Chapter 6: Augustan (Neo-Classical)

Augustan (Neo-Classical) Period

(1713-1789)

A fter the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the German House of Hanover took over
the British throne. The monarchy was not popular, and there were two
rebellions led by the Catholic son and grandson of James II in 1715 and 1745,
but both were defeated. The power of Parliament and the prime minister continued to
grow.
This was the time of the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution.
New inventions made manufacturing processes quicker, and British trade with the rest
of the world grew enormously. The growing British Empire was a ready market for
British produce. At the same time, new processes in agriculture forced many people to
move from the country to the new cities to find work. It was also a time when many
people, especially from Scotland and Ireland, went to live in the new colonies in
America.
Towards the end of the century a new mood of freedom began to grow: the
American Declaration of Independence in 1776 was the first sign of this, and later the
French Revolution in 1789 brought the spirit of `Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' to
Europe. This was a great threat to the stability of British society, which did not want
to see the revolution of 1649 repeated.
In literature the classical ideas of the Augustans changed. Later in the century
the focus on the rational mind and on an ordered society changed to focus on the
world of nature and natural feelings. Drama became less important, especially, after
the Theatres Licensing Act of 1737, but the novel became-more and more important,
reaching a huge number of readers as the profession of writing became more
important. Journalism and magazines formed and reflected the opinions of the new
middle classes. It was the economic power of the new middle-classes which gave
the nation its strength and its political power.

The Rise of the Novel

The rise of the novel is usually said to begin from the early 1700s, but there
are many earlier examples of fictional writing. To go back a century, there are the
works of Thomas Nashe; after the Restoration of 1660, the figure of Aphra Behn,
novelist, dramatist, and poet who was the first Englishwoman known to earn her living by
writing, is also important in the development of the novel.
In fact, women have always written a lot of fiction, and in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century they were also the greatest part of the
readership, the market for the new professional writers. Aphra Behn wrote about
thirty novels, including Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (I683), a
novel in the form of letters, also called an epistolary novel. This became a very

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 Chapter 6: Augustan (Neo-Classical)

popular form about sixty years later, when the epistolary novel was at the top of
literary fashion. Aphra Behn's most famous novel is Oroonoko (I688), sometimes
called the first philosophical novel in English. It is inspired by a visit she made to
Surinam in South America, and concerns the African royal prince Oroonoko who is
captured and sent as a slave to the English colony of Surinam. It is a strong
protest against the trade in slaves and against the power of colonialism, just at the
time when such power was growing. Aphra Behn was not afraid of controversy,
and, in fact, seemed to enjoy her role as a speaker for women's rights and sexual
freedom. But she was an outsider in the society of the time, which was controlled
by men, and her novels were not well considered by later critics.
Mary de la Riviere Manley was a similarly ‘scandalous' woman, and although
her novels were hugely popular in her own lifetime, they were completely ignored
by the (mostly male) critics who followed. She brought the kind of political satire
found in Dryden's great poems of the 1680s into the novel. She used false names
for real characters, to tell scandalous stories about political and personal enemies.
Mrs. Manley was traditional and royalist in her politics, but very liberal in her views on
the role of women in society. So her novels also show the struggle between the
sexes: an innocent girl ruined by an older man is frequently a part of these stories.
The novels are collections of stories rather than well-structured plots. The Secret
History of Queen Zarah (1705), which was published in separate parts, had notes with
every part to explain all the references to real-life characters. The New Atlantis (1709)
was also political and handled many ‘objectionable’ themes such as rape, incest and
homosexuality. When these themes were later handled in novels by men they were
no: considered quite so objectionable. The fathers of the novel, rather than the
mothers of the genre, were seen as the writers who gave a strong moral position to
the novel in- the` eighteenth century.
At first, and for more than a century, the novel was not well regarded by serious
critics. Poetry was a higher form of literary art. But there was a growing market
among the middle classes, especially among ladies, for novels, and this market grew
during the eighteenth century until the novel reached a huge readership all over the
world.
Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, followed a little later by Samuel Richardson
and Henry Fielding, are the most important male names in the story of the rise of the
novel. Defoe produced a great many works and was a journalist for many years
before publishing Robinson Crusoe in 1719. It was an immediate success, and has
remained one of the most famous stories in the world. In it, Robinson Crusoe makes a
kingdom of his island after a ship is wrecked, and remains there for over twenty-eight
years, building a society of two men, with only his ‘man, Friday' as his companion.
The story can be read as a fable of survival in praise of the human spirit, or as an
example of how the new society brought its values, religion and selfish behavior to
any place it colonized. Friday is considered inferior, his religion laughed at, and his
ignorance `cured'. In the meantime, Robinson grows rich, and when he returns to
society he has become a model of the new capitalist man of Europe. Property and the
white man's power are more important than such things as love or marriage
(Robinson's marriage occupies only a page of the story). The happy ending suggests

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 Chapter 6: Augustan (Neo-Classical)

the continuation of the way of life Crusoe has brought to the island, on the model of
white European society.
Defoe's technique in most of his novels is to use a first-person narrator: an ‘I’
who tells the story as if it had really happened. (Robinson Crusoe was inspired by the
story of Alexander Selkirk who had actually been on a desert island for many years.) A
Journal of the Plague year (1722) describes the plague in London in I664-5 in a
journalistic way, with documents and lists of the dead. Moll Flanders (also 1722) tells
the story of a woman who has been a prostitute, a thief, committed incest, and been
to prison. But when she tells the story, she has reformed and changed her life. The
novel therefore makes a moral point about ways of living: the reader shares Moll's
terrible experience in order to learn what life should be.
This reflects the age's concern with experience and how to live. Such a concern
contrasts with the interest in the Renaissance in the exploration of new worlds and
ideas. Hobbes, in Leviathan, had described life as `solitary [lonely], poor, nasty,
brutish [like an animal] and short.' Most of the novelists of the eighteenth century
described the bad side of life, but with a happy ending to show that it was all worth
while.
Jonathan Swift is perhaps the one writer who is
different. His early satire The Battle of the Books (written
1697, published 1704) is one of the best descriptions of the
differences between the Ancients (the classical writers) and
the Moderns in the literary tastes of the Augustan period.
Swift uses humor—his main question is will the Ancients
make space for the newer Modern writers in the library? But
it is the books which discuss this question almost as if they
are people. Swift's satire becomes stronger in his later
works. His Gulliver’s Travels is a very angry use of satire
against what he saw as being wrong with the world. But
almost as soon as it was published in 1726, the novel was
considered as a kind of children's story, a fable, rather than
the strong social criticism which it really is.
The novel is in four parts. In the first part Gulliver travels to Lilliput, where he
meets the very small inhabitants; in book two, on Brobdignag, the people are
enormous. Religion and politics in particular are satirized, and the king of Brobdignag,
after hearing Gulliver describes the society of England, decides that ‘your natives' are:

the most pernicious1 race of little odious vermin2 that nature ever
suffered3
crawl upontothe surface of the earth.
1
nasty 2unpleasant rubbish 3allowed

But the satire gets even stronger: in the third book all the new learning of the Royal
Society is the victim. The Royal Society was founded in I662 and 1663 `for the
Improving of Natural Knowledge.' It was a centre for science and culture, but, as
Swift saw it, all the wisest men have no practical sense of how to live in the real
world. And in the final book, Gulliver meets the cultured horses, the Houyhnhnms,
and compares their ways with the nasty monkey-like Yahoos, who represent
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 Chapter 6: Augustan (Neo-Classical)

First edition of Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift

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 Chapter 6: Augustan (Neo-Classical)

Then Lovelace
humanity. Swift's
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her to escape narrations
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believing
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And from
does want to
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his letters: to comic, from social to satirical, the novel
already had a wide range of themes and styles by 1750.
Is not this the hour of her trial—And in her, of the trial of the virtue1 of
The Novel after her
whole
1750sex, so long premeditated,2 so long threatened? Whether her frost be
After Richardson frost
indeed? Whether her
and Fielding the virtue
novel had be principle.
become a rich and varied genre. In the
next fifty years it moved in several
1good moral character
quite different new directions.
2considered in the past
Again there were several women writers who led the way. Charlotte Lennox, who
was born in the colony of New York in America, wrote The Life of Harriot Stuart in 1750

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 Chapter 6: Augustan (Neo-Classical)

and The Female Quixote in 1752. She concentrates on female experience from a female
point of view, as her titles imply. Arabelle the heroine of The Female Quixote, expects
all men to be her slaves, almost the opposite of the expectations of a Richardsonian
heroine. Similarly, Eliza Haywood in her comic novel Miss Betty Thoughtless (1751)
goes against the usual plot idea by making her heroine suffer in a bad marriage before
all turns out well. Sarah Fielding, sister of Henry, called her most famous novel David
Simple (I744, completed in 1753) which is the name of the innocent hero, who is
looking for a ‘real friend’. He is disappointed, and the novel is one of the earliest
realistic works which avoids the traditional happy ending. Here the man rather than the
woman is the victim.
The most unusual novel of the time was Tristram Shandy (1760-67) by Laurence
Sterne. This is a long comic story which plays with time, plot and character, and even
with the shape and design of the page. Traditionally, a plot had a beginning, a middle
and an end, in that order. Sterne was the first to change this order. He wanted to show
how foolish it is to force everything into the traditional plot.
Sterne was the first writer to use what came to be known as the Stream of
Consciousness technique, following the thoughts of characters as they come into their
heads. In this he was influenced by the Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) by John Locke, and his theories about time, sensations and the relation of one
idea to another.
Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling (1771) also plays with time and plot.
It seems to be a diary with pages and scenes missing. So the reader never gets the
whole story, but can only feel part of the emotions of the new kind of hero: a man
who cries, and who is easily moved by anything he sees or feels. This was a
deliberate challenge to the idea of the of the strong masculine hero, and it had a
great influence through all of Europe. The famous German novel The Sorrows of
Young Werther (1774) by Goethe was directly influenced by Mackenzie’s work.
The Man of feeling was the first Scottish novel to have a huge success, and its
concentration on emotion changed the way and thought about emotion for many
years.
Another Scot, Tobias Smollett, was the major comic novelist of the second half of
the -eighteenth century. His novels, such Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine
Pickle (1751) are entertaining in which the heroes go traveling all over Europe. They
are young men, who react against bad treatment and the ills of society with strong
language and often violent behavior. This is social observation, but it has a more
comic tone than the satire of Swift a generation earlier. Many readers found Smollett’s
novels and their themes too strong. His final novel Humpry Clinker (1771) is an
epistolary novel which describes how disunited the United Kingdom was nearly
seventy years after the Union of Parliaments in 1707. Above all, Smollett uses rich
and original language to suit his characters, and he brings a new comic freedom to
the novel after Fielding.

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