Restoration and 18th Century English Literature: From Grub Street to Robinson Crusoe

The Invention of Grub Street

Periodization of English Literature

1. Initial_period: 'Restoration' (1660-1700). This era closed with the death of John Dryden (satire, drama and poetry).
2. Next generation: 'Augustan Period'. Closed in 1744-45 with the death of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift (satire).
3. Second Half: 'Enlightenment'. Represented by Samuel Johnson and closed with his death in 1784 (essays, review, articles).

The Emergence of Grub Street

The culture that Augustans represent is monolithic, and think that only they represent culture (the rest is not).

• Augustans are compact and coherent in taste and style because they were educated people who reflected similar classical education.
  • Culture in England was divided and tended to ignore those that were considered inferior.
  • A very common element in their writings is how they devote themselves to producing texts in which they attack bad taste, poor intelligence or lack of knowledge of some contemporary writers.
• Other writers were simply 'inferior' and 'neglected'. Augustans were reacting against a different cultural formation that threatened to dominate or occupy their cultural space.

The rivalry between these groups was not only 'artistic' or 'cultural', but the expression of ideological tension between social groups:

• The culture of the gentry and aristocracy (people who had 'culture' vs. the 'rabble', anyone considered relatively illiterate).
• Augustan writers were reluctant to be considered 'professional' writers. They were educated gentlemen who happened to write but did not formally depend on commercial success for their living. Whenever they produced something literary, they were rewarded by 'patronage' and did it for the sake of reputation.
  • A gentleman could afford to be a 'man of letters' without expecting anything in return (Jonathan Swift).
• Those who had to rely on pure success at the market level, true professionals, were just perceived as Grub Street 'hackneys' (Daniel Defoe). What traditional perception transmitted is that Grub Street writers were not real authors, but semi-lettered prostitutes.
  • Another contextual factor to be considered is that the number of professional printers and booksellers was enormous, that they had proliferated during the civil wars and the Commonwealth, and that many of them were Puritans who took liberty of expression very seriously.

Different Systems and Genres

Differences between groups:

• The 'Augustan forms' are the ones inherited from the classical literary system: they do not write Epic poetry because they are too cynical and because contemporary reality does not make them believable, but they play with mock epic. They write verse satire and moral epistles, comedy and drama, and essays and history. The only acceptable form of prose fiction was 'Romance'.
• Grub Street is closer to popular demand and less attentive to tradition. Most of their products circulated in ephemeral commercial formats, such as broadsheets, journals and chapbooks.

The physical commercial space of Grub Street was powerfully associated with a parallel physical space. The wealthy and polite had their own events and meeting places.

Concerning genres and themes, there was a curious combination of utility and entertainment:

• The high-end companion and conduct books provided people with useful information about professions and practical things and also hints about social behaviour, mixed with moral instructions.
• Criminal stories imitated autobiographical confessions with a cautionary function.
• The lowest level was represented by ballads, jest books and folk tales, traveller's tales and adventures, and almanacks. As well as condensed chivalric romances and abridged novels.

Main kind of chapbooks:

• Small Merry Books -> Jest books and burlesques
• Small Goodly Books -> specifically designed to attack particular vices. A call to repentance and faith in Christ.
• Pleasant Histories -> popular summarised versions of tales. Four groups distinguished:
  • Mediaeval and Chivalric Romances
  • Neo-chivalric Romances
  • 'Realistic' Novels of middle-class respectable figures
  • Stories of success among poor boys/girls.

The popular writing of the 18th century adapted to changing demands; it was quite flexible, topical, open to controversy and very visibly concerned with the high-low divide in culture and society. Genres and themes:

• Accounts of urban low life
• Dictionaries of criminal argot, or canting dictionaries
• Antiquarianism
• Ballads, and discussions of their merits
• Propheties
• Almanacks
• Criminal tales and confessions
• Biographies of prostitutes
• 'Portents' and miraculous events
• Radical Pamphleting

Attitudes: Fiction vs Reality/ Public vs Private

The consumption of cultural products deferred across the social hierarchy. What Augustans were looking for followed classical assumptions about what is valuable in art: permanence, universality, quality and selection.

The 'normal' people (market-based) had the opposite attributes: Emphasis on novelty and local quality, characterised by extensive consumption oriented to incite wonder and emotion in the reader.

• In the area of literature, a remarkable aesthetic principle was the apparent rejection of fictionality: for those close to Calvinism, fiction bore the stain of sinfulness and vice. Apart from the Bible, the only safe reading activity consisted of being told 'true stories'.
  • That is why many authors pretended to be offering real news or imitated real documents, to overcome the religious scruples of Puritans.
• Another classical convention challenged by authors and consumers had to do with the identity and social origin of the protagonist. Classical culture required the topics of people should be elevated, following the principle of decorum (elevated people). Normal 'modern' readers could not identify with them. That is why only 'private' people are chosen for the novel (Daniel Defoe -> Robinson Crusoe)

The Battle Against Grub Street

Strategies of self-characterisation that took place (patricians vs folklore):

• Classical model. Only one legitimate space: Patrician culture. The rest is just folklore and outside the 'sacred' space of culture (inferior level). The culture of literate people.
  • The strategy of educated people was coherent with their desire to sharpen the supposed distinctions between their culture (literature), and the products of those inferior to them.

o This correlation between cultural products and social classes was strengthened with the elevated notion of 'literature'. This inferior world is made of hack writers (Grub Street), hack printers and booksellers.

Reality is more complex, and Augustans deliberately favoured it in an attempt to ignore and dismiss the culture of rising middle classes.

The Rise and Fall of Satire

Reasons for Satirical Activity

There were 3 main reasons for the extraordinary proliferation of satirical activity:

1. Political instability and heated debates. In a period labelled by historians as 'The Rage of Party' rivals were enemies, and confrontations did not only take the form of debates in Parliament.
2. Very active press. During the Civil War and the Commonwealth, there was a printing boom, and the number of newspapers grew spectacularly. Booksellers and editors were very active and involved in political life.
3. Liberty of press. Pope puts the blame on the removal of Licensing acts, the main instrument of censorship. Everything started before the civil wars when Parliament closed the Star Chamber (1640). From this moment there were several tos and fros until the crucial moment of the publication of the Theatrical Licensing Act (1737) by which Walpole (prime minister) tried to put an end to the attacks he was receiving from critical playwrights like Fielding. This put an end to Fielding's career in theatre and the beginning of his transformation into a novelist.

Satire stopped being a central genre when political tension came to an end. The end of Tori attacks came with the death of the former generations.

England became more concerned with the behaviour and feelings of individuals in a social context, and this new concern was more compellingly expressed in the novel. The novel has more to do with psychology, sociology and economy, as experienced by individuals in practical situations than with Ethics and Political Philosophy.

Brief Anthology of Satire

The supply of masterpieces in the field of satire was inevitably linked to the moments of more violence of political tension. For this, it is easy to place authors on the two sides of the great ideological divide.

• Early after the restoration, Samuel Butler published the first part of "Hudibras", a long mock epic poem on a Puritan. However, little sympathy is obtained from the reader as he is characterised as a Puritan would: rigid but hypocritical, using an idealistic rhetoric but proving to be mean. Every bit of action is complemented with arguments between Hudibras and Ralpho, showing the clash between elevated ideology (theory) and their mean behaviour (practice).
• Andrew Marvell was a remarkable Metaphysical poet ("To His Coy Mistress") and was very critical of the corrupted management of the country by the King. This was reflected in a brilliant poem: "Last Instructions to a Painter". The poem has too many precise historical references.
• John Dryden represents the opposite stance. He was a writer determined from the beginning of his career to praise and support the powerful. The crucial years of his satirical career were the ones of the Exclusion Crisis, when the King's reputation and authority were in danger -> "Absalom and Achitophel"
• In "Mac Flecknoe", the theme seems to be just literary rivalry, since the target is another playwright, Thomas Shadwell, and what he criticises about him is his lack of talent as a writer.
• Daniel Defoe had a very turbulent phase of political involvement before he became a novelist. The work that gave him popularity was "The True-Born Englishman", in which he ridicules the xenophobic discourse of some Tories.
• For Jonathan Swift, satire was at the beginning an instrument to make himself known by the authorities in the hope of being rewarded with a job if he wrote something to defend Queen Anne ("Tale of a Tub"). When all of this failed, he simply wrote to vent his hatred political life.
• When the rage of politics was over, there were writers who, although younger, still kept the genre of political satire alive. Henry Fielding, before becoming the father of the English novel, used his talent to ridicule Robert Walpole.
• The boldest experiment in this field was perhaps the biography of a notorious gangster who always managed to escape from prison, secretly a portrait of Walpole and his doubtful morals.

Satire as Art: Problems and Techniques

Contradictions in Satire

The first observations to make concerning satire in the frame of literary criticism and history of the period:

• Literary historians who kept faithful to the traditional canon of Augustarianism (Swift and Pope) find it logical to claim satire was the essential genre.
• One of these qualifications has to do with the low reputation that genre had in the Classical Hierarchy of genres, as Literary criticism was influenced by Aristotelian principles, coherent with the classical principle of decorum, while comedies often represented defective behaviour and their protagonists are 'naturally' humbler. The painful paradox for many satirical writers was that they worked hard to produce something that was low.

Justifications for Satire

3 reasons are normally offered:

1. There are a lot of rules and techniques to control
   1. In agreement with classical theory, Dryden considers that 'public' varieties of poetry are superior to 'private' ones.
   2. Respectable etymology: the uncomfortable association of 'satire' with the immortal mythological figure of 'satyr' is replaced by 'saturalanx' by enhancing the formal or structural element.
   3. Typologies and illustrious examples. Subvarieties and modes are always identified thanks to models, and all new productions are to be understood as exercises in imitation.