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THE RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: 1660 – 1780
INTRODUCTION:
From the second half of the seventeenth century to the latter decades of the eighteenth, Britain was undergoing a dramatic process of modernisation. Britain was becoming increasingly urbanised , and London during the eighteenth century would become the largest city in Europe and one of the largest in the world. And Britain saw the development of its political parties ( WHIG and TORY) and had its first Prime Minister. In fact, the entity of Great Britain itself (as a “ nation ”) was created during this period, through the 1707 Act of “Union between the kingdoms of England and Scotland”. It was then that the government became a constitutional monarchy.
Francis Bacon’s insights for modern science – advocating the use of empirical induction and instruments – were institutionalised in the Royal society (chartered 1662), which sponsored scientific investigation and published the results.
The early 1660s also saw the creation of what would come to be known as the Royal Africa Society, which would organise Britain’s participation in transatlantic African slave trade. This involvement would be bound up with the history of the Thirteen colonies, many of them settled during this period, on the western edge of the Atlantic, and later known as the United States of America , which itself emerged during the early eighteenth century. The seventeenth- century creation of the East India Company organised British trade with India , which would lead within a century to Britain ruling the entire Indian subcontinent: the British empire.
British literature saw one of the most important literary developments of the Restoration and eighteenth century: the rise of the novel. At the same time, it was during this period that literary criticism began to take its modern institutional form. The early novels and early literary criticism were addressing, responding to and even shaping the historic events of their day.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW:
Charles II’s arrival in England (from exile in France) and his subsequent accession as king in 1660 are taken as the beginning of a new period in English history: the Restoration. With Charles II (a Stuart) on the throne, the monarchy was restored , after eleven years without a king. The restoration of the monarchy ended nearly two decades of civil wars across England and army coups at Parliament in London. “The Restoration” is the name of a period – from 1660 to the death of Charles II in 1685 – of relative political stability. The return of the king to the throne gave the period its name, and also gave a high political cast to much that was written about it from that time on. Despite the political stability of the period, there were still conflicts between the three kingdoms, and religious conflicts but these issues were treated in a more peaceful way.
CULTURAL OVERVIEW: The Age of Reason : the period is sometimes labelled “The Age of Reason” because reason was much praised and valued. It was the period of the Enlightenment – the major figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment are philosophers: Voltaire, Kant, Locke … their emphasis on reason led to the separation of Church and state, to secularism , which helped shape “modernity”
- of the emergence of modern science. Yet this cultural progress took place within a society that would nevertheless strike us today as more medieval than modern.
LONDON’S RESTORATIONS : Within a few years of the Restoration, London suffered extraordinary devastation: a plague in 1665 and a massive fire in 1666 (which helped control the plague). It is estimated that at least 100,000 people died in the Plague of 1665, or one out of every six Londoners. The Fire of London went on for four days: medieval London – “The City” – burned out of control. Four hundred streets and nearly ninety parish churches were among the structures completely destroyed by the Fire. More than 100,000 people were left homeless. At the time, the Fire was taken as an opportunity to rebuild London to a plan.
Reopening of theatres: Charles II effected one kind of restoration, a cultural one, when he reopened the theatres, which had been closed since 1642. Over time, the theatres in London would proliferate. Moreover, it was during the
which resulted in poems which are often remembered for being “too formal, too simple and too topical.” Stylistically, Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry was dominated by the heroic couplet : pairs or “couplets” of iambic pentameter lines. That is, each line is composed of ten syllables arranged into five groups or “feet” of unstressed and stressed syllables; both lines in the pair end with the same sound. The themes and settings of English poetry go from urban (focused on London) in the Restoration to rural by the mid-eighteenth century. Poetry was dominated by two poets during this period: John Dryden in the Restoration and Alexander Pope through at least the first third of the eighteenth century. Both of them, though, were engaged with the precedent and influence of John Milton (1604-74). Milton is not usually thought of as a Restoration poet, but as his most important poems were all published after 1660 he certainly fits in any consideration of Restoration literature. Although he published an essay against the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy (he worked for Cromwell’s republican government), Paradise Lost (1667), one of the most influential poems in English, was published during the Restoration.
DRYDEN: Paradise Lost ’s status as the first English epic was too important for an ambitious poet such as Dryden to ignore. Its religious themes were present in Dryden’s poetry: The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man. Dryden also found inspiration in Milton’s lifelong engagement with politics, although Dryden chose a different approach from that of Milton. Dryden sided with successive monarchs where Milton successively rejected them. He could write a poem mourning the death of Cromwell in 1658 and a poem, “Astraea Redux”, celebrating Charles II in 1660, just two years later. The poem that earned Dryden his reputation for turning the contemporary into poetry was “Annus Mirabilis” (1667), concerned with the events of 1666, the Fire of London and the defeat of the Dutch navy. His most important poetic achievements ewre in the three-or-four-year period around the Exclusion Crisis in the late 1670s and early 1680s that resulted in Dryden’s most important poetic achievements: poems such as Absalon and Achitophel and The Hind and the Panther are among the most inscrutable of Dryden’s works, because of their coded topical references. They are political allegories.
On Dryden’s political allegories, L. Morrissey writes: “Traditionally, there is a tendency to see literature and the other arts as having a tenuous connection to politics at most. The aesthetic, the argument goes, is above the political, meaning not only “better than” but “beyond” and having little to do with the political. In this model, the critic tends to look at the organisation and appeal of the formal attributes of the poem, often pointing to its representation of universal themes. Steeped in the politics of the moment, the poetry of the Restoration confounds this model of criticism. Dryden’s poetry perfectly illustrates this late seventeenth-century combination of the literary and the political (…). Absalon and Achitophel (1681) was published just before the treason trial of Shaftesbury as Achitophel and the Duke of Monmouth (Charles’s illegitimate son) as Absalon. Understanding the poem, then, requires familiarity with the biblical story and the principal players and stakes in the Exclusion Crisis (…) [it is] a 1,000-line poem which uses the Bible for a defence of the King’s position in the Exclusion Crisis (…) the literary and the political merge in any consideration of late seventeenth-century poetry. In this way, it is understandable that the period has on the one hand resisted the universalist claims often made for great literature while on the other proved such a fruitful area for historicist approaches to literature.”
COMMENTS ON Absalom and Achitophel , and on The Hind and the Panther , by Sherburne and Bond ( Literary History of England , Routledge):
Absalom and Achitophel: A “political satire”. After 1678 (the Popish Plot) there had been repeated attempts to force a bill through Parliament excluding Catholics from the throne of England. The villain of these attempts was the Earl of Shaftesbury. At the suggestion of the king, this poem was written. The poem makes use of a biblical story to suggest how Achitophel (Shaftesbury) is tempting to rebellion Absalom (the Duke of Monmouth, illegitimate son of Charles II and the candidate to succeed his father). The poem consists largely of satirical portraits and of eloquent argumentative speeches. Satirical portraits were a favourite device of the day.
The Hind and the Panther
opera, the rise of the novel, and Puritan objections to the Immorality and Profaness of the English Stage , in Jeremy Collier’s words. This Puritan critic objects to plays’ “smuttiness of expression; their swearing, profaneness; their abuse of the clergy, their making their top characters libertines and giving them success in their debauchery.” William Congreve’s THE WAY OF THE WORLD (1700), could be read as a parody of Collier’s wish for clarity and distinctions: such clarity is not “the way of the world”. This play shows the complexity of human relationships in an “amoral” humorous way.
Sheburne and Bond ( Literary History of England , Routledge) write: “Although dramatists and critics alike agreed that moral instruction, through social criticism, was the aim of literature, and that comedy was a corrective of vices and follies [Molière’s influence] undoubtedly laughter or entertainment, and not moral improvement, was the true objective of Restoration comedy. The manners of the court were highly corrupt, and the comedy that the court patronized was unblushing, hard, cynical, and immoral. Among the notable playwrights Dryden, Wycherley and Congreve were men of fashion and courtiers (…). Perhaps because of the corruptness of court circles, perhaps because of a more general extreme revulsion against all Puritanism, it was good business to present on the stage shamelessly emancipated people. But the real source of comic effect concerns manners rather than morals. It was thought generally that there was or should be an explicit pattern of conduct or decorum for every station in life: for the monarch and for the beggar, for the gentleman and for his valet, for the fine lady and for the bawd. If like Congreve’s Witwoud ( The Way of the World ) one pretended to a pattern for which one was unqualified, one was comic (…) As for the ladies – all at heart engrossed in a man-hunt but always industrious to conceal the fact – their hypocritical coyness as well as their not infrequent sudden blunt remarks about sexual appetites seemed comical. Whatever is shocking is a deviation from pattern: some shocks are painful; some that are painful to us were comical to the Restoration. (…) Elizabethan comedy had been an imaginative representation of men living; Restoration comedy is rather an anatomy of life , not more a representation than
a commentary on life and on various social types (…) Restoration comedy is rather less a representation of life than it is a commentary upon manners. (…) Most of the comedies are in prose , and are realistic rather than romantic or idealistic. Repartee is much valued, and frequently plot is neglected for discussion of proper conditions for marital happiness, of cuckoldry, and, very commonly, of the nature of wit. In such “conversations” CONGREVE is the supreme artist [of witty comedy ]”
CONGREVE : Chronologically Congreve (1670-1729) does not belong to the Restoration but his comedies are in the spirit of the Restoration. After The Way of the World (1700) he wrote virtually nothing for the theatre. He regarded himself as a reformer of the stage, but his reform was concerned with the technique of drama – its wit, its structure, its dialogue. He was a formalist, a technician, a man of artistic rather than moral conscience, but his characters are subtler than other Restoration playwrights’. Congreve’s gentlemen do not berate their servants, and are not vain of their inconstancy in love – though they are inconstant. His works unmask the follies of men. The Way of the World is his best comedy.
“There are Crimes too daring and too horrid for Comedy. But the vices most frequent, and which are the common Practice of the looser sort of Livers, are the subject Matter of Comedy.” CONGRAVE.
THE RISE OF THE NOVEL IAN WATT
Early eighteenth century: FIRST THREE ENGLISH NOVELISTS: DEFOE, RICHARDSON AND FIELDING
The novel was a new literary form begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding in the early eighteenth century. It differs from the prose fiction of the past. Both Richardson and Fielding saw themselves as founders of a new kind of writing – although our usage of the term “novel” was not fully established until the end of the eighteenth century -, and both viewed their work as involving a break with old-fashioned romances.
The historians of the novel have determined the features of the new form: “realism” is seen as the defining characteristic which differentiates the work of the early eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction. The novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents – it attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience - , but in the way it presents it. The main critical associations of the term “realism” are with the French school of realists. “Réalisme” was first used as an aesthetic description in 1835 to denote the “vérité humaine” (human truth) of Rembrandt as opposed to the “idéalité poétique” (poetic idealism) of neo-classical painting (…) The French Realists (Standhal, Flaubert, Balzac) asserted that if their novels tended to differ from the more flattering pictures of humanity presented by many established ethical, social and literary codes, it was merely because they were the product of a more dispassionate and scientific scrutiny of life than had ever been attempted before. Modern realism begins with the position that truth can be discovered by the individuals through his senses. The novel (its realism) reflects what our senses can grasp. Another realistic aspect of the novel is the importance of the time dimension. Stories are never timeless – as in most previous fiction, which uses timeless stories to mirror the “universal” or unchanging moral verities. The novel is realistic because it reflects historical realities , changing realities. The novel has interested itself much more than any other literary form in the development of the characters in the course of time. This is essential to create a sense of narrative realism.
Finally, the novel’s detailed depiction of the concerns of everyday life is also linked to the time dimension: the novel employs a slower time pace than had previously been employed in narrative. The slowing down of narrative time allows the literary representation of many aspects of life which are “slow”, such as personal identity. In the novel, we readers
“have a sense of personal identity subsisting through duration and yet being changed by the flow of experience” Ian Watt
In his epistolary novels, Richardson created this impression by locating all the events of his narrative in an unprecedentedly detailed time-scheme: each letter gives the reader the day of the week, and often the time of the day.
“Richardson’s use of the letter form also induced in the reader a continual sense of actual participation in the action which was until then unparalleled in its completeness and intensity. In many scenes the pace of the narrative was slowed down by minute description to something very near that of actual experience. In these scenes Richardson achieved for the novel what Griffith’s technique of the “close-up” did for the film: added a new dimension to the representation of reality.” I. Watt
