Eighteenth century prose and poetry

Late 17th century poets

JOHN MILTON (1608-1674) is one of giants of English literature, on the same level as Shakespeare. He was a Puritan, supporter of Cromwell and his diplomat and a traveller (he met Galileo). Because he was near Cromwell´s coffin when Charles II returned, he was send to prison and for his political view separated from public life. He had an issue with his sight since he damaged it by overwhelming reading and writing and he was totally blind when he wrote his masterpiece Paradise Lost. His works are imaginary, full of colourful visions, religious feelings and passion.

Paradise Lost is an epic poem written in unrhymed iambic pentameter = blank verse which Milton mastered (A happy rural seat of various view - 10 syllables with 5 stresses). Milton was not a Christian who would reject everything pagan and takes inspiration from Greek and Egyptian mythology. Based on Genesis, Milton retells the story poetically. He used elevated poetic language the text was to decorative and excessive which makes it the only example of baroque style in English literature. He also wrote a sequel Paradise Regained that balances Paradise Lost by highlighting Christ´s victory and the redemption of man.

Satan (former Lucifer) wanted revenge on tyranny of God. Since he is not shown as pure evil it is surprising that a Puritan like Milton illustrated him in such a way. In addition, God is showed as old man on the throne who only gives orders like a dictator and punishes Adam and Eve that they did not wanted to stay ignorant since their free will is released after eating the apple. This might be read also as political allegory in comparison to England: Cromwell is like Satan – very  progressive, although he created another form of tyranny. God would be the monarch. Milton clearly sympathises with Satan/Cromwell.

Milton's story contains two arcs, one of Satan and another of Adam and Eve. The story of Satan begins after Satan and the other rebel angels have been defeated and cast into Hell. In Pandæmonium, Satan employs his rhetorical skill to organize his followers and is aided by his lieutenants Mammon, Beelzebub, Belial and Moloch. Satan volunteers himself to poison the newly created Earth.  Adam and Eve are presented for the first time in Christian literature as having a full relationship while still without sin. Satan successfully tempts Eve and Adam, seeing Eve has sinned, knowingly commits the same sin. He declares to Eve that since she was made from his flesh, they are bound to one another. In this manner Milton portrays Adam as a heroic figure, but also as a deeper sinner than Eve, as he is aware that what he is doing is wrong.

After eating the fruit, Adam and Eve have lustful sex, and at first, Adam is convinced that Eve was right. However, they soon experience guilt and shame. Realizing what they have committed, Adam goes on a vision journey with an angel where he witnesses the errors of humankind and the Great Flood and is saddened by the sin. However, he is also shown redemption through a vision of Jesus Christ. They are cast out of Eden and the archangel Michael says that Adam may find "A paradise within thee, happier far."

 18th century essays

Unlike religious, Puritanist second half of the 17th century, the 18th century is called the Age of Reason because philosophers started to believe in the power of human reason which was possible thanks to Enlightenment. Religion did not disappeared but the key was rather human reason than superstitious belief. This era brought the idea of human equality and freedom of thought. The cultural trend was neoclassicism which sought perfection and rational organisation, referring back antiquity. Within writing, critical essay was the most prominent genre together with satire.

ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744) was a very influential poet who defined poetry and poetic taste for a century. His favourite technique was heroic couplet with a well organised structured. Inspired by antiquity, he believed in public function of poetry and that poets speak for a community and therefore have a responsibility. His poetry was strongly didactic but with wit, elegance and rationality. Although he suffered body paralysis and could not attend school he managed to educate himself. He wrote essays with the structure of poems because he thought that the power of poetry was more creative and can express difficult things in just one line.

An Essay on Man is a philosophical poem. It makes an assumption that man has fallen and must seek salvation. It is about a role of man that is not the centre of all things. But humanity cannot choose what is better and therefore is in the middle of human dilemma. The author uses the word fool to show how little humanity know in spite of the great progress made by science.

JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist and essayist who was especially sensitive to social issues and provides knowledge about desperate situation in Ireland of the 18^th century which was completely under the power of the Protestants. However, majority in Ireland were Catholics that were very poor with many children.  Protestant ruling class was fine but no one cared for famine in Ireland. A Tale of a Tub satirized all existing churches of the period.

In his satirical essay A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public the author suggests that the impoverished Irish Catholics might ease their economic troubles by selling children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. The writer is inhumanly calm and cold about the issue and uses cold calculation, gives percentages, proposals and is being very rational. So rational that we actually can´t trust him. (A young healthy child well nursed, is at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragoust.) He also attacks instrumental reason and shows that that if you apply practical instrumental reason for everything, you can end up creating inhuman society. Except for that, Swift also criticises many essays of that period written by experts that proposed how to improve situation but their theories were not based on real human experience. In addition, by pointing out that man would not beat their pregnant women if they feared miscarriage reveals that in fact pregnant women are being beaten reguarly.

In Gulliver’s Travels he shows his satirical sharpness once again. As the protagonist travels from one strange country to another Swift compares these countries to England. Although he criticises the UK and these strange countries as well, he still finds fantasy countries as better ones. The book presents itself as a simple traveller's narrative and its authorship is assigned to Lemuel Gulliver, the text is a first-person narrative but the name Gulliver appears nowhere in the book. Swift was linguistically inventive and words like "liliput, yahoo" are used even today.

Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput: Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and becomes a prisoner of a race of 15cm tall people, inhabitants of the neighbouring and rival countries of Lilliput and Blefuscu. The feuding between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscudans is meant to represent the feuding countries of England and France, but the reason for the war is meant to satirize the feud between Catholics and Protestants. Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag: While exploring a new country, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer who is 22 meters tall who treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. He is then bought by their Queen and kept as a favourite at court.

Part III: A Voyage to Laputa: Gulliver is washed on a desolate rocky island but he is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music and mathematics but utterly unable to use them for practical purposes. The device described simply as The Engine is possibly the first literary description in history of something resembling a computer. Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms: Gulliver returns to the sea where his crew mutinies in order to become pirates. He is abandoned and comes first upon a race of hideous deformed creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly after he meets a horse and comes to understand that the horses Houyhnhnm are the rulers and the deformed creatures Yahoos are human beings in the basest form. The narrator compared their intelligence to the situation in the UK since horses have no emotions.

SAMUEL JOHNSON was a leading intellectual who projected the fist systematic dictionary A Dictionary of the English language, was an editor of The Plays of William Shakespeare and literary critic who in his work The Lives of the Poets analyzed the works connected to lives of their authors.

 Beginning of the novel

The novel a big 18th century phenomenon but it is hard to trace its origin since it includes many influences. It was fashion of that time to present novels as real stories so when Robinson Crusoe was first published, it was presented as a biography because people in this age of reason were not that much interested in pure fiction. Novels were written for educated bourgeois middle class who were rising in power and could afford to have leisure time. Low class had no time for reading and was illiterate, high class was often illiterate as well because they just enjoyed their life in luxury.

DANIEL DEFOE was a political pamphleteer and was in prison because of it. Moll Flanders is a story of a prostitute Moll who is forced into it by injustice society, critical of society's hypocrisy. He featured in his Robinson Crusoe a man who through his reason and skills is able to survive in the wilderness. The relationship between Robinson and his native companion Friday is shown as a typical master-servant relationship, rather than friendship. It can be interpreted colonially as Robinson teaches Friday and converts him into a Christian.  

Robinson Crusoe sets on a sea voyage in 1651, against the wishes of his parents, who want him to stay at home and pursue a career. The journey ends in disaster as the ship is taken over by pirates and Crusoe becomes the slave. After two years of slavery, he manages to escape. Years later, he joins an expedition to bring slaves from Africa but he is shipwrecked in a storm on an island which he calls the Island of Despair. He proceeds to build a fenced-in habitation near a cave which he excavates himself. He keeps a calendar by making marks in a wooden cross which he has built. He hunts, light a fire, experiences storm, makes shoes, step on sea-urchin, grows barley and rice, dries grapes to make raisins for the winter months, eats sea turtles, makes candles, builds fireplace and chimney, makes clothes and pottery, raises goats, all using tools salvaged from his ship, as well as created from stone and wood which he harvests on the island. He also adopts a small parrot. He reads the Bible and becomes religious. He discovers native cannibals who occasionally visit the island to eat prisoners. At first he plans to kill them for committing an abomination but later realises that he has no right to do so as the cannibals do not knowingly commit a crime. Crusoe help a prisoner to escape, naming his new companion Friday after the day of the week he appeared. Crusoe then teaches him English and converts him to Christianity. 

After another party of natives arrives to partake in a cannibal feast, Crusoe and Friday manage to kill most of the natives and save two of the prisoners. One is Friday's father and the other is a Spaniard, who informs Crusoe that there are other Spaniards shipwrecked on the mainland. Crusoe and the ship's captain strike a deal in which he helps the captain and the loyal sailors retake the ship from the mutineers, whereupon they intend to leave the mutineers on the island. Before they leave for England, Crusoe shows the former mutineers how he lived on the island. Crusoe leaves the island in 1686 and arrives in. He learns that his family believed him dead and there was nothing in his father's will for him. Crusoe reclaims the profits of his plantation. In conclusion, he takes his wealth overland to England to avoid travelling at sea. Friday comes with him and along the way they endure one last adventure together as they fight off famished wolves.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON is considered a founder of the novel and a printer who was writing model letters which later inspired him to write an epistolary novel (= the story develops in letters). Pamela about a maid writing to her parents how her master is trying to seduce her. He succeeded in seducing her but after the marriage she became a respectable lady. Clarissa is another epistolary, it presents Puritan morality where a woman has to marry as a virgin but the heroine cannot because she was seduced by a man. She suffers and eventually dies but she remains morally unbroken. The seducer dies with final realization what he has done. Today he is unreadable because he is very sentimental and moralising but he was popular in his time, answering the taste of readers.

HENRY FIELDING is also considered a founder of the novel. He stopped writing for the theatre because he could not write what he wanted so he started writing novels. He wrote a sort of a criticism of Richardson’s Pamela called Shamela with reversed story where a predatory fortune hunter lures her master intro matrimony.

His Tom Jones is a picaresque novel where a man is in search of his mother and travels to London. This novel gave rise to classical concept of a novel which many writers followed. Fielding is realistic and attacks moral corruption of the 18th century society but the novel is as the same time comic and readers can like the character who might not be morally perfect but he is human being. The book gives a panoramic view of the society.

TOBIAS SMOLETT was a Scottish author who spent many years as a sailor and introduced the character of a sailor into the English canon which became very popular later. In his picaresque novels The Adventures of Roderick Random he exaggerates the features of the characters and they are characterized by the language they use.

LAURENCE STERNE was an enigma, readers did not know what to think about his work but it was comical so he was appreciated. In his work The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman the author plays with the language and breaks defined rules of the novel and creates anti-novel. He is considered to be the very first modern writer who was ahead of his time since he experimented like modernists. The book presented also the very first interactive art because the novel asks readers to draw a picture of your ideal woman and leaves a blank page for it.

The plot is not chronological, as a matter of fact; there is no real plot whatsoever – it´s just a disorganised series of anecdotes and humorous stories. He also used typographical devices and chapters that are very long are followed by chapters with just one line and then a blank page. Although the title suggest the memoir, the funny thing is that the reader learns absolutely nothing about the protagonist since Tristram is born at the end of the book. Everything are stories of his family that happened before his birth so consequently other characters are more important than Tristram. The central joke is that the narrator cannot explain anything simply and makes explanatory diversions to add context and colour to the tales.

JOHN CLELAND became famous for what became known as the most famous English pornography novel – Fanny Hill or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. It was very popular but not accepted by the critics and the Church. It is about a very young girl who came to London to look for a job as a servant. An elderly lady took her into a big house with many young girls.