism , then, can be read as a polemical piece that is intended less to establish guidelines for critics than to identify the moral and cultural significance of criticism. Criticism, for Pope, was crucial to the literary culture of his time because it regulated the relationships between imagination and convention; it functioned ideally not as a form of detraction but as a means to encode those neoclassical values that will establish the importance of literature in creating a moral and ordered society. In this regard, Pope recognized that neoclassical values, literary and political, represented idealized visions of art and society. The ancients, for him, were both historical figures and deliberately idealized extensions of the union of art and nature. Because Pope and his contemporaries could not reconcile the contradictions of a Christian and mercantilist society’s taking a pagan empire as its standard of political and moral value, they sought to transcend these tensions by aestheticizing them, by seeking a set of principles that would allow society to be defined—and judged—in the same way as a work of art. In this respect, the metaphors of harmony and order that figure prominently in eighteenth- century criticism represent efforts to transcend the complexities and contradictions of historical experience, to escape to the kind of idealism that is evident in Shaftesbury’s works and is satirized by Swift in book four of Gulliver’s Travels . The fact that the early eighteenth century generally is considered the great age of English satire suggests the extent to which Pope, Swift, and their contemporaries recognized and sought to overcome the discrepancies between neoclassical ideals and the corruption of their age. In this regard, the criticism of the period 1700-1740 represents the other side of the satiric impulse: a series of attempts to legislate rather than ridicule the corruption of the times out of existence.

Bibliography Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator (5 vols., 1965); Gerald Wester Chapman, ed., Literary Criticism in England, 1660- 1800 (1966); William Congreve, The Complete Plays of William Congreve (ed. Herbert Davis, 1967); John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis (ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols., 1939-43); W. H. Durham, ed., Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1725 (1915); Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry (1718, 2 vols., facs.reprint, 1970); John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, 1975); Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope (ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols., 1939-69); Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (6th ed., 3 vols., 1737-38); J. E. Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (3 vols., 1908-9). Edward A. Bloom, Lillian D. Bloom, and Edmund Leites, Educating the Audience: Addison, Steele, and Eighteenth- Century Culture (1984); Leopold Damrosch, “The Significance of Addison’s Criticism,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 19 (1979); Bonamy Dobree, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1700-1740 (1959); Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (1984); James Engell, Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge (1989); Edward Niles Hooker, “Pope on Wit: The Essay on Criticism” (Eighteenth Century Literature: Modem Essays in Criticism, ed. James L. Clifford, 1959); James William Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (1967); Robert L. Montgomery, Terms of Response: Language and Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theory (1992); David B. Morris, “Civilized Reading: The Act of Judgment in An Essay on Criticism” (The Art of Alexander Pope, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Anne Smith, 1979); Irene Simon, “Art and Nature in Early Eighteenth-Century Criticism,” English Studies 60 (1979); H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., “Rules and English Critics of the Epic, 1650-1800,” Studies in Philology 3s (1938); Dabney Townsend, “Shaftesbury’s Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (1982); David Wheeler, “John Dennis and the Religious Sublime,” College Language Association Journal 30 (1986). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

The nature of Romanticism

Blake, wordsworth, and coleridge, other poets of the early romantic period.

The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
Other poets of the later period
The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
Discursive prose
Thackeray, Gaskell, and others
The Brontës
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Arnold and Clough
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
The Victorian theater
Victorian literary comedy
The Edwardians
Anglo-American Modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot
Celtic Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid
The literature of World War I and the interwar period
The literature of World War II (1939–45)
The 21st century

The Romantic period

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Academia - English Literature
HistoryNet - Anne Frank
Complutense University of Madrid - The Development of English Literature (Summary)
Jewish Virtual Library - English Literature
English literature - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
English literature - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
Table Of Contents

As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics . Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel ’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism.

Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake ’s affirmation in 1793 that “a new heaven is begun” was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley ’s “The world’s great age begins anew.” “These, these will give the world another heart, / And other pulses,” wrote John Keats , referring to Leigh Hunt and William Wordsworth . Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England , was being extended to every range of human endeavor. As that ideal swept through Europe , it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end.

The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.” The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged.

The emphasis on feeling —seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress on imagination . Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention, imagination and judgement,” but Blake wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.” Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was often invoked , and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the “poor Indian” of Pope’s An Essay on Man . A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages.

Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and inane,” and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction , however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language.

Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humor with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centered not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen , a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas ), written from about 1796 to about 1807.

Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge , meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance . For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion ); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy , with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge . Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity.

His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature . The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the “ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood .” In poems such as “ Michael” and “ The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.

Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in “ The Eolian Harp” (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected by Coleridge himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. “ Kubla Khan ” (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism , theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. “ Dejection: An Ode ” (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”

The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of Napoleon . In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy , was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse , “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals.

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers.

In his own lifetime, Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott , by contrast, was thought of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse narratives The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse writers were also highly esteemed. The Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Smith and the Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received with enthusiasm by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of Hohenlinden” (1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens of the British Poets (1819); Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death, as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers ), as well as for his exquisite but exiguous poetry. Another admired poet of the day was Thomas Moore , whose Irish Melodies began to appear in 1808. His highly colored narrative Lalla Rookh : An Oriental Romance (1817) and his satirical poetry were also immensely popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only significant woman poet in this period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches (1795), Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796), and Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1805) all contain notable work.

Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “ Lake school ” of poetry. His originality is best seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three of which were first published in the 1799 volume of his Poems with a prologue explaining that these verse sketches of contemporary life bore “no resemblance to any poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) were successful in their own time, but his fame is based on his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the children’s tale “The Three Bears.”

George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his diction, and his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He differs from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter, concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and the middle classes. He shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers of description. His antipastoral The Village appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned to poetry with The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), which gained him great popularity in the early 19th century.

In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Skip to Guides Search
Skip to breadcrumb
Skip to main content
Skip to footer
Skip to chat link
Report accessibility issues and get help
Go to Penn Libraries Home
Go to Franklin catalog
Penn Libraries

Literature in English: Resources

18th-century literature.

Library Services
Literary Journals: Fiction, Essays, and Poetry
Medieval Literature
Early Modern Literature
Early American Literature
19th-Century Literature
20th-Century Literature
Contemporary Literature
African Literature
African American Literature
Asian American Literature
Cinema and Media Studies
Critical Theory
Digital Humanities
Disability Studies
Drama and Theatre
Environmental Humanities
Gender and Sexuality Studies
History of Material Texts
History and Theory of the Novel
Latinx American Literature
Modernism and Modernity
Poetry and Poetics
Psychoanalytic Studies
Race, Empire, Postcolonialism
Sound Studies
Transnational Literatures

Individual Journals

Does a journal seem to be missing? Check the Top Journals in Literature section on the guide homepage .

Age of Johnson
Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly
Charles Lamb Bulletin
Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Eighteenth-Century Life
Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research
Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats
Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture
Wordsworth Circle

Periodical Indexes and Bibliographic Databases

17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, pamphlets, and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) and held by the British Library digitized and made available online. This represents the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media, totaling almost 1 million pages and containing approximately 1,270 titles. The collection focuses on series published in London.
17th and 18th Century Nichols Newspapers Collection Features the newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and broadsheets that form the Nichols newspaper collection held at the Bodleian library in Oxford, UK. All 296 volumes of bound material, covering the period 1672-1737 are presented in digitized format.
America's Historical Imprints: Early American Imprints Series I and II, 1639-1819 Includes Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800; Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819
American Periodicals Series Online 1740-1900 Includes digitized images of the pages of 1,100 American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century. Titles range from Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine and America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository , to popular magazines (some still in print), such as Vanity Fair , Harper's and Ladies' Home Journal .
British Periodicals British Periodicals tracks the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian 'age of periodicals' and into the 20th century. On completion this digital archive will consist of more than 460 periodical runs published from the 1680s to the 1930s, comprising six million keyword-searchable pages and forming an unrivalled record of more than two centuries of British history and culture.
Early American Newspapers, 1690-1900 Based primarily on the listings in Clarence Brigham's History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820 and Winifred Gregory's Union list of serials in libraries of the United States and Canada , this database focuses on newspapers first published before the Civil War. The collection includes over 900 newspapers. Includes the Philadelphia Inquirer (1860-1900), Philadelphia Public Ledger (1836-1876) and Philadelphia North American (1839-1879) as well as many other Philadelphia Newspapers.
Eighteenth Century Journals: A portal to newspapers and periodicals,1685-1835 Newspapers and periodicals, 1680-1816 from the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, London and Cambridge University Library. Penn has access to modules 3 and 5 only.

Other Databases

Does a database seem to be missing? Check the Core Databases section on the guide homepage .

American Drama, 1714-1915 This collection contains 711 plays by American dramatists that chronicle the history and culture of America through its dramatic writing. It includes plays by dramatists such as Thomas Paine, Edward Hitchcock, and James Lawson. When complete, the collection will contain more than 2,000 plays.
American Fiction, 1774-1920 Encompasses more than 17,500 works of prose fiction written by Americans from the political beginnings of the United States through World War I.
American Poetry, 1600-1900 Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century.
British Literary Manuscripts Online Contains facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials dating from roughly 1120-1900. Searching is based on tags and descriptive text associated with each manuscript. Note: Manuscripts themselves are not full-text searchable.
Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 Provides both images and full-text for a well-defined and comprehensive collection of early American fiction. Currently includes 254 titles by 55 authors, including first printings of works by James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collections Online "Nearly 150,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 will be made available online over the course of the next two years. When complete, the product will allow full-text searching of more than 33 million pages of material, in essence, every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas."
Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1700-1780) 96 complete full-text online works in English prose from the period 1700-1780, by writers from the British Isles.
Eighteenth century drama : censorship, society and the stage Eighteenth Century Drama features the John Larpent Collection from the Huntington Library – a unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, as well as hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays. Also included are the papers of prominent theatrical figures of the period, including correspondence, financial documents, and portraits.
Electronic Enlightenment Searchable and browseable database offering extensive access to the web of correspondence between the greatest thinkers and writers of the long eighteenth century and their families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers.
END: Early Novels Database The Early Novels Database (END) project generates high-quality metadata about novels published between 1660 and 1850 in order to make early works of fiction more available to both traditional and computational modes of humanistic study.
English Poetry (600-1900), second edition Essentially the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th plus representation from Commonwealth and ex-colonial countries. Over 183,000 searchable full-text poems by more than 2,700 poets drawn from over 4,500 printed sources.
English Short Title Catalogue The English Short Title Catalogue provides extensive descriptions and holdings information for letterpress materials printed in Great Britain or any of its dependencies in any language, as well as for materials printed in English anywhere else in the world. Coverage is from the beginnings of print to 1800 including all recorded English monographs printed between 1475 and 1700.
Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period Includes more than 80 volumes of poetry by approximately 50 Irish women writing between 1768 and 1842.
John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera This collection offers unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th-centuries. Categories include 19th-century entertainment, the booktrade, popular prints, crimes, murders and executions, and advertising.
Literary Print Culture: The Stationers’ Company Archive, 1554-2007 The records of The Stationers’ Company Archive showcase a diverse range of primary source material to represent the history of printing, publishing and bookselling. The Stationers’ Company played a central role in book history and the story of seventeenth and eighteenth century drama and literature which can be traced in the rare records made available in this resource. The records also offer a complete picture of an early London Livery Company through the membership, financial and administrative records.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950 Fulltext of letters and diaries, published and manuscript, of American women during the Colonial period through 1950. Biographical information is provided for each writer. Primary source materials are searchable by document type and subject, relevant historical events, and author-specific information including author name, date, age, marital status, maternal status, and geographical location when writing, age at marriage and at first childbirth, number of marriages and of children, nationality and race, religion, occupation, and relevant personal events.
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present "Orlando provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. "
Spectator Project An interactive hypermedia environment for the study of The Tatler (1709-1711), The Spectator (1711-14), Johnson's Rambler and the eighteenth-century periodical in general. Users wishing to view the pages will need to download the DJVU plug-in which is made available at no cost on the website
Women Writers Online Searchable, full-text collection of works in English by pre-Victorian women writers, 1526-1850.

Encyclopedias and Reference Works

Cambridge Companions related to 18th-Century Literature
Oxford Handbooks related to 18th-Century Literature

Special Collections

Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness Over 6,000 works of fiction—novels, short stories, poetry and song donated by Penn alumna Caroline Schimmel, CW’67.
Collection of British and American Fiction, 1660-1830
Geoffrey Day Collection of Sterneana Finding Aid and Franklin records forthcoming. Includes over 100 volumes of Sterne’s work printed before 1800 in English, including three copies of the rare York-printed first edition of volumes one and two of Tristram Shandy. The collection also includes over 100 translations of Sterne’s work in 21 languages. Among these translations are at least two (one in German, one in Dutch) which are not known to exist anywhere else. The Day collection also includes the only known copy of a completely spurious edition of volume 9 of Tristram Shandy, published clandestinely in 1767. Beyond Sterne’s fiction, the collection also contains copies of the works he drew from in his writing, editions of his letters and sermons. In addition to the purchase of his collection of printed volumes, Day gifted the Penn Libraries a manuscript letter written by Laurence Sterne to a local apothecary the day following the death of Sterne’s daughter in childbirth.
Geoffrey Denison Gulliver's Travels Collection Illustrated editions of Gulliver's Travels.
Jonathan Swift's Library and Reading Collection The Swift's Library and Reading Collection, as well as an oil portrait of Swift and various Swift-related manuscripts and publications, including many Dublin imprints, were the gift of the independent Swift scholar Archibald Elias.
<< Previous: Early American Literature
Next: 19th-Century Literature >>
Last Updated: Apr 11, 2024 12:49 PM
URL: https://guides.library.upenn.edu/literature-in-english

18th century literature characteristics/historical context/topics

18th-century literature

The literature of the 18th century stood out mainly for the idea that humanity was happy through contact with culture and progress. At that time the stage of the Enlightenment originated, also known as the “Age of Enlightenment”, where reason was the most important and the texts had moral, civil, and teaching objectives. 18th-century literature with characteristics

It began with the so-called War of Succession in 1701, which broke out as a result of the death of the Spanish King Carlos II, who left no heirs. The death of the monarch originated a conflict between royal houses for the throne, in which the Bourbon dynasty was victorious and Felipe V came to power .

The so-called period of the Enlightenment was also joined by the post- baroque movements, neoclassicism, and pre-romanticism. The three agreed to maintain a cultured language, sober and far from emotions . In general, literature was not linked to personal feelings but was directed towards the knowledge of the community .

As for literary genres, eighteenth-century literature was oriented to the development of theater, poetry, and prose. Importantly, the novel was not considered a genre, so the essay had more value. Among the most prominent authors are Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Benito Feijoo, José Caldaso, Rousseau and Voltaire.

Historic context 18th-century literature with characteristics

The literature of the eighteenth century occurred between different warlike conflicts that took place in Europe due to the predominance of the bourgeoisie and the monarchy. The dispute of the throne in Spain after the death of Carlos II brought as a consequence the War of Succession that in turn produced that the French won and Felipe V became king .

Later other series of political and social conflicts arose that marked the course of history, among them the French Revolution in 1789 commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte. 18th-century literature with characteristics

At the same time, in countries like England, economic growth expanded with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution . Meanwhile, the Latin American territory continued in the hands of the Spanish.

During that time, the development of the New World was debated between the interests of the crown and the benefits that the Creoles sought to obtain. As a result, the American continent was economically and politically behind for a long time in relation to the momentous changes that occurred in Europe.

Characteristics

Referring to the characteristics of 18th century literature is to mention the most outstanding features of the currents: the illustration, neoclassicism, and pre-romanticism. The most outstanding aspects are described below:

– Illustration

Rationalism.

The authors of the time stated that reason should be above feelings and imagination. In such a way that the texts became teaching material of social, political, and moral content. At the same time, they were aimed at society in general. An example is the essays of Fray Benito Feijoo.

The Enlightenment managed the ideal that reason was the main weapon for societies to develop their cultural potential and economic advancement. In this sense, the intellectuals sought the approach of reformist thoughts in their works in order to produce transformations.

One of the most representative works in this sense was Emilio by the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Analytics 18th-century literature with characteristics

The literary works of the Enlightenment period were characterized by being critical, analytical and questioning about the role of the church in the behavior of society. On the other hand, the writers delved into the habits and customs that man was acquiring. At the same time, they debated the absolutism of the monarchies.

Added to the above is the importance that the intellectuals gave to the right of the people to participate in political life . One of the most representative authors on this type of subject was the Spanish Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos.

Language and aesthetics

Literature during the Enlightenment period was characterized by the application of a well-crafted, sober, and cultured language. During the development of that time, the authors expressed their ideas without exaggeration or overflow of emotions . As for aesthetic canons, those imposed by the academies prevailed.

However, the domain of reason took away space from ideas loaded with fantasy , while the authors resorted to the use of sarcasm and parody as tools to denounce and criticize members of the bourgeoisie and the powerful classes. The works of Voltaire and Rousseau are a clear example of this.

– Neoclassicism

The characteristics of the neoclassic movement were attached to the precepts of the current or phenomenon of the Enlightenment . The following are the most salient features of this trend were:

Academicism

The authors of neoclassicism developed their works under the guidelines established and controlled by the academies that operated in the 18th century. In this way, creativity and imagination were left out. The essays by José Cadalso or the plays by Leandro Fernández de Moratín are an example.

The universal and didactic 18th-century literature with characteristics

The literary genres developed in neoclassicism had universal features, that is, they reflected themes of general social interest. In this sense, the works were created with the intention of leaving some kind of knowledge to the masses.

Distraction and recreation were not considered elements. An example of these are the fables of Félix María Samaniego.

Genres and styles

The literature of the 18th century within the neoclassic movement developed poetry, theater, and prose. The essay was the predominant subgenre in prose writers. Now, the poetry was not very expressive, while the theater went for a walk through the traditional and respected the units of time, space and action.

On the other hand, the academic norms of the time did not allow the mixture of tragedy with the comic in the theater. In the genres already mentioned, authors such as Ramón de la Cruz, Alberto Lista, José Marchena and Tomás de Iriarte stood out.

The literary genres of neoclassicism were characterized mainly by the application of reason. Hence, they were sober, didactic, formal and devoid of emotionalism. The work The Old Man and the Girl by Leandro Fernández de Moratín is a clear example. 18th century literature with characteristics

– Preromanticism

The preromanticism movement was characterized by the manifestation of emotions and feelings that gave way to intimate expressions. Consequently, the authors moved away from established norms and embraced creative freedom. In that sense, genres stopped being didactic to become recreational.

Using freedom, the writers varied the subject matter of the texts and began to write about love, loneliness, the end of existence, disillusionment, and other points that paved the way for Romanticism.

In relation to language, written creation became more expressive through the use of a diversity of literary resources. The works of Alberto Lista and Nicasio Álvarez Cienfuegos represent a clear example of this in Spain.

Fragment of the poem “La Primavera” by Alberto Lista

“The bitter winter fled,

and in the warm sphere

on the wings of the tender favonio

spring shines;

and its beautiful garland

smiling defoliating,

of white lily and fiery rose

Las Vegas is sowing.

No longer from frozen snow

the covered meadow lies,

nor love the stripped jungle,

nor the sad and stiff mountain… ”.

Fragment of the poem “My destiny” by Nicasio Álvarez Cienfuegos

“In my poor crib,

needy child,

between innocent dreams

I posed calmly,

when towards me, without arrows,

laughing love came

and, around him, playing

another thousand sweethearts… ”.

Topics 18th-century literature with characteristics

The theme of the works of literature of the eighteenth century varied according to the introduction of the currents described above. So in the beginning the authors wrote about social, political, religious, moral, educational and civil aspects. 18th-century literature with characteristics

However, with the arrival of pre- romanticism , the content was based on the feelings of the human being, which allowed more freedom to the writers.

The house of the spirits themes with authoritarianism and freedom.

Poetic movement Characteristics movements today

Omniscient narrator definition literature characteristics types, tragicomedy characteristics authors and works in detail, leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Please input characters displayed above.

Modernist writers and their works October 4, 2023

18th Century Writers

Right Icon This ranking is based on an algorithm that combines various factors, including the votes of our users and search trends on the internet.

English poet William Wordsworth, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, released Lyrical Ballads in 1798, which set the tone for the Romantic Age of English Literature . Wordsworth was known for his poems I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud , The Prelude , and The Solitary Reaper . He also served as the Poet Laureate .

Regarded as the greatest literary figure in Germany's modern era, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a statesman and writer. Apart from writing poetry and prose, he also wrote treatises on color, anatomy, and botany. Thanks to his literary genius, Goethe was made part of the Duke's privy council in Weimar and he implemented several reforms at the University of Jena .

Eighteenth-century essayist, poet, and pamphleteer Jonathan Swift is remembered for his iconic works such as A Tale of a Tub , A Modest Proposal , and Gulliver's Travels . One of the world’s greatest satirists, he gave rise to the deadpan Swiftian style. He had also been the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral .

Essayist, biographer, lexicographer, and literary critic Samuel Johnson, or Dr. Johnson, is remembered for his A Dictionary of the English Language and Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets . He was also a poet, a playwright, and a staunch Tory. His mannerisms indicated he had Tourette syndrome.

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer, advocate of women's rights, and philosopher. Wollstonecraft, who attracted a lot of attention for her unconventional personal relationships, is widely considered a founding feminist philosopher. Although her unorthodoxy initially attracted criticisms, her advocacy of women's equality became increasingly important during the 20th century. Modern-day feminists cite her works and her life as important influences.

Samuel Coleridge was an English poet, philosopher, theologian, and literary critic. He is credited with co-founding the Romantic Movement in England along with his friend William Wordsworth. Despite struggling from bouts of depression and anxiety throughout his adult life, Samuel Coleridge had a major influence on American transcendentalism and writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Alexander Pope was a satirist and poet whose works produced during the Augustan period made him one of the greatest artistic exponents of that period. Widely regarded as one of the most important English poets of the 18th century, Alexander Pope is best remembered for writing discursive poetry and heroic couplets.

Widely known as the first American man of letters, Washington Irving penned the legendary tales of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , which are also called the first short stories by an American author. He had also had a brief stint as a lawyer.

Friedrich Schiller was a German poet, physician, philosopher, playwright, and historian. Schiller is best remembered for his friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the two discussed issues concerning aesthetics. Schiller's discussions with Goethe paved the way for a period, which came to be known as Weimar Classicism . Friedrich Schiller is also widely regarded as Germany's most prominent classical playwright.

Renowned British essayist Charles Lamb was a major figure of the Romantic period. He is best remembered for his Essays of Elia and his book of abridged versions of Shakespeare’s plays, Tales from Shakespeare , which he co-wrote with his sister, Mary. He had also once spent time in a mental facility.

Noah Webster was an American textbook pioneer, lexicographer, political writer, English-language spelling reformer, author, and editor. Dubbed the Father of American Scholarship and Education , Webster's books have been credited with teaching the art of spelling and reading to five generations of American children. Thanks to his work as a spelling reformer, his name became synonymous with dictionary in the US.

Walter Scott was a Scottish novelist, poet, historian, and playwright. Scott's ability as a writer and his knowledge of history made him a pioneering figure in the formation of the historical novel genre. An influential writer, many of his works remain classics of Scottish as well as English-language literature. Scott was admired by other prominent writers like Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

Eighteenth-century historian and author Edward Gibbon is best remembered for his 6-volume historical work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , a narrative that charted events from the 2nd century to the Fall of Constantinople. He had also been an MP, representing Lymington and Liskeard.

William Penn was a writer and one of the earliest members of the Quakers . He is credited with founding the Province of Pennsylvania. He also oversaw the planning and development of the city of Philadelphia. Penn has several universities and schools named in his honor, including the William Penn University in Iowa.

Considered one of the greatest writers in English history, Jane Austen is best known for her six major novels - Sense and Sensibility , Pride and Prejudice , Mansfield Park , Emma , Persuasion and Northanger Abbey . Her writing was set among the British landed gentry and dealt with ordinary people in everyday ordinary situation. The author achieved great fame after her death.

Best known for his biography of his friend Samuel Johnson, 18th-century biographer and diarist James Boswell was also a qualified lawyer. Know for his reckless lifestyle and his trysts with prostitutes, he had contracted gonorrhea and had also fathered many children, including two illegitimate ones.

English-born American political activist, philosopher, and revolutionary, Thomas Paine, is credited to have penned some of the most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution. His works inspired the common people of America and motivated them to fight for independence from British rule. He was ostracized for criticizing Christianity and died a lonely man.

As a child, Ethan Allen was fond of deciphering passages from the Bible . He grew up to co-establish Vermont and led the Green Mountain Boys during the American Revolutionary War. After failing to achieve Vermont’s separation from New York, he tried to unite Vermont with Canada.

Olympe de Gouges was an 18th-century French playwright and political activist. Her writings on women's rights and abolitionism were popular in various countries. She was an outspoken advocate against the slave trade in the French colonies. She demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. She was executed during the Reign of Terror.

E. T. A. Hoffmann was a German author, jurist, artist, composer, and music critic. His stories served as an inspiration and laid the foundation for The Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach. The Nutcracker by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is also based on Hoffmann's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King . Hoffmann is among the most influential authors of the Romantic Movement.

Irish author Thomas Moore was chiefly branded a Whig ally. It is believed he had a role in burning the memoirs of his friend Lord Byron, an act now considered a literary crime. His iconic Irish Melodies contained his most popular works, such as The Last Rose of Summer .

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was a French polymath who had worked as a watchmaker, playwright, musician, financier, and diplomat. He was also an inventor and revolutionary. He was much respected in French society and held influence in the court of King Louis XV. He supported American independence and actively participated in the early stages of the 1789 French Revolution.

Essayist Thomas De Quincey is best remembered for his iconic book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , which initially appeared in the London Magazine . The work was an autobiographical account of his own addiction to opium, which he had begun consuming to help him deal with the pain of his facial neuralgia.

Carlo Goldoni was an Italian librettist and playwright from the Republic of Venice. He is credited with producing some of Italy's best-loved and most famous plays. His plays are often admired for their ingenious mix of honesty and wit. One of his most famous works, Servant of Two Masters , has been translated into many languages.

English essayist and critic William Hazlitt is remembered for his characteristic humanism in his works. Initially aspiring to be a painter, he traveled to Paris but later deviated to philosophy and metaphysics. Though he penned iconic works such as The Spirit of the Age , he spent his later life in oblivion.

Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish novelist, poet, and playwright. Described by his contemporaries as a disorganized and impetuous person, Goldsmith is best remembered for his works, such as The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village , and She Stoops to Conquer . A respected writer, Goldsmith's statue has been erected in several places, including the Trinity College , Dublin.

William Blackstone was a British politician, jurist, and judge of the 18th century. Best remembered for authoring the Commentaries on the Laws of England , Blackstone is credited with influencing prominent American personalities like Abraham Lincoln, James Kent, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall among others. His Commentaries , which were cited often in Supreme Court cases, were repeatedly republished throughout the 1770s.

Poet and philosopher Friedrich Leopold, better known as Novalis, was a significant figure of German Romanticism. He narrated the loss of his 15-year-old fiancé to tuberculosis in his Hymns to the Night . He himself died of the disease a few years later. He was also well-versed in natural sciences.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a noted German dramatist, critic, and author, remembered especially for his contribution towards liberating German theatre from the influence of its classical and French counterpart. Known for such literary masterpieces like Miss Sara Sampson; Emilia Galotti; Minna von Barnhelm; Nathan the Wise; Laocoön; Hamburg Dramaturgy , he is now considered an outstanding representative of the Enlightenment era.

199.3K Votes

169.8K Votes

Transitions to Romanticism

The restoration and the 18th century.

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 Longman Anthology of British Literature Those RULES of old discover’d, not devis’d, Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d . ~ Alexander Pope

Background: The Augustans and the Age of Reason

An Age of Satire

1660: Restoration–Charles II, Stuart monarchy
1662: Royal Society established
1685: James, Duke of York, succeeds his brother Charles II
1688: Glorious Revolution–James II deposed, William and Mary share the English throne
1689: Bill of Rights–limits crown, affirms supremacy of Parliament
1689: Toleration Act–religious freedom for dissenters
1690: John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1707: Act of Union–England and Scotland for Great Britain
1745: Last Jacobite uprising

For more details see Restoration Politics

Cultural and Literary Contexts

Newspapers and Periodicals
The Coffeehouse Culture
Classical Education in the Eighteenth Century
Eighteenth-Century Grammars
Religion, Politics, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama
The Royal Society and the Enlightenment
Social and Family Life in the Late17th & Early 18th Centuries
Jonathan Swift
Alexander Pope
Samuel Johnson
Henry Fielding
Oliver Goldsmith
Thomas Gray
John Dryden

Damrosch, David, and Kevin J.H. Dettmar. The Longman Anthology of British Literature . 3rd ed. United States: Pearson Education, Inc., 2006.

Damrosch, David, and Kevin J.H. Dettmar. “Essay on Criticism.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature . 3rd ed. United States: Pearson Education, Inc., 2006.

Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews . 1st ed. United States: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1987.

“Neoclassicism: An Introduction.” The Victorian Web . http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/nc/ncintro.html 16 Mar. 2008.

“Restoration Drama”. Theatre History . 2 Mar. 2008 < http://www.theatrehistory.com/british/restoration_drama_001.html>.

The Restoration and the 18th Century. Authored by : Diane Aiken and Lindsay Milbourne. Provided by : BritLitWiki. Located at : https://britlitwiki.wikispaces.com/The+Restoration+and+the+18th+Century . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

terms of use
site status

SCOTUS, 18th Century Kings and The Dangers of an Unbound Presidency

This may seem like a minor point. But I thought it’s worth saying because I have seen a minor rearguard argument to this effect: that the SCOTUS immunity decision doesn’t actually change any laws, doesn’t change what a president can and can’t do. It simply removes the possibility in many or most cases for post-presidency prosecution, something which has actually never happened in American history until last year. This is notionally a good point, but in a purely notional way. It’s true as applied to presidents who didn’t need this kind of hammer hanging over them. All of us are constantly through every day abiding by laws even though we’ve never been prosecuted — or at least most of you, maybe some have been prosecuted before — for breaking a criminal law. We report all our income on our taxes; we don’t fraudulently sign documents; we don’t steal from the store. Most of us act that way just because it’s the right thing to do, though most of us have been tempted at the margins. But laws work in complicated ways. Much of our understanding of what is the right thing to do is in fact conditioned by the laws themselves. As we’ve noted before, laws and prosecutions are not only to keep people in line and punish wrongdoers. They are how societies speak to themselves about what is acceptable and what is not.

Join TPM and get The Backchannel member newsletter along with unlimited access to all TPM articles and member features.

Yes, Hamilton Thought John Roberts Was Full Of it Too
Where We Are on July 4th and One Week After
Thomas Jefferson Disagrees with John Roberts About Presidential Immunity
Times Gonna Times

Not yet a TPM Member?

One must-read from Josh Marshall delivered weekly to your inbox

Josh Marshall
David Kurtz
Nicole Lafond
Josh Kovensky
Hunter Walker
Emine Yücel
Khaya Himmelman
John B. Judis
Millet Israeli
Joe Ragazzo
Derick Dirmaier
Matt Wozniak
Jackie Wilhelm
Jacob Harris
Christine Frapech

IMAGES

The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 3: The
18th Century American Literature
A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1660-1780) by Gosse, Edmund
18th Century Literature
Course: Eighteenth Century Literature (Spring 2021)
PPT

VIDEO

18th CENTURY NOVEL
18th Century English Literature Mcqs| History of English Literature
Sol 18th Century Literature 2nd Semester Internal Assessment 35 Questions Solution 2024
British literature 18th century question paper ba honours English PYQ #delhiuniversity
18th Century Literature Important Questions & Exam Pattern BA PROG Second Semester DU SOL
Dec 2023 BEGC-108( British literature:18th century) question paper|#ignou #ignoubagwithnisha #exam

COMMENTS

18th century in literature
European literature of the 18th century refers to literature (poetry, drama, satire, essays, and novels) produced in Europe during this period. The 18th century saw the development of the modern novel as literary genre, in fact many candidates for the first novel in English date from this period, of which Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe is probably the best known.
English literature
English literature - Enlightenment, Satire, Novels: The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 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 ...
10 Eighteenth-Century Novels Everyone Should Read
The Gothic craze led to many other novelists, among them William Beckford with his novel Vathek, trying their hand at the genre, but Ann Radcliffe was probably the most successful and inventive Gothic novelist of the eighteenth century, and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is her most ambitious work. 10. Jane Austen, Lady Susan.
The 18th century
American literature - Colonial, Revolution, Enlightenment: In America in the early years of the 18th century, some writers, such as Cotton Mather, carried on the older traditions. His huge history and biography of Puritan New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, in 1702, and his vigorous Manuductio ad Ministerium, or introduction to the ministry, in 1726, were defenses of ancient Puritan ...
Best Books of the 18th Century (372 books)
1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. 4. The Sorrows of Young Werther. by. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 3.69 avg rating — 133,871 ratings. score: 14,599 , and 150 people voted. Want to Read. saving….
The 18th century
Western literature - Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism: To call the 18th century the Age of Reason is to seize on a useful half-truth but to cause confusion in the general picture, because the primacy of reason had also been a mark of certain periods of the previous age. It is more accurate to say that the 18th century was marked by two main impulses: reason and passion. The respect paid to ...
What are the main characteristics of 18th-century English novels
Some scholars say that the 18th century is the era during which the English novel came to be, in terms of an official literary genre.The novels from this time period generally depict, in realistic ...
Enlightenment in English Literature
Enlightenment marks the change from an essentially religious outlook. If we go back to the age of Milton, people still believed in Satan, in witches and demons, in burning in hell in everlasting perdition, etc.By the end of the 18th-century people were still Christian and religious but they had a naturalistic and secular view about religion because of the growing tendency of Enlightenment.
Restoration and Eighteenth Century English Literature: 1660-1789
Restoration Literature: 1660-1700. Augustan Age: 1700-1750. Age of Johnson and Sensibility: 1750-1789. Background on Reading Restoration and 18th Century Literature. View of St. Paul's Clock Tower, designed by architect Christopher Wren and constructed in 1675.
The Best Eighteenth-Century Poems Everyone Should Read
Below, we introduce ten of the greatest and most emblematic poems of the eighteenth century. We've confined ourselves to poems written in the English language here, to make the task even vaguely achievable. 1. Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock. The neoclassical return to the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome - coupled with a desire for ...
18th-Century English Literature
18th-Century English Literature; 18th-Century English Literature. Affiliated Graduate Students. Lilith Todd. PhD Student. Research Interests ... of the Body. Race and Empire. History of Capitalism. Gender and Sexuality Studies. The Department of English And Comparative Literature 602 Philosophy Hall, MC4927 1150 Amsterdam Ave · New York, NY ...
The Restoration and the 18th Century
The Restoration and the 18th Century. King Charles II. 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 Longman Anthology of British Literature. Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd,
5.1: The Restoration and 18th Century
The 18th century gave birth to the novel, an extended fictional prose narrative, as a form of literature. Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders are considered the first novels . DeFoe's works were followed by Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel (a novel written in the form of a series of letters) Pamela , and Henry Fielding ...
Introduction to 17th & 18th-Century Literature: Major Authors and Works
A few other aspects of 18th-century literary culture began to look quite a bit like our own. Also, in the mid-1700s, writer John Newberry made children's literature a popular thing or a real thing that people took seriously. (You may be familiar with the children's literature award now named after him, the Newberry Medal.)
Early Eighteenth Century British Literary Criticism
Literary criticism developed in the early eighteenth century as part of a broader cultural discourse that included moral philosophy, politics, aesthetics, science, and economics. For critics otherwise as different as Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Joseph Addison (1672-1719), and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the study of literature offered a means to promote…
English literature
English literature - Romanticism, Poetry, Novels: As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, "Romantic" is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled "Romantic movement" at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics.
Introduction to 17th- and 18th-Century Literature: Major Authors and
The 200 years that spanned the 17th and 18th centuries saw an explosion of major authors, works, and styles in English literature. Discover the authors and major literary movements at end of the ...
Guides: Literature in English: Resources: 18th-Century Literature
This collection offers unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th-centuries. Categories include 19th-century entertainment, the booktrade, popular prints, crimes, murders and executions, and advertising. Literary Print Culture: The Stationers' Company Archive, 1554-2007.
18th-century French literature
Rousseau. 18th-century French literature is French literature written between 1715, the year of the death of King Louis XIV of France, and 1798, the year of the coup d'État of Bonaparte which brought the Consulate to power, concluded the French Revolution, and began the modern era of French history. This century of enormous economic, social ...
18th century literature characteristics/historical context/topics
The literature of the 18th century stood out mainly for the idea that humanity was happy through contact with culture and progress. At that time the stage of the Enlightenment originated, also known as the "Age of Enlightenment", where reason was the most important and the texts had moral, civil, and teaching objectives. 18th-century literature with characteristics
18th Century Literature
18th Century, variously known as the Neoclassical Age, Augustan Age, Age of Pope, Age of Johnson, is characterized by emphasis on reason, sense and sensibili...
The Greatest 18th Century Writers
An influential writer, many of his works remain classics of Scottish as well as English-language literature. Scott was admired by other prominent writers like Letitia Elizabeth Landon. 18 . ... Olympe de Gouges was an 18th-century French playwright and political activist. Her writings on women's rights and abolitionism were popular in various ...
The Restoration and the 18th Century
The Restoration and the 18th Century. 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 Longman Anthology of British Literature. Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd,
SCOTUS, 18th Century Kings and The Dangers of an Unbound ...
The American presidency is modeled off 18th century kingship. It is in key ways a relic of 18th century monarchy. Of course, the new Americans were trying to move away from monarchy.
What Was It Like to Live in 18th-Century England?
There were two very different lifestyles in 18th-century England: the rich and the poor. With the Industrial Revolution, which started in the middle of the century, came new machinery that saved time and made some people very wealthy. The rich were getting richer and the poor, poorer. Many people were out of work because suddenly machines were ...

Enlightenment in English Literature | Definition, ideas, meaning | The age of Enlightenment

Characteristics of Enlightenment:

The important Enlightenment thinkers:

John Lock as an Enlightenment thinker:

Conclusion:

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Restoration and Eighteenth Century English Literature: 1660-1789

English Literature of the Enlightenment

Restoration Literature: 1660-1700

Significant Historical Dates:

English Literature 1660-1700: Major Authors and Highlights

English Literature of the Augustan Age, 1700-1750: Major Authors and Highlights:

Age of Johnson and “Sensibility” 1750-1789

English Literature in the Age of Johnson, 1750-1789: Major Authors and Highlights:

Never Miss a Post!

Search the Site

Recent Posts

Privacy Policy: Click Here

Author Login

Email Read Great Literature

Privacy Overview

The Best Eighteenth-Century Poems Everyone Should Read

Discover more from Interesting Literature

1 thought on “The Best Eighteenth-Century Poems Everyone Should Read”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

The Restoration and the 18th Century

Background: The Augustans and the Age of Reason

An Age of Satire

Cultural and Literary Contexts

English 101: English Literature

200 Years of Literature

The Renaissance

Caroline/Interregnum/Restoration

Neoclassicism

Lesson Summary

Literary Theory and Criticism

Early Eighteenth Century British Literary Criticism

Share this:

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

The nature of Romanticism

The Romantic period

Literature in English: Resources

Individual Journals

Periodical Indexes and Bibliographic Databases

Other Databases

Encyclopedias and Reference Works

Special Collections

18th century literature characteristics/historical context/topics

18th-century literature

Historic context 18th-century literature with characteristics

Characteristics

– Illustration

Analytics 18th-century literature with characteristics

Language and aesthetics

– Neoclassicism

Academicism

The universal and didactic 18th-century literature with characteristics

Genres and styles

– Preromanticism

Fragment of the poem “La Primavera” by Alberto Lista

Fragment of the poem “My destiny” by Nicasio Álvarez Cienfuegos

Topics 18th-century literature with characteristics

Related Articles

Poetic movement Characteristics movements today

18th Century Writers

Transitions to Romanticism

Background: The Augustans and the Age of Reason

An Age of Satire

Cultural and Literary Contexts

SCOTUS, 18th Century Kings and The Dangers of an Unbound Presidency

IMAGES

VIDEO

COMMENTS