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‘WHO SHAMES A SCRIBLER?”: SCANDAL AND PRINT CULTURE IN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

BY

Kathleen Mairi McGarvey

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
2000

ABSTRACT

‘WHO SHAMES A SCRIBLER?”: SCANDAL AND PRINT CULTURE IN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

BY

Kathleen M. McGarvey

Early eighteenth-century British print culture abounds
with texts that put that put the private behavior of real
individuals on public display. Such “scandal writing” (a
genre that in my definition includes scandal narratives,
personal satire, libel and pamphlet attacks) negotiates
public authority through the manipulation of individual
reputation. By conceiving of public discourse as a form of
personal attack, such writing challenges Jurgen Habermas's
depiction of the British eighteenth-century public sphere as
a space of purely rational discourse and points to the
existence of a counter-public sphere, one characterized by
less disinterested norms of exchange.

This dissertation presents a two-pronged argument.
First, it contends that the concepts of scandal and the hack
writer were developed to legitimate satire and the
professional author. Personal satirists identified scandal
as the defamatory genre, thus suggesting that their
satirical texts were not associated with detractive
practices. Similarly, authors participating in but
nevertheless ambivalent about the literary marketplace

invented the hack as the embodiment of commercial

 

authorship. Pope, Swift, Addison and others rely on the
tactics of scandal to promote their vision of the hack while
deploring scandal as the hack's contamination of print
culture.

Second, the dissertation argues that scandal writing
was the conduit through which public authority was mediated
by private life. Scandal writing produces a conception of
privacy that it also undermines. The private life is
conceptualized as a separate realm that can be exposed to
public scrutiny. In its exposure, however, it becomes a
dimension of the public sphere. The clearly fictional
nature of such representations (prominent among them,
certain pamphlet representations of Pope) marks them as
simulacrums of exposure, though their fictionality did not
diminish their purchase on the public imagination.

Scandal's private self is a textual self, a product of print
culture. The two lines of the dissertation's argument come
together in the idea of the constructed nature of scandal
writing and its object: the private selves scandal writing
claimed to expose were as much inventions as the very

concepts of scandal and satire, literary author and back.

 

Copyright by
KATHLEEN MAIRI MCGARVEY
2000

 

To Jean and Joseph McGarvey
and in memory of Helen McCormack

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Michigan State University's College of
Arts and Letters for supporting this project with a
Dissertation Merit Fellowship, and to the Department of
English at Michigan State and the Yunck family for the John
A. Yunck Award, which also assisted me in my research.

I am thankful to the members of my dissertation
committee -- A. C. Goodson, Judith Stoddart, Stephen Arch
and Karin Wurst —- for their comments, suggestions and
guidance.~ I especially thank my director, Ellen Pollak,
whose encouragement and generous, thoughtful reading of
drafts were invaluable to me.

I am indebted, too, to my friends and family for the
assistance they gave and the interest they showed as I
completed this dissertation. I am particularly grateful to
my parents, Jean and Joe McGarvey, for their support and
confidence, and to Greg Garvey, who read and listened,
discussed and encouraged, and helped in more ways than I can

say.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE
CIRCULATING REPUTATIONS: SCANDAL, SATIRE AND THE LAW 21

CHAPTER TWO
THE POLITICS OF EXPOSURE IN THE WORK OF
DELARIVIER MANLEY 61

CHAPTER THREE
INVENTING GRUB STREET: THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE
AND THE PROFESSION OF AUTHORSHIP 91

CHAPTER FOUR
REPUTATION, THE PUBLIC SELF AND THE ‘PAPER-WARS”:

THE CASE OF ALEXANDER POPE 123
CONCLUSION 159
BIBLIOGRAPHY 163

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INTRODUCT I ON

Issues of reputation animated early print culture in
Britain. While the libel laws -- the primary form of press
regulation in the eighteenth century -- sought to protect a
person's ‘good name,” the literary marketplace was rife with
texts that scrutinized and attempted to undermine public
standing with accounts of private conduct. Scandal, in the
early eighteenth century, described not just an event but a
way of writing. It denoted the deliberate publication of
private information in a calculated effort to diminish
another person's reputation. What I broadly define as
‘scandal writing” -- encompassing scandal narratives,
personal satire, pamphlet attacks and libels -—
simultaneously posited and blurred a demarcation between
private and public.1

In this dissertation, I examine scandal writing as a
seminal genre in the early eighteenth century, when print
technology was transforming publicity through the creation
of the mass audience, and the nature and norms of the
emerging public sphere were as yet only beginning,
tumultuously, to coalesce. This newly constituted public
sphere was inextricably linked to the private sphere -- each
implying its supplement and opposite. As such, the private
sphere is at once necessary to the idea of publicness and
that which makes publicness inherently unstable. In my

argument, I undertake to show that this instability

manifests itself in a body of writing that exploited the
private underside of public life: scandal, of which even
Pope's and Swift's personal satire is a version. Scandal
was mobilized as part of the production of both the public
and the private.

My project is in part a response to Jurgen Habermas's
now-classic formulation of the eighteenth-century bourgeois
public sphere. The dimension of print culture that Habermas
emphasizes brings rationality, critical distance and
impartiality into the foreground. Many texts published in
the early eighteenth century, however, do not conform to the
parameters of critical-rational debate that Habermas
describes. It is my contention that scandal writing appeals
to a different form of critical public than that which
Habermas defines in his StLucLuLal_ILans£QLmatiQn_Qfi_Lhe
EnhliQ_there. I posit the existence of a scandalous part
of a counter—public sphere. This critical public is
characterized not by impersonal rationality, but by personal
interest and insinuation. It is a new kind of critique,
based on revealing secrets and impugning character, which
was as vital and influential a form of public discourse as
the rationality Habermas analyzes. Scandal existed
alongside rational exchange, neither exclusively defining
the nascent public sphere. Habermas, I am suggesting, shows
only one side of this competitive relationship.

The term ‘counter-public" has been employed before to

supplement and challenge Habermas's account of the public

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sphere, by critics such as Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner.2
Both identify ‘counter-publics” as groups of individuals
that define themselves against a larger public; they are
‘alternative publics,” consciously subordinate to the
broader public body. Fraser and Warner cite a variety of
examples: minority groups, women, gays and lesbians,
workers. These counter-publics emerge because their
members' interests have been excluded from consideration in
the public sphere generally. In using the term
‘counter-public sphere,” however, I mean to denote a
different kind of public critique (scandalous rather than
rational), not a different public body. Fraser and Warner
use ‘counter—public” to indicate a public defined in
relation to the hegemonic group; I use the term to denote
the public sphere as influenced by a counter-form of
publicity: scandal.3

The View that Habermas takes of print culture in
eighteenth-century Britain is a narrow one, and one that
supports his theoretical blueprint of the bourgeois public
sphere. This sphere, he argues, was a social structure most
fully realized in the eighteenth century, when a sense of
‘the public” as differentiated from the state emerged and
mechanisms such as coffee houses, salons, and the periodical
press enabled the populace to participate in debates over
issues concerning commodity exchange and social labor.4 The
public sphere consisted of private people interacting as a

public group, defined in opposition to public authority.

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Interaction in the public sphere took the form of
critical-rational debate. Such critical-rational discourse,
Habermas argues, was the distinctive innovation of the
bourgeois public sphere: ‘The medium of this political
confrontation [wherein private people came together as a
public to debate the actions of public authorities] was
peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public
use of their reason” (27).

When Habermas identifies institutions such as coffee
houses as sites of critical-rational debate, he makes them
embodiments of an idealized form of discourse. There are
three main attributes of the public discussion taking place
there. First, status does not figure in these discussions.
Habermas explains that such institutions ‘preserved a kind
of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the
equality of status, disregarded status altogether. The
tendency replaced the celebration of rank with a tact
befitting equals” (36). Second, these debates problematized
areas of ‘common concern” -- religion, philosophy,
literature, art -- as the new critical public challenged
church and state authorities’ monopoly over their
interpretation. ‘The private people for whom the cultural
product became available as a commodity profaned it inasmuch
as they had to determine its meaning on their own (by way of
rational communication with one another), verbalize it, and
thus state explicitly what precisely in its implicitness for

so long could assert its authority” (37). Finally, ‘the

 

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public” must be, in principle, inclusive. As soon as it
discounted any person or group from possible inclusion, it
would cease to be ‘the public.” Habermas argues that the
‘issues discussed became ‘general' not merely in their
significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had
to b£_ahle to participate” (37).5

The essential qualities of the public sphere Habermas
describes are rationality and openness, and he sees these
qualities reflected in the publications of the age. Print
is key to the inclusivity he stipulates, so central, he
writes, that the bourgeois public sphere's ‘decisive mark”
was the ‘published word” (16). Habermas’s consideration of
eighteenth-century England’s print culture, however, is
cursory and constricted. He concentrates on periodicals
such as the Taller and Spectatar, and he positions them as
purely an extension of coffee-house discussion (which he has
already situated as critical-rational debate’s point of
origin). Joseph Addison and Richard Steele first published
Ihe.IaL1&r in 1709, Habermas explains, to facilitate contact

between the legion of coffee house discussants:

the coffee houses were already so numerous and the
circles of their frequenters already so wide, that
contact among these thousandfold circles could
only be maintained through a journal. At the same
time, the new periodical was so intimately
interwoven with the life of the coffee houses that
the individual issues were indeed sufficient basis

for its reconstruction. (42)
Habermas represents these texts -- and he uses them
synecdochically for print culture generally -- as artifacts

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of the public exercise of reason, and the account of print
culture he gives emphasizes publishing’s service to reason
and accessibility.6 His account, however, does not address
the vast quantity of texts that did not mirror these
periodicals in tone or purpose; nor does it hint at the
anxiety and resistance with which many authors (including
those who now function almost iconicly for the period)
responded to the idea of an inclusive, participatory public
sphere.

Journals such as the Iatler and Spectator were
committed to fostering the reading public as a polite body.
The readership they envision and encourage -- the atmosphere
of the public sphere they endorse —- conforms to Habermas's
idea of the critical public: a body of private persons
engaged in critical-rational debate. But this vision of a
decorous public sphere vied for influence with a scandalous
public sphere. Addison himself acknowledges this in the
Spectator when he tells readers -- some of whom clearly have
other expectations -- that he will not engage in scandal

writing. He has received correspondence from

such as fill their letters with private scandal,
and black accounts of particular persons and
families. The world is so full of ill-nature,
that I have lampoons sent me by people who cannot
spell, and satires composed by those who scarce
know how to write. I must therefore inform these
my correspondents, that it is not my design to be
a publisher of intrigues and cuckoldoms, or to
bring little infamous stories out of their present
lurking holes into broad day-light [. . .1. At
the same time I am very sensible that nothing
spreads a paper like private calumny and
defamation; but as my speculations are not under

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this necessity, they are not exposed to this
temptation.7

Addison touches here on three important ideas: first, that
the organs of publicity can be devoted to excavating the
private; second, that such an enterprise is tied to
commercial ambition; and third, that scandal is a lesser
form of public discourse and those who cleave to it are
ill-equipped to exercise a public voice, while suggesting,
too, that literacy promotes rationality. The violation of
private life and the debasement of public discourse that
Addison assumes in scandal writing obscure the way in which
private life is actually realized through its production in
print.

Habermas distinguishes between three related spheres:
the public, the private and the intimate. His theorizing
rests on their simultaneous uniqueness and interpenetration.
The ‘public” has a dual existence as, on the one hand, the
“sphere of public authority” and, on the other, the
political and literary public spheres that monitor and
evaluate the sphere of public authority. The private sphere
is a domain distinct from the public as a space independent
of public authority, ‘a sphere in which private people
pursued their affairs with one another free from impositions
by estate and state, at least in tendency” (75). Because
issues pertaining to this domain are of public interest,
however, the private sphere furnishes matter for the

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the intimate sphere is a region of the private sphere, that
held to be beyond the boundaries or compass of the public:
the family and home.8 It is, Habermas explains, the ‘inner
region of the private sphere” and the ‘source of privateness
in the modern sense of a saturated and free interiority”
(28). The intimate sphere, the ‘domain of pure humanity”
(46), is where subjectivity resides, where the private,
autonomous self is grounded.

Even the intimate sphere is a kind of public space.
Habermas explores the public enactment of this sphere,
asserting that, despite its essential, agreed upon
isolation, it is ‘always already oriented to an audience”
(49). As an example of its performative aspect, Habermas
cites the sentimental novel, envisioning author and readers
together gently probing the new experience of interior
subjectivity. The result is a bonding that effaces the
phenomenon of publicity, returning the author/reader

relationship to the intimate sphere:

The relations between author, work, and public
changed. They became intimate mutual
relationships between privatized individuals who
were psychologically interested in what was
‘human,” in self-knowledge, and in empathy.
Richardson wept over the actors in his novels as
much as his readers did; authors and readers
themselves became actors who ‘talked heart to
heart.” (50)

The public sphere of the reading public in the first
half of the century was a considerably more bruising,
rough-and-tumble place. While Habermas depicts

sentimentality as drawing the public into the intimate

 

realm, the counter-public sphere strips the intimate realm
of its sanctity and puts it on display before a mass
audience. The counter-public sphere's appropriation of the
private for public display is crucial to the distinction
between gossip and scandal. Gossip is fundamentally
private, usually an exchange between intimates or
acquaintances. It both acknowledges and fosters a bond --
the gossipers share common associates about whom to talk,
and in talking augment their own relationship.9 Scandal, on
the other hand, is a product of mass culture. It moves
discussion outside the circle of intimates and into the
broader public. As such, scandal is a phenomenon tied to
the widespread use and availability of print and the
development of the anonymous audience. While gossip
operates in the region between the private and intimate
spheres (making events of the intimate life the subject of
private discussion), scandal reaches between the poles of
the intimate and public spheres, putting the intimate life
on public display. At the same time, scandal is founded on
precisely the premise that Habermas presents as the defining
assumption of the intimate sphere: that a person is
determined by interior self, not social role. When scandal
represents the intimate life, it does so on the claim that
there is public purchase on an interior self, at least as it
is revealed through private actions.

With the emergence of the intimate sphere comes a new

conception of the person, whose selfhood is rooted in

 

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private life. When the private self is posited as the
‘real" self, however, that private self becomes publicly
relevant.10 The private self is thus never extricated from
the public; indeed, the concept that there is an interior
self not defined by social role emerges with the new public
sphere.11 Print provides a means of producing oneself and
others for public consumption. Scandal writing capitalizes
on the resulting fluidity of identity, purporting to expose
a private self, while in fact putting forth multiple
representations of such a self.

This phenomenon was brought to bear in the political
realm by such a prominent writer of scandal fiction as
Delarivier Manley, who constitutes the subject of chapter
two. Manley provides an exemplary instance of how scandal
contended with rational exchange as a form of public
discourse. Her texts present loosely organized stories,
under a transparent fictional veil, about the private lives
of real individuals. She marshals these stories to
political effect, with the purpose of discrediting the
ruling Whigs, unseating them from public power by
acquainting the public with their private misdeeds. These
narratives have been the focus of most recent work on
eighteenth-century scandal, but, for the most part, such
criticism has emphasized the fictional dimension of Manley's
work. As accounts of the history of the novel have been
revised to include the women writers so long omitted,

Manley's work has been situated within the patterns of the

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emerging novel. In this context, scandal becomes the raw
material of Manley’s early attempts at novelistic narrative.
The texts are at best unsatisfying on these grounds,
however, because their interest does not correspond to that
of the novel -- traditionally, a sustained narrative line, a
cast of developing characters, and so on. It is the
cumulative effect of these discrete episodes of scandal that
drives Manley's work. I shall argue that rather than
seeking to shoehorn Manley's writing into the patterns of
the novel as they later developed, we should View her texts
as part of the environment of detractive writing in which
they were published. In her day, Manley was held to be the
embodiment of scandal and her texts provided an unparalleled
demonstration of how private selves functioned as public
constructions. Her work, most notably ThedAdyenLures_Qfi
Riyella, demonstrates the productive capacity of print; in
Biyella, Manley seeks to appropriate the power of
self-representation. Unlike Alexander Pope, however, who
engages in a similar effort, Manley enters into rather than
strains against the mutability of any such representation.
The status of scandal writing was the subject of
contention during the early portion of the long eighteenth
century, when writers debated the permissibility and value
of personal satire. I investigate this debate and the libel
law that surrounded it in my first chapter. When the legal
injunction against defamation separated into slander law and

libel law in the seventeenth century, libel was the far

11

graver offense because the law held that written detraction
constituted a more calculated abuse than spoken words. The
truth of one's statements, furthermore, was no defense;
truthful allegations were more damaging to reputation
precisely because they were true, and libel law gave
priority to the preservation of reputation. The cultural
assumptions about writing and reputation, as they were
eXpressed in the law, were squarely opposed to scandal
writing. Yet as print culture took hold, scandal was
clearly a compelling form of public discourse. This
discrepancy, I postulate, arose in part because legal
devotion to stability was at odds with the impulsive,
formidably unstable atmosphere of early print culture and
the literary market that created it. Within print culture,
reputation became far more malleable than the law suggested
it could be; while legal redress for defamation was
concerned with maintaining a reputation intact, print
culture showed reputation to be not a stable entity that
could be damaged and then restored but rather a continuous
process of construction and revision.

Attitudes toward scandal as public discourse were
enmeshed in reaction to the literary marketplace. The roots
of this market lay in the seventeenth century. While the
technology of print had spread steadily since the
introduction of the printing press to England in 1475, the
Civil War sped the evolution of print culture. Both sides

in the war turned to pamphleteering as a way to win support

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for their cause, and the increased availability of printed
material encouraged an increase in the rate of literacy.

The production of printed material remained high in the
years of the Restoration and, at the end of the century, in
1695, Parliament allowed the Licensing Act to lapse. This
legislation had provided for the regulation of printers and
the publications they produced. Without it, England became
the only country in Europe that did not have pre—publication
censorship. It is easy to see why, in such a climate, early
eighteenth-century writers became preoccupied with questions
about what one could justifiably reveal about another person
in print, and what the foundations of and obligations to
reputation ought to be.

As the popularity of print transformed the literary
scene from a patronage to a market system, the idea of
writing itself was transformed. It was not only the
reception of print that was popularized -- so, too, was its
production. By contrast to earlier concepts of authorship
that saw writing as an expression of intellectual or social
cultivation, authorship could now be a form of work, with
the author living on the profits that the writing earned.
The distinction between these categories of authorship was
not impervious. Numerous critics of Alexander Pope have
examined Pope's negotiation of these constructions of the
author, profiting handsomely from his verse while
simultaneously -- and as a result -- presenting himself as a

‘gentleman.” What has received little discussion, however,

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is that while Pope manipulated these categories to his own
advantage, he and his circle were instrumental to their
function and perpetuation. This is the subject of chapter
three. Pope and Jonathan Swift, on whom I focus there, both
engage in and repudiate scandal as public discourse. Their
ambivalence is related to their complex feelings toward the
literary marketplace, in which they must compete and want to
dominate, but which they also revile as a diminishment of
authorship into a trade serving a body of uneducated and
unruly readers. These feelings find expression and
attempted resolution in the figure of the Grub Street hack.
This familiar shadow in eighteenth-century writing -- by
design, more read about than read, at least today -- was, I
contend, the invention of writers such as Pope and Swift,
who were eager to institute hierarchy in the market, to fix
difference in what Habermas has guided us to think of as the
equitable environment of the public sphere. The distinction
drawn in the period between the literary writer and the hack
writer is a fundamental one -- so fundamental that even
critics today have tended to accept it as natural, without
questioning what was at stake in giving us the idea of the
‘hack," the writer whose artlessness and self-interest
debase literature, who reduces art to commerce.

Scandal writing and the hack are knit together in this
view, one the degradation of public discourse, the other the
degradation of authorship. If the hack was what the author

might become in the new economy of writing, then scandal was

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what literature could become. Indeed, anxiety about the
commodification of writing found some of its strongest
expression in discussions of scandal. Scandal writing was
held to be motivated by envy and a desire for profit. The
writer could make money by catering to the prurience and
envy of the public. Scandal was also ephemeral and without
literary value. It had no classical precedent and existed
only long enough to be sold. Writers such as Dryden, Pope
and Steele suggest repeatedly that scandal writers would be
remembered only if they were to choose to write about
them.12 Scandal writing was, furthermore, the dangerous
result of unregulated publicity and a commercialized
literary sphere. It was evidence that now anything could
find its way into print. Authority over the literary realm
had evaporated and in turn made possible a further erosion
of authority: the result of the new literary sphere would be
to make those authors who believed they had a rightful claim
to cultural authority indistinguishable from the growing
mass of writers.

Our acceptance of the hack as a useful category for
ordering the world of eighteenth—century writing obscures
the vociferousness with which the authors so-designated
resisted their characterization. In the final chapter, I
turn to Alexander Pope's scandal writing and the pamphlet
attacks directed against him. The status of Pope's verse as
satirical or defamatory was the topic of sustained

discussion in the period. Pope is a tireless advocate for

15

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the social benefits of his work, an advocacy that puts him
in the delicate position of explaining that his poems are
not destructive libel while at the same time proclaiming the
public good achieved by his exposure of others’ vices and
flaws. In ‘The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace
Imitated,” for example, Pope rehearses the defense he would
offer in court against a charge that he had written libels:
they are only ‘grave Epistles, bringing Vice to light.”13

He vows, meanwhile, to endure the defamation inflicted by
those who object to his purpose.

Needless to say, not all of Pope's contemporaries
agreed with his self-portrait of noble service -~ and his
employment of defamatory tactics offended doubly in View of
his attribution of scandal to those whom he held himself
above. This is the context for understanding Pope's
Dunciad, a text perhaps better described as detonated than
published. A.mock—epic on the state of culture and
authorship in his day, the Dunciad did more than any other
piece of writing to establish the image of the Grub Street
hack. Within the poem itself and especially in the copious
footnotes of the Dunciad.¥ariarnm, Pope ravages the
reputations of his contemporary writers. The attack
(repeated and augmented in revised editions) brought a
barrage of answering pamphlets in prose and verse. Most of
the authors are individuals targeted in Pope's poem, among
them Edward Ward, John Henley, John Duckett, John Oldmixon,

John Dennis, and Jonathan Smedley. The pamphleteers respond

16

that Pope is no different than they are -— that if they are
hacks, so is he, for he employs the same tactics in his
writing. They use his private life to dispute the public
standing he claims for himself, using often cruel depictions
of his physical deformity to represent the disparity between
his actual self and his public presentation. The ‘Paper
Wars," in the words of one contemporary, that many of the
period's authors were engaged in demonstrate the
counter-public sphere at work, as public authority is
contested through appeal to the private self, a self that is
not exposed but conjured and so exists only in a state of
various representation. This idea is exemplified in the
pamphlet A_Eopp_upon_EQpe (1728), which offers the anonymous
author's satisfying fantasy of Pope, while out for a stroll,
being thrashed soundly by two Dunciad victims and then
rescued by a neighboring woman. This inventive tale
nevertheless compelled Pope to publish a protestation
informing the public that the story could not be true
because he ‘did not stir out of my House at Tuickenham all
that Day.” The obvious fictionality of this simulacrum of
exposure is irrelevant; the private self exists only in its
public representation.

Together, the texts I examine in this dissertation
suggest rationality's inadequacy to encompass
eighteenth-century public exchange. My argument’s purpose,
however, extends beyond the familiar observation that the

period was not quite the realm of reason it was

17

 

traditionally held to be. Rather, in positing scandalous

discourse as evidentiary of a counter-public sphere, I mean
to show that these texts are not aberrational, but conform
to norms of exchange at a time when the private became part

of public life.

18

 

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NOTES

1 Two helpful overviews of the complexities involved in
the distinction between private and public are Jeff
Weintraub’s ‘The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private

Distinction," Public and Erivate_in_Ihought_and_Eractice1
WW, ed. Jeff Weintraub and
Krishan Kumar (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997), 1- 42; and

S. I. Benn and G. F. Gaus, ‘The Public and the Private:
Concepts and Action,” W, ed.
S. I. Benn and G. F. Gaus (New York: Saint Martin' s, 1985),
3- 27. See also Philippe Aries, ed. , A_Histot¥_of_2tiyate
Life, Vol. 3, WWW, ed. Roger
Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1989).

2 Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A
Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy,” Habezmas_and_the_Eublic_Sphere, ed. Craig
Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992), esp. 122- 28; Michael
Warner, ‘Public and Private,” forthcoming in Ctitioel_letme

, ed. Catharine
Stimpson and Gil Herdt (Chicago: U of Chicago P). See also,
for example, Rita Felski' 5 chapter, ‘The Feminist

Counter-public Sphere” in her book, Beyond_Eeminist
E I] l' . E . . I I' | l i 3 ] :1

(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), 164-74.

3 The closest equivalent to what I am here suggesting

is Joan Landes' 8 description in HomeLantheJubliLthere
in the Age of the French Beyolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP,

1988) of dispossessed writers in eighteenth- century France
who, shut out from patronage and resentful of the
representatives of high culture who excluded them, turned to
‘biting social criticism, flavored by scandal and
pornography” (55). She situates this writing as
‘underground,” a ‘clandestine counterpublic sphere" that saw
salons as ‘among the worst symptoms of the despised system
of privilege whose destruction they hoped to ensure" (57).
While Landes and I are alike in seeing in scandal writing a
counter-public sphere, I see English scandal writing not as
an underground form, but as one that met resistance because
its opponents believed it threatened to define print
culture.

4 Jurgen Habermas, We
' , trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge: MIT P,
1994), 27.

5 One recurrent theme of criticism of Ihe_Sttnotutal

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Iransformation_of_the_£ublic_Sphere is Habermas's failure to
consider the exclusions on which the bourgeois public sphere
he describes was based. See, for example, Fraser,
‘Rethinking the Public Sphere,” and Geoff Eley, ‘Nations,
Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the

Nineteenth Century,” both in Habermas_and_the_£ublic_there.

6 Dustin Griffin argues that the public sphere is a
fiction that mirrors Scriblerian self— —authorizing myths in
‘Fictions of Authorship," Essays_1n_gtit1oism,43 (1993):

188. See also Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere,"
where she notes that in Habermas's account, a ‘discourse of
publicity touting accessibility, rationality, and the
suspension of status hierarchies is itself deployed as a
strategy of distinction” (115).

7 Joseph Addison, Ine_Speotatot, ed. Donald F. Bond
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) 1: 71-72.

8 See Marie Fleming, ‘Women and the ‘Public Use .Of
Reason, '"

Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan (New York: Routledge, 1995).

9 Patricia Meyer Spacks, 595512 (New York: Knopf, 1985)

10 See John Brewer, ‘This, that and the other: Public,
Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries," Shifting the Boundaries: Iransformation.of the
I E E 11' I E . I . I] E' ]| I] : I I
ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: U of Exeter
P, 1995) 1-21. Brewer observes that ‘the public sphere
produced an unprecedented discussion and unparalleled public
exposure of private life" (6).

11 For discussion of the development of this private

self, see, for example, Nancy Armstrong, Desi;e_ano_Domeet1o
Fiction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987).

12 See John Dryden, Discourse_Concerning_the_Qriginal
and_Erogress_of_Satire in The_florks_of_dohn_Dr¥den, ed. H.
T. Swedenberg (Berkeley: U of California P, 1974) 4: 9. See

also The_Speotator no. 445, 4: 72.

13 Alexander Pope, ‘First Satire of the Second Book of

Horace Imitated," Eoems_of_Alexander_Eope, ed. John Butt
(London: Methuen, 1961) 4: 21.

20

CHAPTER ONE

CIRCULATING REPUTATIONS: SCANDAL, SATIRE AND THE LAW

‘I would not make myself merry even with a Piece
of Pasteboard that is invested with a public
Character.”

Joseph Addison, Ihe_Speotatotl

In 1712, and again in 1713, Queen Anne called upon
Parliament to halt ‘this growing evil” -- the publication of
libels. Her outcry came in direct response to publications
criticizing her government’s effort to negotiate a peace
settlement to the War of the Spanish Succession. But her
words also express an anxiety widespread in the period about
published personal attack in an unregulated press. While we
today think of ‘libel” primarily as a legal charge, in the
eighteenth century, it also denoted a literary genre.
Personal attack thrived in the literary marketplace as
libel, scandal and satire. Despite this, scandal writing --
which I define as writing intended to diminish another
person's reputation -- has received little address within
eighteenth-century studies. New interest in the rise of the
literary marketplace and the eighteenth century's
redefinition of the public sphere has created a lively

context in which to examine scandal and to turn attention to

21

a print culture that does not conform to the paradigms of
rational exchange.

With scandal writing, reputation became a product -- a
creation and a commodity —- of print culture. It was
formed, sustained, changed, and communicated through print.
Reputation, one's capital in the social and, increasingly,
the political economy, was newly malleable. Charges made
against one were no longer contained by one's social circle;
they now played out in the wide venue of print. Print
became the site at which reputations were constructed. The
question of "public Character," to return to Addison's
phrase, was vital in the eighteenth century. It was with
print culture that the modern idea of the public life
emerged.

In this chapter, I will discuss the concept of libel
and its legal history, examine the changing importance of
reputation in the period, and investigate how these two
factors came together in the debate over scandal and satire
that took place in the early eighteenth century. Scandal,
as the term was used, described not an event, but a mode of
discourse -- and the fear that animated many of the
"established" writers was that it was the form of discourse

that would come to define the developing culture of print.

LIBEL LAW’AND THE CULTURE OF PRINT
Central to a discussion of scandal is the history of

libel law in England, both because it outlines the

22

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conditions within which writers published and because it is
a codified expression of the culture's definition of and
attitudes toward scandal and print. Libel's legal history
is complex and surprisingly haphazard, as competing
interests dictated jurisdiction, and jurisdiction in turn
defined the nature of the offense and its remedies. The
place to begin, then, is with the structure of the legal

system itself.

The History of the Courts

Libel was originally a matter of local concern in
England. In the Anglo-Saxon period, defamation was first
the crime of insulting another person to his or her face;
gradually the definition was expanded to include talking
about this person to a third party. The local jurisdiction
survived into the era of Norman rule. William the Conqueror
separated the ecclesiastical and secular courts, and the
royal courts willingly ceded jurisdiction over defamation to
the ecclesiastical courts, with one major exception, until
the late sixteenth century.2 Canon law derived its
authority over defamation from the church's position as
moral arbiter: "The jurisdictional competency of the church
was based on its claim to corrective authority over all
matters concerning the Christian faith and morals; and its
interest in defamation reflected, at least indirectly, these

jurisdictional pretensions" (Jones 275).

23

The operations of the church had important implications
for the idea of reputation. Canon law punished not only the
defamer, but the person defamed —- a bad reputation was
sufficient for the church to bring a person before its
justice system (Jones 275). As legal historian T. H.

Plucknett explains,

the very word 'defamation' is a technical term in
church law, signifying that evil reputation which
is sufficiently notorious to put a man on his
trial. Mere rumor is not sufficient. The
diffimatus is thus a person whose reputation is so
bad that it serves as an accusation; but if as a
result of the trial he is acquitted, then clearly
his ill-fame was unfounded, and those who spread
the calumny have themselves committed a crime.3

In the eyes of church law, reputation was both that
which must be protected from the wrongful defamer and that
which signaled its owner's true moral standing. Reputation
thus seems to have been regarded as a reliable index of
character. It was the crime of the diffimatus that was
primary; defamation was discouraged because false
accusations, which would put the ecclesiastical justice
system in motion, could cost that system its credibility and
authority.

Throughout the middle ages, defamation remained a local
concern, as the church shared the punishment of detraction
with borough and manor courts (Jones 278). In 1275, the
king issued the scandaium_magnaium.statute. This important
law in the history of libel, which I will discuss in detail
below, marked the first time that defamation became

prosecutable in the king's court. With the exception of

24

soandalnm_maonatnm, however, which prohibited defamation of
the monarch or magnates, the royal and common law courts did
not challenge the ecclesiastical courts for jurisdiction
over defamation cases until the reign of Elizabeth I. The
political instability of her rule prompted an increased
determination on the part of the government to silence
critical remarks (Plucknett 486). While scandalum_magnatum
gave the royal courts a stake in seditious defamation from
the thirteenth century, it was only later that they took up

this authority:

During the middle ages this jurisdictional
competency had only occasionally been exercised,
but the eruption of religious controversy in the
sixteenth century, and of constitutional crisis in
the seventeenth century, increased official
concern over sedition and political dissent

[. . .1. The defamation of the state and its
servitors quickly came to be regarded with a
degree of alarm that the slander of private
persons never elicited. (Jones 281)

The move began with royal writs of prohibition, which
refused the ecclesiastical courts jurisdiction over secular
crimes. By the early seventeenth century, the royal courts
were trying slander cases concerned with moral and spiritual
crimes on the grounds that these cases, too, had secular
implications (Jones 279). As of the early 16003, then, it
was the royal courts that were developing and applying the
law of defamation.

The distinction that we make today between the two main
kinds of detraction -- slander (spoken) and libel (written)

-- did not develop until the seventeenth century.

25

Initially, the distinction was simply a matter of
jurisdiction. Slander was a tort action and thus was
actionable only in the common law courts, while libel could
be tried as a tort or a crime or both, and thereby fell
within the jurisdiction of the Star Chamber. This
separation of courts meant that libel law developed in
isolation from slander law until the latter half of the
seventeenth century.4 When the Star Chamber was abolished
on August 1, 1641, Cromwell's Council of State took over its
function. .After the Restoration, the Court of the King's
Bench replaced the Council of State. The Court of the
King's Bench had developed slander law; in taking on the
role of the former Star Chamber, slander and libel law came
together for the first time. As a result, the distinction
between spoken and written detraction became procedurally

crucial.

893W and the Development of Libel

The scandalum_magnatum statute issued by Edward I in
1275 declared that:

Forasmuch as there have been oftentimes found in
the Country [Devisors] of Tales, whereby discord
[or occasion] of discord, hath many times arisen
between the King and his People, or Great Men of
this Realm; for the Damage that hath and may
thereof ensue; It is commanded, That from
henceforth none be so hardy to tell or publish any
false News or Tales, whereby discord or [occasion]
of discord or slander may grow between the King
and his People, or the Great Men of the Realm; and
he that doth so, shall be taken and kept in
Prison, until he hath brought him into the Court,
[which was the first Author of the Tale].5

26

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It was, as Plucknett has observed, an essentially
political concept of defamation: offenders were prosecuted
on the grounds that they posed a threat to civil discord
(486). Soenoainm_maonatnm was designed to protect the
government and ruling class from criticism, with the
reasoning that such a law served the public good because to
allow defamation of authorities would be to invite
instability. Nineteenth-century jurist Francis Ludlow Holt,
in one of the most complete accounts of English libel law,
argues that soandainm_meonetnm was not so much a matter of
delineating new crimes as it was a matter of expanding the

law to protect the magnates:

In substance, this statute creates no new offense,
and prohibits nothing but what was prohibited by
the common law before; but, in respect to the
dignity of the persons for whose protection it was
made, it comprehends within its penalties the less
offensive modes and terms of slander of which the
common law took no cognizance, and marks out a new
proceeding to redress them.6

Scandalum_magnatum.was a crime, not a tort, because it
applied to the king and the magnates; scandalnm1magnatum is

the foundation of libel law as it developed in the
seventeenth century because the charge of libel, too,
assumed criminality.

Scandalnm_magnatum was pursued in two legal arenas: the
Star Chamber and Privy Council, and the common law courts.
The former took action against the political offense of
defamation. The penalty could be harsh -- mutilation, such

as branding of the face, or cutting off of tongue, hand, or

27

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ear.7 The common law courts were responsible for the civil
aspects of defamation. The scandalum_magnatum_statute made
no provision for civil remedy, but in the middle sixteenth
century, the courts decided that the defamed should be able
to collect compensation for the damage done to his or her
reputation (Plucknett 486).

The scandaium_magnatum statutes were both pragmatic and
political, designed to prevent criticism of the government.
They were also disablingly narrow -— for example, their
prohibition of "false news" did not address the issue of
criticism that was not deceitful. The need to regulate true
but damaging statements created one of the most interesting

turns in English defamation law.

Truth and Libel

In the church courts, a person could be found guilty of
defamation only if his accusations were untrue, for
revealing the truth was neither sin nor infraction.8
Similarly, the scandaium_magnatum,statutes were explicit in
their outlawing only of "false news" about the monarch and
magnates. This stipulation, the courts and crown found, was
at odds with the purpose of the statute: to prevent the
spread of words that could harm the state. True
accusations, they realized, were at least as damaging as
false ones. While nothing either in Roman law -- the

precedent for much English political law -- or in the

scandalum_magnatum.statutes themselves provided for this,

28

the common law courts (which are not bound by the written
law) took the position that truth could not be offered as a
defense in a libel case (Plucknett 490). This was justified
on three main grounds. First, the courts argued that the
defamer should take the complaint before the law rather than
addressing the matter him- or herself (Plucknett 490).
Second, the Crown argued that its main concern was to
prevent disturbances of the peace that detraction might
incite. Because the populace could rise up in reaction to a
true statement as well as to a false one, the truth of the
statement was not exculpatory. "Indeed," critic C. R. Kropf
comments, "since a true statement was more likely to lead to
public discontent than a false one, the former kind of
defamation was regarded as the greater crime."9 Third, the
courts held that the malicious intent upon another person's
reputation that writing represented superceded all possible
justification (Plucknett 490). Libel law was thus especially
concerned with controlling the act of exposure.

The precedent-setting trial was the De_L1beiiis_Famois
case of 1606. It was in this case that the court ruled that
the truth of one's accusations does not justify those
accusations because such charges ought to be made in a court
of law, not in the court of public opinion. The Libeilis
Eamois ruling that truth does not matter was a way for the

government to evade the scandalum_magnatnm requirement that

the criticism of the magnates be false.10 The case was,

29

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above all, concerned with the preservation of order. R. C.

Donnelly explains:

In adopting libellnfi_iamgsns [one of two forms of
Roman defamation law], the Star Chamber ignored
its Roman limitations and for the first time
introduced into the English law a new type of
defamation based upon mere form, with the
additional principle that a libel is punishable
because it tends to a breach of the peace. (118)
It was with this development that libel and slander
definitively cleaved apart. One could plead truthfulness as
a defense in a case of slander, even if the words one was
charged with speaking were directed against a magnate. The
same words could not then be published, however, despite the
court's having found them true (Holt 26). "[T]he English
law of libel or published defamation," Jones writes,
"fashioned in response to technological change,
constitutional change, and ideological ferment, has a
history very different from that of the common law of
slander" (282). Certain words were not defamatory when
spoken, but were defamatory, and thereby potentially
criminal, when written. This led to a small industry of
books listing the forbidden words. In his book of 1647,
ACLiQn&_£QL_Slande£, a catalogue of cases and actionable

scenarios, John March discusses the actionability of words:

That all scandalous words which touch or
concerne a man in his life, Liberty, or Member, or
any corporal punishment; or which scandall a man
in his Office or place of Trust; or in his Calling
or function by which he gaines his living; or
which tended to slandering of his Title or his
disinheritance; or to the losse of his advance, or
preferment, or any other particular damage; or

30

 

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lastly which charge a man to have any dangerous
infectious disease by reason of which he ought to
separate himselfe, or to be separated by the Law
from the society of men: all such words are
actionable.11

While evidence in slander cases was construed in the
defendant's favor —- words were given the most innocent
possible meaning, and were not actionable if the evidence
suggested that they were spoken in the heat of the moment
(Jones 282) -- libel law assumed the malicious intent that
slander law required to be proved. The very existence of
the document in question was evidence of one's libelous
intent, of one's premeditated effort to destroy the
plaintiff's reputation. "The theory," Plucknett reflects,
"seems to regard writing as so deliberate an act that
writing defamatory matter was criminal; words, on the other
hand, were felt to be more spontaneous and irresponsible,
and so justification could be pleaded” (490). This attitude
toward print as a force to be contained affected the
resistance to popular authorship that I discuss in chapter
three.

The issue of truth in libel law dramatizes the conflict
underpinning the emergence of print culture. The state of
being printed, which implied authority, and the presumed
deliberateness of a printed statement were at odds with
publication's popularization and increasing accessibility.
Libel law developed as part of an effort to control printed

exchange. The law's stance toward the truth of a printed

statement both acknowledged and augmented print's cultural

31

value by treating it as something that must be strenuously
regulated. Thus, the law strove to contain an authority of

print that it simultaneously reinforced.

The Lapse of the Licensing Act and Libel Law

For the first fifty years after the introduction of
print to England in 1476, there was little legal interest in
it. Under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, however, the
government moved swiftly and decisively to take control of
printing (Siebert 2). In 1529, the first list of banned
books was published; with Henry's Proclamation of 1538, the
government introduced a regular system of licensing and
censorship. The crown, Siebert explains, claimed control of
the press as a prerogative right, a claim that expired only
with the Revolution in 1688. The crown's authority to
control print was based on three assertions. First, that it
was the king who first had seen to it that print should be
introduced to England. Second, that the peace and stability
of the country depended on control of the press. And third,
that regulation by the crown had been in existence since
1476 (Siebert 21).

Printing came under regulation by the same body -- the
Star Chamber -- that was responsible for suppressing
sedition (Jones 282). The effect of this congruence, Jones
argues, was to "reinforc[e] the distinction between written
and spoken defamation, which in its arbitrariness and

absoluteness distinguished English law from other legal

32

traditions of early modern Europe" (282). Government
control of the press, so tightly woven in the Tudor and
early Stuart eras, began to unravel in the political
upheavals of the seventeenth century. This was the period,
for example, of John Milton/s Ameopaoitioa (1644), a
strenuous argument against pre-publication censorship.12

In 1680, Charles II issued a royal proclamation saying
that all news was printed at the royal prerogative. This
position of absolute authority over public discourse could
not be sustained after the Glorious Revolution, however, and
government intervention in the press lessened.l3 In 1695,
Parliament allowed the Licensing Act to lapse.14 This was
not a matter of omission. The case for allowing the Act to
wither had been drawn up by none other than John Locke, and
centered on the argument that the Act had failed in its
purpose of preventing the publication of treason and
sedition. The Licensing Act lacked teeth -- the punishment
of offenders lay not with the Act itself, but with the
common law (Hanson 7). While no one supported the idea that
the press should be unrestrained in the wake of the
Licensing Act's expiration, the House of Commons was
unsuccessful in drafting and passing replacement
legislation. Part of the reason no new system of licensing
developed after 1695 is that both political parties "were
afraid to trust the other with the administration of a

licensing act" (Siebert 263). This new atmosphere of

33

unregulation was seen as instrumental to the proliferation

of libels.

REPRESENTING REPUTATION

For much of the eighteenth century, the protection of
two interests directed defamation law: "(1) the interest of
the individual in his claim to honor and reputation; and (2)
the interest in the public peace and security" (Donnelly
122). These were the long-standing priorities of defamation
law. For example, "Anglo-Saxon kings punished slander for
the dishonor and insult inflicted, and also for the threats
defamation could pose to the public peace" (Jones 274).
What changed, at least in part, however, was how reputation
was conceived, as legal redress moved from a model of
penance to compensation.

In English canon law before the Norman Conquest, the
only form of remedy received by the plaintiff in a
defamation case was a public apology from the defamer. The
object of the law was, and was only, vindication (Eldredge
4). In the church courts after the Conquest, little
changed. A guilty defamer was required to perform public
penance. Thus, the purpose of the law remained vindication
of the person defamed (Eldredge 5).

In the sixteenth century a new conception of reputation
began to emerge. A plaintiff could now appeal to the civil
courts to receive payment for the damage done to his

reputation. M. Lindsay Kaplan depicts the sixteenth-century

34

concentration of the courts on the temporal damages of
defamation as a fundamental change in purpose. She argues
that the "gist of the common law action is not the
restoration of reputation, which the ecclesiastical courts
attempted to provide, but the compensation of temporal
loss."15 The move to assign an economic value to reputation
is striking on several grounds. First, it reifies as an
economic entity something that exists at two degrees of
abstraction, as I will explain. Reputation becomes a
quantifiable entity, for loss of or damage to which one can
be monetarily reimbursed. Second, it solidifies the law’s
aim of preserving reputation, now using financial penalty to
discourage defamation. At the same time, the law emphasizes
reputation's importance in the market economy by focusing on
detractive statement's potential harm to the victim's
ability to make a living. Finally, this linkage of
reputation and the market economy mirrors reputation's
function in a social economy, as reputation is the social
stock on which one trades (an important facet of Delarivier
Manley's career, as I will examine in chapter two).

Patricia Meyer Spacks's analysis of gossip illuminates this
idea, when she identifies reputation as a form of social

‘currency”:

Tattling, like detraction, threatens a tender and
valued aspect of social beings: their reputations.
Reputation matters equally (though for different
reasons) to men and to women [. . .1. The
importance of a man's good name derives partly
from his need to function in public. Reputation
is social currency.16

35

While Kaplan suggests a disjunction between models of
vindication and compensation, the system of monetary
compensation might also be understood as a form of
vindication in a market-based society. As the social model
moves from defense of honor to protection of reputation, so
the form of symbolic penance changes from a performative to

an economic act.

Defining Reputation

Reputation is both highly personal and dissociated from
the person. It is not the same as one's character; rather,
it is what others take that character to be.17 "A
reputation is constituted by the set of definite
descriptions with which the individual is habitually
identified by others as a third party. It is the product of
the different discourses which take the individual as their
subject; a person 'is' for others what s/he is known or
believed to have done."18

Reputation is further refracted by the fact that the
existence of "a reputation" is illusory. As Walter Probert
observes, reputation is not single or unified: "there is no
public image, although there are possibly numerous
individual images which can be reduced to a statistical
probability (public image)."19 Reputation, he goes on to
explain, is really "a shorthand relational concept," a way
of reducing a web of ties and opinions to a single object

(1185).

36

Reputation in itself is value-neutral; it can be good
or bad. In this sense, reputation must be distinguished
from honor, which is, as Pat O'Malley argues, a specifically
aristocratic concept.20 Honor is a feature inherent in the
(aristocratic) individual, but reputation is constructed by
others. Only reputation -- that which the person is made
out by others to be -- is protected by the law. This is
because the law recognizes that reputation, unlike
character, is subject to manipulation. Reputation, that is
to say, is an aspect of the individual that resides only in
the public sphere. The third-party construction of

reputation makes it a public issue.

For if reputation is theoretically a product of
the individual's own character and deeds, it is
also by definition [. . .] constituted through the
discourse of others [. . .1. And it follows from
the fact that reputations are given by public
opinion that, justly or unjustly, they can also be
taken away again. (Rigney 55)

The political and social purchase of reputation is
visible in the work of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In The
Leziatnan, Hobbes discusses the connection between power and
reputation that underlies the scandalum_magnatum statute.
Reputation, he argues, is an ”instrumental power,” one that
is used to acquire a future good. "Reputation of power is
Power; because it draweth with it the adherence of those
that need protection."21 Reputation contributes to the
construction of social hierarchies. Value, he argues,

resides not in the person but in the estimation of that

person by others: "For let a man (as most men do) rate

37

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themselves at the highest value they can; yet their true
Value is no more than it is esteemed by others" (I, ch 10).
Reputation also functions as a way of controlling individual
behavior because good action can come from the desire for
praise and value: "Desire of Praise, disposeth to laudable
action, such as please them whose judgment they value; for
those men whom we contemn, we contemn also the Praises" (I,
ch 11).

John Locke is less concerned with reputation's
relationship to power than to the moral order. He argues
that the "law or opinion or reputation" is one of three
moral laws that guide human action, the other two being
divine and civil law. The vice or virtue that this law
judges, however, is socially contingent: "the measure of
what is everywhere called and esteemed virtue and vice is
this approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which by a
secret and tacit consent, establishes itself in the several
societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world."22

The primary distinction drawn before the eighteenth
century in defamation law was between the seditious and the
non-seditious. These determinations were made according to
whether the damage inflicted was of a public or private
nature. Out of this came the conception of libel as a
public wrong and slander as a private one. As H. Montgomery
Hyde explains,

Briefly, they [the differences in substance and
procedure between slander and libel] stem from the
fact that libel was originally regarded as a crime

38

1.

1
a

nu.

. 3
V1.

y-

e

regardless of its truth or falsity, and punishable
by the King's courts, while slander, unless
uttered about the sovereign or officials of the
government, was treated as a private wrong
primarily within the jurisdiction of the
ecclesiastical courts, a jurisdiction which,
though it became virtually obsolete by the
beginning of the last century, was not formally
abolished until 1855.23
The distinction between public and private began to
change, however, and the View that a libel was public
because it was about the government and slander private
because it was against individuals was transformed through
the spread of print. Writing against an individual was not
a "private" matter when the charges themselves were made in
the public realm of print. From the early seventeenth
century, the courts were deluged by libel cases, as the
government used the legal system to control the rapidly
growing press and individuals began to rely on the courts
rather than on duels to protect their names (Kropf 153).24
While the distinction between private and public
pre-existed print culture, the meaning of privacy changed
with the.emerging notion of an intimate sphere. While
‘private" is etymologically derived from the same root as
‘deprivation” and first denoted lack of official office, it
came to suggest a positive value: a state of intimacy and
seclusion that can be violated by publicity. When
individuals took legal action to protect ‘private” matters,
this violation was the grounds of the objection, coupled

with the effects of misrepresentation of that private self

before the public. This dichotomous understanding of public

39

:‘f‘

LJ

and private, fostered by the legal system, broke down in the
conditions of print culture, as I will examine in chapter
four.

In his history of English defamation law,
nineteenth-century legal author Francis Ludlow Holt
expresses concern about widespread publication and the legal
protection of reputation. He presents reputation as one of
the "rights of personal security” (32). The question that
he then pursues is, did the invention of printing -- "a new
and enlarged means of libel" (36) -- in any way change the
legal View of libel? In other words, did the availability
of print cause a change in the conception of ”the rights of
reputation" (36)? The answer that he arrives at is a

resounding "no":

When we have termed the press a new and enlarged
instrument of publication, whether of good or
evil, we have, in fact, pointed out that part of
its nature which defines and circumscribes the law
which attaches to it. The law of libel was not
altered by the discovery of printing; nor is there
any reason that it should be altered. The rights
of personal reputation, and the rights of free
discussion remained the same. Printing is but the
mechanical art of extending such discussion into a
wider sphere. It was a new power, but no new
right. It left, therefore, everything as it found
it, with the exception, that the acquisition of
such power, and the greater facility of mischief
demanded an increase of vigilance on the part of
the law. (37)

So Holt sees two rights in competition -- the right of
reputation and the right of free discussion. Printing
expands gossip beyond the boundaries of any spoken

conversation, and so makes possible the magnitude of

40

exposure that constitutes scandal. But, he argues, the
right of discussion is in no way expanded by the change in
the way that discussion itself can be conducted. In fact,
Holt draws some very firm limits on the right of discussion,
and sees discourse itself as an almost physical object to be
controlled. While we are all at liberty to think as we

will, he writes, we cannot say whatever we think:

When these thoughts are embodied in words, they
become in that shape moral substances; they
produce palpable and material effects upon the
personal rights of others [. . .]. In this shape,
therefore, as being naturally capable of injury,
they become cognizable by law. Writing is the
further publication of words, as printing is the
further publication of writing. They are all
different forms of the same thing, namely, public
speaking. (38)
While Holt sees words as mechanisms of production, he
resists acknowledging the productive power of print,
insisting instead that printing had ‘left [. . .] everything
as it found it.” This attitude in some ways mirrors that of
Habermas, who conceives of print as a communicative venue, a
‘means for disseminating and sharing ideas, and not as an
independent causal factor that shaped new modes of
thought.”25
The effects of print's abuse, Holt suggests, are grave.
"The greatest injury which a citizen can suffer," he writes,
"is such as affects his life or produces a bodily loss. The

next injury is that which affects him in character" (49).

The act of speaking against another is usurping the proper

41

authority of the law, a position frequently expressed in the

debate over satire:

As no man can individually assume to himself the
power of administering justice, of trying,
sentencing, and punishing offenders, so can no man
likewise take upon himself to speak against those
who seem to do ill; which is a sort of punishment,
inflicting pain and damage upon the persons

concerned. (50)
Ann Rigney argues that discrediting someone -- and thus
lowering his or her symbolic value -- is the ”foundation" of

the right to social criticism. This is so because a person
can enjoy a reputation that others do not feel the person
deserves. The dilemma she sees, then, as does Holt, is
this: "The problem for communities who recognize the right
to fair comment is to fix on criteria with which to
distinguish 'poison' from 'fair comment', and personal
animosity from criticism, when they judge the acceptability
of third-party communication" (57). This predicament, as we
shall see, is precisely the issue that animates the debate
over satire in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth

centuries.

THE DEBATE OVER SATIRE

Satire was an embattled genre in the eighteenth
century. We today think of the period as the "great age" of
satire, but at the time satire's status, purpose, and nature
were matters of heated contention. The debate over satire
that writers waged in the eighteenth century turned on a

series of oppositions: whether satire should praise or

42

condemn, whether it should be gentle or biting, and, perhaps
above all, whether it should be general or personal. This
debate sprang up because the issue it addressed -- the fate
of personal reputation in a print culture —- was already of
significant concern. The positions that the participants in
this debate took reflect both a sincere ethical dispute over
the limits of satire and justifications of detraction, and a

self-interested response to a new class of writers.

The Contours of the Debate

The standard eighteenth-century defense of satire was
its efficacy as a moral tool. Satire, it was argued,
exposes vice and folly to public View and (according to some
models of satire) recommends and praises virtue. The
satirist thus occupies a position of moral authority. The
value of this moral mission was not contested; the question
was whether or not satire delivered on its promise, and many
held that it did not. Criticism of satire came from a
variety of sources, and staked out a range of complaints.
Among the dangers that its detractors identified were the
following: that it could influence readers for good or ill;
that it could injure the reputations of the innocent; that
it could injure reputations even when well-intentioned; that
its roots were in corruption and vice; that, by its nature,
it must treat sordid and unpleasant topics; that it catered
to the worst in human nature; and that the satirists

themselves were malicious and envious, unfit to judge

43

1
.n.

1v

others.26 The most common object of denouncement was
personal satire.27 General satire, it was argued, addresses
vice and folly as abstract qualities; personal satire makes
them concrete by locating them in the actions of real
individuals. As such, personal satire was a threat to
reputations in a way that general satire was not.

Personal satire became the crux of the satire debate.
As P. K. Elkin notes, by the 17205 and 17305, most attacks
on satire focused on this form. When the Augustans defended
satire generically, in other words, the defense they offered
was usually of personal satire. It needed defending on
several grounds. It was charged that personal satire was
simply a means of exacting private revenge, and thus did not
serve the public benefit that satire traditionally claimed.
Critics held that such public humiliation could do
irreparable harm to a person's reputation, and that innocent
people could be hurt by an irresponsible satirist. Satire
was upheld as a "lawful" form by John Dryden, among others;
personal satire, with its free-for-all of charges and
counter—charges, threatened lawlessness. The motives of the
personal satirist were suspect; Elkin remarks that personal
satire "usually carried with it associations of pettiness
and malice" (123), and Joseph.Addison, in Soeotatot 256,
holds that defamatory writing is the product of jealousy,
pride in one's power of discernment, vanity, or ostentatious

display of wit.28

44

There is a recurrent argument that to accept the
personal as the satiric is to misunderstand the meaning of
satire. Charles Gildon makes this case in his LaHS_Qi

Boetry (1721):

Satite with us is taken to be something very
malicious, sharp, and biting, something that
consists wholly of invectives, and railing at
particular persons; but in its original meaning
among the Ramans, where it had its first rise, it
contained nothing of so virulent a nature; and
this misunderstanding of the very name of the poem
has with us made lamponns, or copies of verses
stuft with scurrility and scandal, in the abuse of
particulars, pass so currently for Satire, that
the general readers have no other idea of that
poem. A great deal of malice, and a little wit,
without learning or any knowledge of human nature,
fine sense, or reflection, sets up a very
indifferent scribbler for a great performer in
this kind [. . .].29

Gildon finally allows personal satire only on the
condition that "the crimes and follies they charge any one
with, must not only be absolutely true, but known to the
public, and prejudicial to others, as well as ignominious to
themselves; otherwise it is all libel, and what we call
scandal, a task very unfit for a gentleman, or a man of

probity"(145). Gildon's comment is telling on two grounds:

it reveals the class dimensions of scandal -- it is beneath
the pursuit of a gentleman —- and raises the issue of public
exposure.

John Newbery's Art_of_Eoetr¥_on_a_New_Plan (1761) takes
a similar position: "In writing satire care should be taken
that it be true and general, that is, levelled at abuses in

which numbers are concerned; for the personal kind of

45

 

satire, or lampoon, which exposes particular characters, and
affects the reputation of those at whom it is pointed, is
scarce to be distinguished from scandal and defamation."3O
The response from personal satire's defenders was that
it was no less public-spirited than general satire, and they
recommended it for its greater power of reform. In his
Leotntes_on_2oetty (1742), Joseph Trapp makes a pointed
defense of "biting" satire: "But however various the Matter
of [satire] is, it ought always to have somewhat of Keenness
and Invective, to expose the Vices and Follies of Mankind
with Raillery, or chastise them with severity."31 He does
not make a case for personal satire specifically, but his
praise of exposure clearly lays a road for it. As Alexander
Pope, who plays a complicated role in this debate,
remarked:
To attack Vice in the abstract, without touching
Persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is
fighting with Shadows. General propositions are
obscure, misty, and uncertain, compar'd with
plain, full, and home examples: Precepts only
apply to our Reason, which in most men is but
weak: Examples are pictures, and strike the
Senses, may raise the Passions, and call in those

(the strongest and most general of all motives) to
the aid of reformation.32

Critic J. A. Richardson writes that personal satire
attempts to "effect change by exploiting regard for
reputation."33 Here Pope disowns designs on reputation —-
his real target is the vice, he maintains, not the
individual. The discussion surrounding personal satire is

almost always concerned with the morality of the enterprise.

46

 

Pope, in the extract above, takes the standard position of
personal satire's defenders. It is, he explains, a moral
form, more effectual than general satire because it steers
the reader more forcefully by example. Proponents of
general satire contend that the satirist has no purchase on
another's reputation -— no social interest can outweigh the
individual's interest in maintaining a "public Character” of
high standing. Defenders of personal satire, contrastingly,
argue that the interests of the community as a whole can
claim priority over the individual's interest in a good
reputation. That is to say, actions in the private life
could bring negative consequences to bear on the community
as a whole; therefore, it is in the public interest (which,
according to this position, is of the highest value) to
expose the individual.

One of the clearest delineations of the case against
personal satire is found in Richard Allestree's Government
of_the_Ionone (1713). In this lengthy treatise on the
proper ends of speech, Allestree holds that all human
communication must serve two purposes: "the glorifying of
God and the benefiting of men."34 .Accordingly, detraction

is one of the most serious and common of sins. He explains:

Detraction in the native importance of the word
signifies the withdrawing or taking off from a
thing. And as it is apply'd to reputation, it
denotes the impairing or lessening a man in point
of fame, rendring him less valued and esteemed by
others, which is the final aim of Detraciinn, tho'
pursued by various means. (42)

47

Fun I

Allestree's treatise falters on the ambiguities of
defamation. Defamation, he writes, is a form of detraction,
and exists in two forms: false and true. False defamation
is, very simply, the circulation of lies —- or at least, the
circulation of information the truth of which one cannot
vouchsafe -- intended to diminish another. It is a moral
crime of profound seriousness, Allestree writes: "Even in
this age of insulting vice, when almost all other vice
appears bare-faced, this is fain to keep on the vizard"
(50).

The case against true defamation is more complicated.
Allestree claims an essential similarity between true and
false defamation: "tho' they may seem to be of very
different complexions, yet [they] may spring from the same
stock and drive at the same design" (49). Nonetheless,
Allestree sees true defamation as a less sinful form of
detraction, and owns that there can be circumstances under

which defamation is not a sin at all:

'tho every discovery of anothers fault be in the
strict natural sense of the word a Detractinn, yet
it will not always be the sin of Dettaotion,
because in some instances there may be some higher
obligation intervene, and supersede that we owe to
the fame of our neighbor; and in those cases it
may not only be lawful, but necessary to expose
him. (63)

There are two such higher obligations, Allestree
explains: justice and charity. The former, of course, is
precisely the defense claimed by the personal satirists, and

the fact that even Allestree grants the possible legitimacy

48

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a . .1 . n 3 (3 e c .l S

 

of this position, while simultaneously delivering such a
staunch indictment of slander and libel, indicates the
deeply fraught nature of the debate over personal satire.

This ambivalence is also voiced in Dryden's Disoontse
nn_the_Qrieina1_and_Erogress_of_Satire, a central text in
the debate over satire. While the Discourse has frequently
been approached as the authoritative articulation of the
eighteenth-century View of satire, Dustin Griffin rightly
argues that this both misreads the Diseeurse and obscures
the plurality of positions on satire in the period. As he
remarks, "Dryden's Diseeurse [. . .] was not simply an
objective and reliable summary of late Renaissance or
neoclassical theory; it joined a lively controversy and took
a partisan position."35 Like Allestree, Dryden takes a
position firmly in opposition to the lampoon, but in his
discussion, he betrays the ambiguity of his own views, first
excusing and then excoriating lampoon, justifying his own
inclinations to write against others, portraying his battle
against these inclinations as a heroic moral struggle, and
finally displacing the production of lampoon onto the body
of "scriblers" and excising the lampoon from the genre of
satire altogether.

Dryden argues that satire is, at its roots, defamation,
but that this wild origin has been tamed by satire's
cultivation as an art. Dryden's position, Griffin argues,
is progressive: Dryden wants to establish the acceptance of

satire as an art, and he wants to argue that the history of

49

satire is a history of improvement (18). "If we take Satire
in the general signification of the Word," Dryden writes,
"as it is us'd in all Modern Languages, for an Invective,
'tis certain that it is almost as old as Verse; and tho'
Hymns, which are praises of God, may be allow'd to have been
before it, yet the defamation of others was not long after
it."36 This origin, he notes ruefully, "is not much to the
Honour of Satire; but here it was Nature, and that deprav'd:
When it became an Art, it bore better Fruit" (28). For
Dryden, the conundrum is personal satire, a form that takes
satire dangerously close to its roots, and yet is a form
that he cannot entirely dismiss, either. Edward P. Nathan
describes Dryden as "an apologist for personal satire," a
label that oversimplifies Dryden's complex reaction to the
dilemma of personal satire.37 Dryden argues that personal
satire is generally "unlawful" because of the harm it does
to reputations: ”that former sort of Satire, which is known
in England by the Name of Lampoon, is a dangerous sort of
Weapon, and for the most part Unlawful. We have no Moral
right on the Reputation of other Men. 'Tis taking from
them, what we cannot restore to them" (59).

Dryden's response to personal satire as an unlawful act
is complicated by his belief that it can be justified under
two circumstances: revenge and the public good. In the case
of the former, Dryden's discussion of personal satire
becomes itself strikingly personal -- he reveals his own

inward struggle between his sense of Christian duty and his

50

desire to protect himself as a public man (not,
significantly, as a poet). It is a passage that must be
quoted at length to capture Dryden's labyrinthine

reflections:

The first [justification] is Revenge, when we have
been affronted in the same Nature, or have been
any ways notoriously abus'd, and can make our
selves no other Reparation. And yet we know,
that, in Christian Charity, all Offences are to be
forgiven; as we expect the like pardon for those
which we daily commit against Almighty God. And
this Consideration has often made me tremble when
I was saying our Saviour's Prayer; for the plain
Condition of the forgiveness which we beg, is the
pardoning of others the Offences which they have
done to us: For which Reason I have many times
avoided the Commission of that Fault' ev'n when I
have been notoriously provok'd. Let not this, my
Lord, pass for Vanity in me: For 'tis truth. More
Libels have been written against me, than almost
any Man now living; And I had Reason on my side,
to have defended my own Innocence: I speak not of
my Poetry, which I have wholly given up to the
Criticism; let them use it, as they please;
Posterity, perhaps, may be more favourable to me:
For Interest and Passion, will lye bury'd in
another Age: And Partiality and Prejudice be
forgotten. I speak of my Morals, which have been
sufficiently aspers'd: That only sort of
Reputation ought to be dear to every honest Man,
and is to me. But let the World witness for me,
that I have been often wanting to my self in that
particular: I have seldom answer'd any scurrilous
Lampoon; When it was in my power to have expos'd
my Enemies: And being naturally vindicative, have
suffer'd in silence, and possess'd my Soul in
quiet. (59-60)

When Dryden turns to the second justification of
personal satire, he simultaneously asserts its necessity for
the public good and the unfitness of most of his
contemporaries to fulfill this public responsibility, one

that he calls "absolutely of a Poet's office to perform":

51

.AL axe

.\.. ...

"'Tis an Action of Virtue to make Examples of vicious Men.
They may and ought to be upbraided with their Crimes and
Follies: Both for their own amendment, if they are not yet
incorrigible; and for the Terrour of others, to hinder them
from falling into those Enormities, which they see are so
severely punish'd, in the Persons of others" (61).

Nathan argues that Dryden's rationale for personal
satire is a civic, collectivist one -- the good of the group
is met by the exposure of the individual. This imperative,
however, contradicts Dryden's religious values: "Dryden's
Christianity will not tolerate the abuse of a man's
reputation” (376). While Nathan's reading is sensitive to
the genuine ethical dilemma that Dryden faces in ed_heminem
attack, Nathan misses the print culture context that also
surrounds Dryden's tribulations. His misgivings about
scandal come not just from his worries about religious
offense, but from his association of that writing with
another class of writers.

This sentiment is reiterated in Dryden's dedication to
his patron, the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, whom he
summons to publication as a way of silencing the
"Scriblers." He suggests their perniciousness while denying
their influence:

indeed, a provocation is almost necessary, in
behalf of the World, that you might be induc'd
sometimes to write; and in relation to a multitude
of Scriblers, who daily pester the World with
their insufferable Stuff, that they might be

discourag'd from Writing any more. I complain not
of their Lampoon, and Libels, though I have been

52

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H. .1 .3 r... t c _ C s .

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Q» v .

the Public Mark for many years. I am vindictive
enough to have repell'd by force, if I cou'd
imagine that any of them had ever reach'd me; but
they either shot at Rovers, and therefore miss'd,
or their Powder was so weak, that I might safely
stand them, at the nearest distance. (8)

The theory that Dryden propounds, Griffin argues, is
one intended to win acceptance for satire as a genre, in
part through the prescriptive rules he produces. And yet he
is remaking satire, and thereby ignoring or ruling out much
writing that already existed: "Lampoon, in Dryden's scheme,
is likewise exiled beyond the pale as a lawless and
dangerous kind of poem" (22).

The journals The_1etler and The_SpeeteteL.also
propounded satiric theory. In the Specteter, personal
satire is depicted as a symptom of class envy: "A Satyr or
Libel on one of the common Stamp, never meets with that
Reception or Approbation among its Readers, as what is aimed
at a Person whose Merit places him upon an Eminence, and
gives him a more conspicuous Figure among Men” (1: 494).

The Speeteter, the periodical announces, contains ”no
private Scandal, nor any thing that may tend to the
Defamation of particular Persons, Families, or Societies"
(1: 517).

To produce scandal, the Speetater argues, is to
infringe on the territory of the court system: "I cannot but
look upon the finest Strokes of Satyr which are aimed at

particular Persons, and which are supported even with the

Appearance of Truth, to be the Marks of an evil Mind, and

53

highly Criminal in themselves. Infamy, like other
Punishments, is under the direction and distribution of the
Magistrate, and not of any private Person" (1: 88).

The attitude expressed in The_IatleL is more
complicated. In August of 1709, Steele put forward a

limited justification of personal satire:

It is a common Objection against Writings of a
Satyrical Mixture, that they hurt Men in their
Reputations, and consequently in their Fortunes
and Possessions; but a Gentleman who frequents
this Room declar'd, he was of Opinion it ought to
be so, provided such Performances had their proper
Restrictions.38
He goes on to praise the capacity of satire to allot justice
extralegally: "The greatest evils in human Society are such
as no Law can come at" (1: 420). The example Steele cites
is of an ungrateful benefactee and promises that "[w]e shall
therefore take it for a very moral Action to find a good
Appellation for Offenders, and to turn 'em into Ridicule
under feign'd Names" (1: 421).

In an issue of Ihe_Tat1et from the autumn of the same
year, however, Steele rails against the idea of public
exposure. The disjuncture can perhaps be explained by the
fact that, in the later issue, Steele envisions publicity

unharnessed from "proper Restriction." The public culture

is suddenly mass culture:

we reject many eminent Virtues, if they are
accompanied with one apparent weakness. The
reflecting after this Manner, made me account for
the strange Delight Men take in reading Lampoons
and Scandal, with which the Age abounds, and of
which I receive frequent Complaints. Upon mature
Consideration, I find it is principally for this

54

Reason, that the worst of Mankind, the Libellers,
receive so much Encouragement in the World. The
low Race of Men take a secret Pleasure in finding
an eminent Character levelled to their Condition
by a Report of its Defects, and keep themselves in
Countenance, though they are excelled in a
thousand Virtues, if they believe they have in
common with a great Person any one Fault. The
Libeller falls in with this Humour, and gratifies
this Baseness of Temper, which is naturally an
Enemy to extraordinary Merit. It is from this
that Libel and Satyr are promiscuously joined
together in the Notions of the Vulgar, though the
Satyrist and Libeller differ as much as the
Magistrate and the Murderer. (2: 74)

The vision of print culture that Steele summons is one
of order turned upside down. The "low Race of Men" are
assuming cultural authority and, he argues, it is his duty

to contribute to the effort to control them:

I shall, for the Good of my Country, hereafter
take upon me to punish these Wretches [. . .1; for
the future, I shall take Notice of such Enemies to
Honour and Virtue, and preserve them to immortal
Infamy. Their Names shall give fresh Offence many
Ages hence, and be detested a Thousand Years after
Commission of their Crime. (2: 75-76)

The undercurrent of the debate over satire is clear.
Reputation is increasingly important, it is in the hands of
the masses, and the politics of exposure are highly charged.

No writer was more definitively marked as an agent of
exposure or producer of scandal than Delarivier Manley. In
the introduction to the second volume of her New1Ata1antis,
Manley appropriates Dryden's and Steele's arguments to

defend the practice of personal satire.

Were not the scene of these memoirs in an island
with which those of ours are but little
acquainted, I should, my Lord, say something in
the defence of them as they seem guilty of

55

particular reflections,

defending the author by

the precedent of our great forefathers in satire,
who not only flew against the general reigning
vices but pointed at individual persons, as may be

seen in Ennius, Varro,

Lucian, Horace, Juvenal,

Persius, &c. What would have become of the
immortality they have derived from their works, if
their contemporaries had been of the Tatler's
opinion? Who, though he allows ingratitude,
avarice, and those other vices which the law does
not reach to be the business of satire yet, in
another place he says, these are his words, That

where_the_cr1mes_are_enermousi_the_de11nquent
WW. At

this rate, vice may stalk an noon, secure from
reproach, and the reformer skulk as if he were
performing an inglorious as well as ingrateful

office.39

Delarivier Manley's work brings together the issues of

publicity and privacy with an insistence that made her a

particularly controversial figure
simultaneously evokes a tradition
leads her readers to question the

tradition with the new conditions

in her day. She
of personal writing and
compatibility of this

of the public sphere. Her

texts, as I will argue in the next chapter, helped to define

that sphere.

56

NOTES

1 Joseph Addison, The_fipeetetez, ed. Donald F. Bond
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) 2: 518.

2 See W. R. Jones, “Actions for Slaunder’: Defamation
in English Law, Language, and History,” Quarter1y_fiontna1_of
Speech 57 (1971): 275; and R. C. Donnelly, ‘History of
Defamation,” Wisconsin_Law_Reyiew (1949): 106.

3 Theodore F. T. Plucknett, ‘A Concise History of the
Common Law,” 5th ed., vol. 2 (Boston: Little Brown, 1956)
484.

4 For a discussion of court treatment of slander in
London in the first half of the eighteenth century, with
particular reference to gender, see Tim Meldrum, ‘A.Women’s
Court in London: Defamation at the Bishop of London’s
Consistory Court, 1700-1745,” Lenden_1eu£ne1 19 (1994):

1- 20. See also Laura Gowing, ‘Language, Power and the Law:
Women’ s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London,” moment

Crime_and_the_Ceurts_in_Early_Medern_Eneland, ed. Jennifer
Kermode and Garthine Walker (Chapel Hill, NC: U of North

Carolina P, 1994) 26-47.
5 Statutes_of_flestminster I (1275): c. 34.

6 Francis Ludlow Holt, The_Lefl_e£_Libe1 (1812; New
York: Garland, 1978) 25.

7 Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells, eds., Writing_and
Censorshin_1n_Britain (New York: Routledge, 1992) 15.

8 Lawrence H. Eldgredge, The_Law_of_Defamation
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978) 5.

9 C. R. Kropf, ‘Libel and Satire in the Eighteenth
Century,” Eighteenth:Century_Studies 8 (1974/75): 158.

1° Fredrick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the.2ress_in
England1_1416:1116 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1965) 119.

11 John March, Actions_for_Slander (London, 1647)
10‘11.

12 For discussion of Areepagitiea and the emerging
figure of the author, see Abbe Blum, ‘The Author' 5
Authority: Areepegitiea and the Labour of Licensing,"

EmzmemberinQEMilten., ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson
(London: Methuen, 1987) 74- 96.

57

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13 See Laurence Hanson, eoyernment_and_the_2ressr
.1ses;11§a, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967) 15.

14 For the history of the Licensing Act, see Terry
Belanger, ‘Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-Century
England,” ' ' ' -
England, ed. Isabel Rivers (London: St. Martin’s, 1982)
5-26.

15 M. Lindsay Kaplan, ‘The Poetics of Defamation in
Early Modern England, " EME1_Stud1es_1n_Early_Medern_Erance,
ed. David Lee Rubin, vol. 2 (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood
P, 1996) 116. See also Kaplan, Ihe_Cultnre_ef_Slender_in
Early_Modern_Eneland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).

16 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Bessie (New York: Knopf,
1985) 31.

17 Van Vechten Veeder, ‘The History and Theory of the
Law of Defamation,” Columbia_Lam_Rerieu 4 (1904): 31.

18 Ann Rigney, ‘Fame and Defamation: Towards a
SocioPragmatics,” Semietiea 99 (1994): 54

19 Walter Probert, ‘Defamation, a Camoflauge of Psychic
Interests: The Beginning of a Behavioral Analysis,”
Yanderbilt_Law_ReMieH 5 (1962): 1176.

20 Pat O’Malley, ‘From Feudal Honour to Bourgeois
Reputation: Ideology, Law and the Rise of Industrial
Capitalism,” ' ' ' '

SecieleeicaILAssociatien.15 (1981): 80.
21 Thomas Hobbes, The_Le11eLhen I, ch. 10.

22 John Locke, An_Essa¥_Concernine_Human_understandinn
II.28.sec 10.

23 H. Montgomery Hyde, ‘A Look at the Law,” Wiokedt
Wieked_Liheis, ed. Michael Rubinstein (London: Routledge,
1972) 5.

24 On the development of public insult as a means of
settling conflict, see Robert B. Shoemaker, ‘Reforming Male
Manners: Public Insult and the Decline of Violence in

London, 1660-1740, ” English.Masculinitiesi_1660:1800, ed.
Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (New York: Longman, 1999):

133-50.

25 David Zaret, ‘Religion, Science, and Printing in the

58

 

Public Spheres in Seventeenth- -Century England," Habermee_and
the_2nb11e_Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MIT P,

1997) 214. On the relation between print and the emerging
public sphere, see also Michael Warner, The_Letters_of_the

E 11' . E 11' I. I II E )J' i l .
Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990).

26 P. K. Elkin, Ihe_Aueneten1Defence_ef_Satire.(Oxford:
Clarendon, 1973) 44—45.

27 For general discussions of reading personal satire,
see R. B. Gill, ‘Dryden, Pope and the Person in Personal
Satire," Essays_1n_L1terature 13 (1986): 219-30; and ‘Real
People and Persuasion in Personal Satire,” Ihe_Sonth

Atlant1c_Quarter1¥ 82 (1983): 165- 78
28 The_Snectater 2: 495.

29 Charles Gildon, Ihe_Laus_of_Poetty (London, 1721)
127.

30 John Newbery, Ihe1Art_of_Poetry_on_a1Neu_Plan
(London, 1761) 100.

31 Joseph Trapp, Lectures_on_£oetty, ed. Malcolm Kesall
(1742; Menston, Eng.: The Scholar Press, 1973) 221.

32 Alexander Pope, ‘Letter to Arbuthnot, 26 July 1734,”

The_Cerrespondence_of1Alexander_Pone, ed. George Sherbun
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1956) 3: 419.

33 J..A. Richardson, ‘Swift: Personal Satire,
Reputation and the Reader,” Englieh_fitndies 5 (1987): 433.

34 Richard Allestree, The_Goyernment_of_the_1eneue
(London, 1713) 6.

35 Dustin Griffin, Sat1ree_A.Critical_Beintroduction
(Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1994) 16.

36 Dryden, Qr1g1nal_and_Erogress_ef_Satire in The_florks
ot_John_Dryoen, vol. 4, ed. A. B. Chambers and William Frost
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1974) 28.

37 Edward P. Nathan, ‘The Bench and the Pulpit:
Conflicting Elements in the Augustan Apology for Satire,"
ELH 52 (1985): 375.

38 The_IaL1eL, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon,
1987) l: 420.

59

Bel

39 Delariver Manley, W, ed. Ros
Ballaster (1709; New York: Penguin, 1991) 132.

60

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CHAPTER TWO

THE POLITICS OF EXPOSURE IN THE WORK OF DELARIVIER MANLEY

Implicit in the exposure of public figures that
Delarivier Manley justifies in the preface to volume II of
her HewdAtalantis is a redistribution of authority. Rank is
no longer sufficient to secure a position of public
influence. Transformations in social ideology in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain invested a
special public value in the enterprise of scandal. Amidst
significant unease about profitable detraction and
disruptions of the social order, private character became an
important element of political, social and cultural
authority. ‘Over the course of the seventeenth century,"
Michael McKeon has observed, ‘the predominant meaning of the
word ‘honor' as a term of denotation shifts from ‘title of
rank' to ‘goodness of character.”1 Character was held to
manifest itself in private (that is to say, undisplayed)
actions; private life was thus a matter of public concern.
This is the claim made by some defenders of personal satire,
who argued that the public benefited when examples of
individual vice were brought to its attention.
Self-proclaimed satirists positioned satire as an authorized
genre, a counterpart to the law in punishing bad actions and
protecting the public interest; as such, they distinguished

it from libel, which, they contended, wantonly destroyed

61

reputations. The boundary between satire and libel was an
unstable one, and satire's advocates found themselves having
continually to assert and re-assert difference. The
contrast with libel afforded satire some legitimacy, as
Manley acknowledges when she deliberately situates her New
Atalantis in the history of personal satire. Such tactics,
however, did not protect Manley from the imputations of
being a scandal writer, and she herself was absorbed into
the economy of scandal that she advanced with her texts. In
her Adventures_of_Biyella, a disguised autobiographical
account of her life, Manley enters into the process of
representation on her own behalf. Rather than presenting a
straight-forward self-defense, Manley provides an impression
of exposure: a scandal narrative about her life, which she
did not acknowledge as her own text. In writing The
Adyantnres_of_fiiyella, Manley depicts the process of having
one's private life represented for the public eye. She
intervenes in the exchange of scandal to offer a
self-representation, but in doing so, she emphasizes the
power of writing to produce rather than reveal a life.2
The_NewdALalantis (1709) is a text about fame and
notoriety that was a seminal factor in making Manley herself
a public entity. She had published before, as a playwright
and as a scandal memoirist. But it was the astounding
popularity of Ihe_Neu_ALalanL13 that transformed Manley into
a truly public figure. Delarivier Manley began her literary

career in the 1690s as a playwright, but by the early years

62

of the eighteenth century, she was working for the Tory
party and had taken up writing scandal narratives. The
genre had its roots in France, in the chroniquea
scandalenses that developed around 1660. These texts, which
related the events of real private lives, found popularity
in England, and many French scandal chronicles were
translated for an English audience.3 Aphra Behn was perhaps
the earliest English scandal writer; Memoirs_gfi_the_DnLchess
Qf_Mazar1ne (1676) and Lola:LeLLers_Betueen_a_Nleeman_and
his_fiister (1684-87) are examples of the form.4 Manley's
narratives put scandal to more overtly political use. Her
first was 1W
Zarazians (1705), a satirical roman_a_cle£ about Sarah
Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough and Whig confidante of
Queen Anne. Manley followed this with her most popular
work, Ih£_Nefl_ALalantis, the central target of which is John
Churchill, lst Duke of Marlborough. In these scandal
narratives, Manley blends amatory fiction and political
expose as she relates compromising stories about the lives
of influential Whigs.

Manley’s ability to manipulate renown and reputation
for political ends is in keeping with the changes wrought by
political events in the seventeenth century. In his book,
Ihe_EIanzy_Qf_BanQun1_Eame_and_lLs_HisLQr¥, Leo Braudy notes
the new fluidity of political power. The restoration of
Charles II and the 1688 Revolution that removed James II

from the throne to be replaced by William III were the will

63

of the ‘majority of the politically aware and powerful.”
Honor and value were newly malleable: ‘Medieval imagery had
made fame the often arbitrary gift of fortune. But with the
new political and legal awareness of the late Renaissance,
what had been seen as a gamble on the Wheel of Fortune
became something to learn about and manipulate.”5 Manley’s
New_ALalantis is one form of such manipulation. The public
for which she wrote was likely still a fairly constricted
circle. Nevertheless, it extended considerably beyond king
and court to encompass a larger reading public. In ‘The
Rape of the Lock,” for example, Pope's reference to IhQ_Neu
Atalantis (‘As long as Atalantis shall be read”), intended
to evoke ephemerality, also suggests the text’s popularity.6
As I have argued, scandal, like gossip, involves the
circulation of damaging stories about others' private lives.
While gossip itself is part of a private sphere, scandal
moves the activity of gossip into open view. Delarivier
Manley writes about the most influential individuals of her
society. In Ihe_NEH_ALalantis, she depicts such socially
prominent figures as: Earl Godolphin; the Duke of Leeds; the
Earl of Berkeley; the Marquis and Marchioness Wharton;
Catherine Tufton and Elizabeth Montagu, daughters of the
Duke of Newcastle; the Duke of Kent; Thomas, Earl Coningsby,
and Frances, Countess Scudamore. Knowledge of intimate
stories about such lofty individuals as those represented in
The_New#ALalantis would, without Manley, have been confined

largely to other members of their circle.7 Indeed, the

64

 

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staid but authoritative Dictionary_of_National_Biggraphy
upbraids Manley for IhB_Neu_Atalantis, stating that in it,
she ‘impudently slandered many persons of note, especially
those of whiggish proclivities.”8 The adverb is important --
Manley's crime is not simply that she slanders, but that she
does so from the position of a social inferior. So
Catherine Gallagher observes when she comments that
Delarivier Manley represents the ‘scandal of scandal:
affront to propriety offered by the public discrediting of
people in authority.”9 Their power, in other words, should
make them immune to public attack, yet it is their very
proximity to the public good that Manley cites in her
autobiography, W, as a justification
for her scandal writing. Authority itself is redistributed
as these public figures become accountable to a broad public
and its evaluations of their private conduct.

In this respect, Manley's writing expands on three
fronts the boundaries of an already existing economy of
gossip: she draws into the realm of public gossip the
private lives of privileged figures; she absorbs politics
into this economy; and she makes people of her rank
significant participants in its workings. Information is
the currency in this economy; reputation is each
participant's capital. One accrues power through the
tactical revelation of information about others, not just
because that information establishes special knowledge, but

also because that information can be used to discredit the

65

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object of gossip. Those who inspire gossip are vulnerable
to the circulation of slander, the betrayal of secrets, and

the penetration of privacy.10

Reputation is both a
potential defense against gossip (a good reputation may
sustain relatively little damage from accusations hurled
against it) and that which is at risk from gossip. The
reputation of the gossiper is also a crucial factor in this
economy, for personal credibility is essential to the
influence of the gossip that is spread. Janet Todd argues
that Biyella had its genesis in Manley's recognition that,
as an infamous woman, she had nothing left to lose: in
Riyella, ‘the reader learns that a woman without reputation
and honour may be freed for economic activity.”11
(Actually, Manley is not ‘without reputation”; rather, the
reputation she has is of a woman ‘without honour.”) But
while the very act of publishing imperils Manley's
reputation, and the writing of scandal narratives mars it
still further, some measure of good reputation and honor is
required for Manley’s ‘economic activity." Her scandal
writing will be without effect if she herself has no public
credibility, and the authority she has gained will be lost.
This is why Manley must intervene on her own behalf in the
economy of gossip. Biyella is that intervention.

The very fact that subjects of gossip are worthy of
public discussion signals their influence, and in this sense
gossip acknowledges authority even as it assaults its

12

legitimacy. Paradoxically, through her charges of others'

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scandal, Delarivier Manley raises her own public notoriety,
a double-edged sword. Her status is enhanced by this
notoriety; it is an acknowledgment that she wields genuine
power. Manley becomes a kind of peer of the influential
figures about whom she writes in that she, too, becomes a
subject of gossip. At the same time, she becomes vulnerable
in just the way that the targets of her own scandal
narratives are: her life becomes something that can be used
against her. The material with potential to be exploited
included her bigamous marriage to her guardian and cousin,
John Manley; her relationships with Sir Thomas Skipworth and
the married warden of Fleet Street Prison, John Tilly; and
her years of living with the publisher John Barber.

In introducing gossip as political discourse, Manley
brings what was traditionally seen as a form of private,
female exchange into the public, male world of politics.13
Patricia Meyer Spacks identifies three sources for the
historical association of gossip with women: Eve's ‘unwise
speaking and unwise listening”; the presumed feebleness of
women’s minds that would prevent them from comprehending and
discussing matters of consequence; and, an explanation that
emerged around Manley's day, that women gossip because,
lacking any consequential business, they have nothing else
to occupy them (41). It is an irony of Manley's work that
she puts this gossip into service as a way of asserting a
female voice in the affairs of state.14 On one hand, that

she would do so confirms in some of her critics' minds

67

misogynistic notions about women's involvement in public
life (i.e. that Manley infects public discourse with the
gossip that women engage in privately). On the other hand,
the very effectiveness of her New_Atalantis in discrediting
those about whom she writes demonstrates the power of gossip
as a form of political propaganda. It could not be
dismissed as a woman's misplaced effort to enter the field
of debate because it was one factor in changing the nature
of that field, as the scandal chronicle drew private
peccadilloes into the realm of the politically
consequential. Gossip was employed by both sides, Whig and
Tory, and as Riyella itself testifies, it became an
important weapon to be used against Manley.

Gossip is the private made public, the ‘social
appropriation of personal knowledge," as Clare Brant terms
it.15 When Manley publishes her scandal, she mirrors this
process of publicizing the private. Spacks writes
approvingly of the ‘bonding of gossip,” the intimacy and
social connection that it established and enforced in the
exchange of information between two individuals. Manley's
scandal involves no such intimacy, however, because it is
immediately available to anyone able to read it. She also
draws back the curtain from women's private communication,
through the characters of Intelligence and especially Mrs.
Nightwork. If spoken gossip's effect is incremental, as a
story is spread from person to person, then the scandal

narrative is a form of gossip distinctive for its instant

68

effect. This therefore makes it a particularly potent way
of influencing reputation.

The vital thing to remember about Manley's scandal
narratives is that they function on two levels: as amatory
fiction and as public attacks on real—life individuals. In
Ihe.Neu1Atalantis, for example, she chronicles the rise to
royal favor of Count Fortunatus through his affair with the
Duchess de l’Inconstant. It is in fact the story of the
Duke of Marlborough's relationship with Barbara Villiers,

Duchess of Cleveland and mistress to Charles II:

[The Duchess] caused [Fortunatus] to be called,
and all full of native love and high desire, for
an object so entirely new and charming, she bid
him attend her after the King's conchéa, who that
night was to lie of his own side. The governess
knowing the Duchess's amorous star, was
transported at the happy introduction of her
nephew, not doubting that he was destined for her
peculiar pleasures; she caused him to bath in the
Duchess's bathing-room, perfumes being than [sic]
much worn by people of condition, she procured him
the riches, scented his fine linen, and all sweet
and charming as an Adonis, introduced him to the
bed-side of the expecting Venus.

In Manley's hands the scandal narrative becomes a tool of
political influence, rather than merely a voyeuristic
diversion. In this scene, Marlborough is both the innocent
beneficiary of his aunt's machinations and the subject of
Manley's scandalous representation. Nonetheless, this
scene, which marks a literal rite of passage in
Marlborough’s education as a courtier also sets him on the
road that will lead him to Blenheim Palace. When she puts

forward for public consideration stories illustrating

69

Marlborough's greed, deceitfulness, and unscrupulous
ambition, she assaults his public standing as a national
hero. While treated as a suspect form of political
propaganda, the scandal narrative was an apparently
effective one, for Ihe_New_ALalantis was an important
element in the propaganda war that ended in the Tories
taking power from the Whigs in 1710.17

In the atmosphere of the early eighteenth century, any
woman imperiled her reputation by becoming a published
author because she thereby eluded the boundaries of the
private sphere to which virtuous women were confined.18
Manley made herself more scandalous by writing scenes of
passion and seduction rather than morally didactic works.
In her scandal narratives, however, the amatory functions as
a screen for the scandalous.19 The purpose of the
passionately-rendered scene in which Fortunatus and
Germanicus play a bed-trick on the Duchess de l'Inconstant,
for example, is not simply to titillate readers but to
demonstrate the calculating ambition in Marlborough that
prompts him to dispose in this way of his now-unwanted
lover. It was this exposure of others in Ihe_NewdALalantia
that prompted The Taller to publish a satirical reflection
on the influence of Manley’s work.20 The author imagines a
‘College for Young Damsels” at which the students will study
subjects (mathematics, Greek, Latin, etc.) ordinarily

reserved for men:

Only on Holydays the Students will, for moderate

70

 

Exercise, be allow'd to divert themselves with the
Use of some of the lightest and most voluble
Weapons; and proper Care will be taken to give
them at least a superficial Tincture of the
Ancient and Modern Amazonian Tackticks. Of these
Military Performances, the Direction is undertaken
by Epicene_[Manley}, the writer of Memoirs_from
thBEMediterransan, who, by the Help of some
artificial Poisons convey'd by Smells, has within
these few Weeks brought many Persons of both Sexes
to an untimely Fate; and, what is more surprising,
has contrary to her Profession, with the same
Odors, reviv'd others who had long since been
drown'd in the Whirlpools of Lethe.

These remarks demonstrate the distaste with which
Manley's work was received and the effort to paint it as
inconsequential (‘the lightest and most voluble Weapons”)
even while lamenting its results. The Amazonian context in
which the author sets his scene testifies to a preoccupation
with Manley's gender as a political writer. Her amatory
fiction harmed only her own reputation as a virtuous woman;
her scandal narratives damaged the reputations of others, as
this evocation of literal character assassination makes
clear. It is this latter damage that prompts retribution
against her. In light of the effect of Manley's text on the
Whig party, the Whig government responded swiftly to the
publication of the second volume of The_Nefl_ALalan11&,
arresting Manley on the charge of libel in October 1709.

The effort to thwart her work was not limited to such legal
pursuit, however; it also involved discounting her narrative
authority by making public the private embarrassments of her
own life. The logic was simple. To expose Manley was to

discredit her work, to blunt the effects of her charges of

71

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scandal, and to strike a blow against the enterprise of
scandal writing itself. An attack on Manley was thus an
attack on scandal; in silencing her, the threat to public
authority that her narratives represented would be
contained. Manley became, in other words, an embodiment of
her work; she was scandal made immanent.22

It is this knotting together of author and work that
Manley is concerned with in Ih£_Ad¥enLuLefi_Qf_BiKElla. As a
scandalous woman —- that is to say, a woman whose work is
bound up in the enterprise of scandal and who is publicly
accepted as a figure of scandal -- a treatment of her life
necessarily functions as a scandal narrative. This is not
because of her sexual past, as April London argues, but
because she is already part of the economy of gossip. Her
past is ammunition in scandalous attack, but it is not the
reason for that attack. It is her own scandal writing that
prompts the will to discredit her. And yet, that attack
will fail if Manley can persuade Rilella's audience that the
scandalous behavior attributed to her is in fact
insignificant.

One of the most interesting aspects of the history of
this work is that it had its start, not in Manley's hands,
but in those of writer Charles Gildon. In his preface to
the edition issued some ten years after Riyella first
appeared, publisher Edmund Curll claimed that Gildon wrote
‘upon a Pique, the cause of which I cannot assign.”23

Another, less personal, motive for writing also suggests

72

itself: while Manley was in the service of the Tories,
Gildon was employed by the Whigs.24 No more than the first
two pages of Gildon's text were ever printed, however. Upon
hearing of its impending publication, Manley rushed to Curll
and appealed to him that she be allowed to tell her own
story. Her urgency was born, Curll explains, of her
‘suspecting [Gildon's text] to be what it really was, a
severe Invective upon some Part of her Conduct.”25 Curll
presents the ensuing negotiations as harmonious and
generous-spirited:

upon hearing her own Story, which no Pen, but her
own, can relate in the agreeable Manner wherein
she delivered it, I promised to write to Mr.
Gildon the next Day: and not only obtained his
Consent to let Mrs. Manley see what Sheets were
printed, but also brought them to an Interview, by
which Means, all Resentments between them were
thoroughly reconciled. Mr. Gildon was, likewise,
so generous, as to order a Total Suppression of
all his Papers, and Mrs. Manley, as generously
resolved to write The History of her Own Life and
Times, under the same Title which Mr. Gildon had
made Choice of. (45)

Curll's picture of easy collegiality is undercut by the
very evidence that he himself cites in support of his
account: the letters Manley wrote to him. She is clearly
anxious about the enterprise, and pleads with Curll that her
authorship should be concealed: ‘for God's sake let us try
if this Affair can be kept a Secret.” She later adds, ‘I
dread the Noise ‘twill make when it comes out; it concerns
us all to keep the Secret” (46). Gildon's Riyella is
retaliatory gossip about Manley. If it should become known

that the writer of TheLAdyentures_of_Rivella is not Gildon

73

 

but Manley herself, then its status as gossip evaporates,
possibly inviting Gildon or another to write a genuine
exposure of Manley. Her eager acceptance of Gildon's title
makes sense in this light: it further obscures her
responsibility for the text.

Thus, while Gildon's reasons for retreating from the
project are unclear, the implications of his involvement for
Manley's Biyella are profound: whatever account she gives of
herself is checked by the awareness that, while she writes
to avert Gildon's ‘invective,” too flattering a portrait of
herself may only prompt Gildon to resume his work. Her
solution to this dilemma is a clever one: she shifts her
narrative lens from her own life to the desire of others to
learn about that life. Riyella is less a portrait of
Delarivier Manley than it is of her public representation.

Ihe_Adyentnres_Qf_Riyella is a complicated text because
it must offer an account of Manley's life that is favorable
enough to protect her reputation and yet critical enough not
to announce itself as the product of her own pen. She must
convince her audience that it is reading a scandal
narrative, and she does this through her use of scandal
narrative conventions and her revelation of scandal in a way
that only appears harmful. The frames of her narrative are
central to this effect. The first frame is a brief preface
from its fictional translator, describing the origins of the
work: on a visit to his uncle, the French ambassador to

England, the young Chevalier D'Aumont converses with Sir

74

Charles Lovemore on the subject of Rivella. Eager to give
Lovemore ‘Proof both of the goodness of his memory, and
Great Attention,” D'Aumont decides to translate Lovemore's

26 Soon after his return

spoken narration into written form.
to France, however, D'Aumont dies of a fever. His former
servant, now a printer, inherits and publishes the papers,
which are subsequently translated into English. A.private
conversation becomes a public document, in a self-conscious
reflection of both the practice and the nature (the private
made public) of Manley's other works. This frame announces
to readers familiar with the conventions of scandal
narrative that the text before them is another of that
genre.

D'Aumont's plea to Lovemore to tell him about Rivella
is the other frame of Lovemore’s own narration. D'Aumont,
who has read The_uew_Atalantis, wants to hear all about this
‘Mistress of the Art of Love” (742). In D'Aumont, Manley
dramatizes one way of reading her scandal narratives: as
purely fictional scenes of seduction. He is oblivious to
the political import of the writing, telling Lovemore that
no one can match ‘your famous Author of the Atalantis” when
it comes to ‘treat[ing] well of Love" (740). D'Aumont's

reaction to her work is one of enthusiastic arousal:

She has carried the Passion farther than could be
readily conceiv ’d: Her Germanicus_on_the
EmlzrniderLd.Bugle.Bed...naked_Qut_of_the_Bathz

Her WWW, transported with
the powerful Wine,
WWW
WW: Chevalier

75

Tomaso dy1ng_at_the_EeeL_Qf_Madam de Bedamore, and
aftemardestessianieLinJhat Sylvan Scenem
Bleaauze_the_fiardan; are such Representatives of
Nature, that must warm the coldest Reader [. . .].
(740)
D'Aumont reads the characters as representatives, but of
types, not of real individuals. Because D'Aumont fails to
see behind the scandal narrative's fictional curtain, the
seduction scenes carry for him only an exemplary
significance: ‘After perusing [Rivella's] Inchanting
Description, which of us have not gone in Search of Raptures
which she every where tells us, as happy Mortals, we are
capable of tasting” (740). These raptures, D'Aumont
concludes, are best met in the person of Rivella herself.
‘Do her eyes love as well as Her Pen?” he beseeches
Lovemore.27 D'Aumont reads Rivella's narratives as amorous
only, and then conflates the author with her work. She is
for D’Aumont the embodiment of eroticism, just as Manley was
for others the very personification of scandal.

If D'Aumont reads Rivella as the playful writer of
amatory fiction, Lovemore is fully aware of the political
purpose of her work. While Manley's invention of a male
narrator for her story has received comment from many of her
critics, only Ros Ballaster has treated the relationship
between Lovemore and Rivella at length. She argues that
‘Lovemore struggles throughout the novella to contain
Rivella within the private sphere he considers proper to the

woman," but that Manley herself has the last laugh, for the

Rivella he describes is only his own fantasy, and ‘[w]hile

76

the man appears to have ‘authored' the perfect female
object, she is, in reality, elsewhere ‘authoring' him.”28
Ballaster's reading of the narrator is compelling as far as
it goes, but she gives little attention to Lovemore’s avowed
purpose in his narration or the ways in which his real
project is revealed. Lovemore has known Rivella for
virtually the whole of her life, and promises D'Aumont that
he will deliver to him an authoritative account of her life.
Lovemore prides himself ‘Upon the Reputation of an Impartial
Historian” (789), but the preoccupation that shapes his
narrative soon becomes clear: Rivella once spurned him as a
lover. His constant rehearsal of this rejection places him
in an often censorious, and sometimes adversarial, position.
He departs from fulfilling D’Aumont's narrative desires in
order to satisfy his own: to show Rivella as a woman
ultimately undone by her rebuff of him. Lovemore's claim to
impartiality collapses, then, in the revelation of his
self-serving narrative end. His oration on Rivella’s
conduct exposes itself as jealous gossip.

While Manley gives Lovemore the task of tracing
Rivella's ruin, the events that he presents are scarcely
scathing accusations. Rivella's scandalous reputation,
Lovemore asserts, is the result of misfortune and folly. He
cites her bigamous marriage (by referring D’Aumont to the
story of Delia in Ih£_Nefl_ALalantis, thus reminding D'Aumont
of the referential nature of that work) as her greatest

source of misery and ill fortune.29 Most of the damage done

77

to Rivella's name has come, however, from her own failure to
guard her reputation. He comments, for example, that after

the production of Rivella's first dramatic tragedy, ‘another
wrong step toward ruining Riiella's Character with the world

[. . . was] the Incense that was daily offer'd her upon this

Occasion from the Men of Vogue and Wit” (778). Describing
Rivella's relationship with Peter Vainlove -- a
representative of Sir Thomas Skipworth -- Lovemore laments,

‘Behold what a fine Person Riyella chose to fool away her
Reputation with” (784). The image that Manley presents of
herself is of a woman profoundly indifferent to her own
reputation. She is foolish enough to strike up a friendship
with Hilaria (the Duchess of Cleveland), who spreads
‘Slander_and_3canda1? (771) about Rivella out of jealousy;
she is vain enough to accept and enjoy the public accolades
offered her by the wits. This is the scandal that Lovemore
reveals: that Rivella has neglected to protect herself from
malicious gossip. The indignation and mournfulness with
which Lovemore traces her ‘ruin” insists on the seriousness
of his revelation, so that the reader hardly notices the
indictment of Rivella collapsing under its own
contradictoriness and inconsequence. Rivella is scandalous
because she has given the world an opportunity to claim that
she is so. Manley produces public gossip about herself in
Bixella to prevent anyone else from writing her secret
history, but the accusation she levels against herself is in

effect so slight that she gives the appearance of scandal

78

 

without exacting any of its damaging effects. She protects
her reputation by suggesting that the greatest charge to be
made against her is that she shows a careless disregard for
her own good name -- that she has, in fact, no mind toward
protecting herself.

In December, 1709, the year that The_Neu_A£alantia
appeared, Susanna Centlivre's comedy, Ihe_Maan_Bew1tchLd1
QL1_Ihe_DeMil_LQ_DQ_abenL_Her, opened at the Haymarket. In
its prologue, Manley is attacked for her hypocrisy in daring

to make scandalous charges against others:

Tho' flickerstaff’s vast Genius may engage

And lash the Vice and follies of the Age;

Why should tender Delia tax the Nation;

Stickle, and make a Noise for Reformation,

Who always gave a Loose, herself to Inclination?30

Manley repeats this accusation of her hypocrisy in Rivella,
when Lovemore tells D'Aumont that ‘[t]he Casuists told her a
Woman of her Wit had the Privilege of the other Sex, since
all things were pardonable to a Lady whe_eeuld.se_uell_giie
W"
(780). In Manley’s hands, however, the criticism of her
conduct is tempered by the suggestion of sexual hypocrisy
that makes a ‘Woman of Wit” earn the privileges accorded to
men. Manley appears to indict herself here through
Lovemore's reiteration of the claim that she does not adhere
to the standards of behavior to which she holds others. She
has also shown her audience, however, that ‘the World

[. . .] wou’d never restore a Woman’s Reputation, how

innocent soever she really were, if Appearances prov'd to be

79

against her” (768). Her own indulgence of ‘Inclination,"
Manley implies, is only a matter of gossip. Thus, she
reasserts her legitimacy as a revealer of scandal even as
she recapitulates others' complaints against her.

That Manley should depict herself through the eyes of
someone like Lovemore reinforces the notion that what
interests her in Riyella is not representing herself, but
showing herself being represented. She implicates Lovemore,
and by extension Charles Gildon himself, in the enterprise
of gossip and scandal. What is Ihe1AdMenLn£efi_Q£_RilellaI
after all, but an elaborate example of male gossip? Kathryn
Shevelow has remarked that in the eighteenth century, men’s
‘idle conversation” took place in public, while women's

‘tattle” happened in private.31

The exchange between
Lovemore and D'Aumont has none of the public nature that
Shevelow connects with male discourse, or that Habermas
represents as the language of the public sphere. It is
instead an intensely private event: ‘[D'Aumont] made an
intimacy with Sir Charles Lovemore, [. . .] If you think it
a proper Time to perform your Promise, I will command the
Door-keepers, that they suffer none to enter [this Garden]
this evening to disturb our Conversation” (737-38). Manley
shows her male characters engaged in the ‘feminine” activity
of ‘tattle": the men are hidden away, gossiping about her.

Manley was literally and figuratively indicted for her

scandal writing; she in turn indicts those who assail her

80

while declaring themselves outside of this economy of
gossip.

Manley's account of herself as a scandal writer,
however, is anything but simple. She moves from one
explanation of her work to another, the only unifying factor
being her constant awareness of herself as a woman writing
(or not writing) about politics. Lovemore tells D'Aumont
that ‘[Rivella] loves Truth, and has too often given her
self the Liberty to speak, as well as write it” (750). He
thus implies that her scandal narratives represent the
truth, and that Rivella has revealed this truth at her own
cost.

Manley refuses to prove an easy target, however, for
those who would punish her. When she is questioned on the
charge of libel, she is pressed to disclose ‘from whom she
had received Information of some special Facts." Manley (as
Rivella) claims innocence through fiction: ‘Her Defence was
with much Humility and Sorrow, for having offended, at the
same Time denying that any Persons were concern'd with her,
or that she had a farther Design than writing for her own
Amusement and diversion in the Country; without intending
particular Reflections or Characters” (849). The court
thoroughly rejects this explanation, and Rivella replies
that it therefore must have been pure inspiration.
Catherine Gallagher has noted the shrewdness of Manley's
ploy: because she insist on the fiction of her work, she

forces her accusers to identify the real-life figures that

81

her characters signify. They ‘were thus tricked into
attaching the scandalous stories to the names of Whig
ministers, in a sense becoming parties to the libel.”32 The
fictional veneer of Manley’s scandal narrative, coupled with
the image that she presents of herself as an idle woman,
scribbling fantasy for her own entertainment is finally
sufficient to secure her release. Lovemore is incensed
that, despite ‘their heinous Offence, and the notorious
indiscretion of which they had been guilty” (851), Rivella
and her printer and publisher should be allowed by the law
to escape punishment. Is it, he wonders ruefully, because
the ‘Persons in Power were ashamed to bring a Woman to her
Trial for writing a few amorous Trifles purely for her own
Amusement, or that our Laws were defective, as most Persons
conceiv'd, because she had serv'd her self with Romantick
Names, and a feign'd Scene of Action?" (850). The
alternatives hinge on whether Manley is, or only affects the
appearance of, a non-political female author.

While in court Rivella manipulates these roles to
establish her innocence, and she offers Lovemore a more
complicated explanation of her scandal narratives. On the
one hand, she represents herself as a revealer of truth, a
patriotic woman who has placed the public good ahead of her

self-preservation:

she was proud of having more Courage than had any
of our Sex, and of throwing the first Stone, which
might give a Hint for other Persons of more
Capacity to examine the Defects, and Vices of some
Men who took a Delight to impose upon the World,

82

by the Pretence of Public Good, whilst their true
Design was only to gratify and advance themselves.
(845)

Manley then rebukes all the men who have failed to
write accounts of concealed, private actions among the
corrupt Whigs who lead England. The biblical phrase ‘to
throw the first stone” resonates here because Manley knows
full well that she is not ‘without sin," and that she will
meet with swift, retaliatory exposure. She has Lovemore
comment that ‘what is not a Crime in Men is scandalous and
unpardonable in Woman” (743); hence, Manley's assertion of
her courage. She suggests that she has risked the ire of
the most powerful members of society because men lack the
nerve to expose them, and has compounded that risk by
writing as a woman, a particularly vulnerable target for
their reprisal.

In the same speech, however, Manley also portrays her
scandal narratives not as the work of a political martyr but
as the result of peevishness and as the petty response of a

woman herself targeted by gossip:

all the World was out of Humour with her, and she
with all the World[. . .]. [S]he said she did no
more by others, than others had done by her (1121)
Tattle of Frailties; the Town had never shewn her
any Indulgence, but on the contrary reported ten
fold against her in Matters of which she was
wholly Innocent; wheras she did but take up old
Stories that all the World had long since reported
[. . .]. (845-46)

Manley both asserts and retreats from the political
importance of her writing, first by insisting that it is

devoted to the good of the nation, then by dismissing it as

83

mere gossip, ‘tattle" of others’ weaknesses that is prompted
only by their unfair reports of her frailties. The vital
disclosure of secret ambitions that imperil the public good
becomes the trifling trade of old stories long since
reported. Ihe_Neu1ALalanL1S, by this account, is not a
political document at all, but a purely personal settling of
scores. If Manley’s work demonstrates anything, however, it
is that this personal/political distinction simply does not
hold; Manley herself manipulates the ambiguities of these
categories in her text when she suggests that there is,
finally, no private space.

At the conclusion of Ihe_Adyentures_Qf_Riyella,
Lovemore exults in having finally convinced Rivella that
‘Politicks is not the Business of a Woman” (853). Her
agreement comes on purely pragmatic grounds: she consents to
the ‘Folly of a Woman's disobliging any one Party by a Pen
equally qualified to divert all” (852). Rivella, whom the
Tories fail to protect in return for her service, sees no
option but to retreat to the safer ground of ‘gentle
pleasing Theams" (853). Manley, however, staged no retreat:
she followed The_Nem1ALalantis with two more volumes in
1710, and was reputedly at work on a fifth volume at the
time of her death. Rivella is fearful to write without a
champion to shield her, but Riyella itself represents
Manley's intervention into the fray of gossip on her own
behalf. At the end of the text, she slips in, briefly yet

bluntly, an admission that ironizes all her many

84

justifications and explanations of her work: ‘Scandal
between Whig and Ier, goes for nothing” (855). Scandal
that goes for nothing is a most apt description of Riyella
itself, a scandal narrative that insists that the very
charges of scandal it makes do not matter. What Manley
shows in Ihe‘Adyentures_Qf_Riyella_is that she is able to
turn talk of her own frailties into a kind of capital for
her continued participation in the economy of gossip.
Manley's texts were, in her own day, prominent examples
of scandal writing, but they were part of a larger
counter-public sphere that used personal detraction to
negotiate public standing. The pervasiveness of scandal
writing did not lend it stature or full acceptance; its
association with the marketing of literature, as I will
explain in the next chapter, and its legal implications lent
it at best suspect status. Nevertheless, the cultural force
of scandal was such that it became a contested site; writers
used its discourse while shunning its label. This has
contributed to the largely unacknowledged scandalous nature

of high literary satire.

85

NOTES

1 Michael McKeon, Ihe_0r1g1ns_of_the_Eng11sh_Neye11
1000:1140 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987) 156. See also

Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘The Construction of Honour, Reputation
and Status in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth- Century
England,” Iransaet1ens_ef_the_Beyal_Hister1cal_See1ety 6
(1996): 201- 213; Laura Gowing, ‘Women, Status and the
Popular Culture of Dishonour,” Iransactiens_efi_the_Be¥al
H1sLQr1ga1_SQcieLy 6 (1996): 225— 34; David Turner, “Nothing

is so secret but shall be revealed: The Scandalous Life of

Robert Foulks,” Engl1sh_Masculinities1_1660;1800, ed. Tim
Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (New York: Longman, 1999)
169-92; J. A. Sharpe, Defamat1en_and_Sexual_Slander_1n_Early
Medern_Eng1and1_Ihe_Church_Ceurts_at_Yerk, (York: Borthwick
Papers, 1980); Mervyn James, English_2elities_and_the

Concent_ef_Henour1_1485:1642 (Oxford: Past and Present
Society, 1978).

2 Manley's veiling of her authorship is at the root of
a lack of critical consensus about how to approach The
Adventures_ef_Riyella. Criticism of the text falls
generally into two categories: that which describes Biyella
as ‘fictional autobiography,” thus emphasizing its status as
an account of Manley's life, and that which terms Riyella an
‘autobiographical novel,” thereby contextualizing the work
in the development of fiction in the early eighteenth
century. John Richetti and Janet Todd both approach the
text in the first manner. In Eepular_E1etien_Befere
R1chardsen1_NarratiMe_Eatterns1_1109:1139 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1969), Richetti argues that Manley' s scandal
narratives were politically important in their day, but that
they won lasting popularity as erotic fiction. Richetti's
consideration of Rivella is confined to a footnote, in which
he comments merely that it ‘is the only source for many of
the details of her life" (142, n. 1). In ‘Life After Sex:
The Fictional Autobiography of Delarivier Manley," HemenLS
Stud1es 15 (1988): 43-55, Janet Todd declares that the text
‘naughtily subverts" the conventions of stories about virtue
in distress and love betrayed when Manley converts her
infamy into authorship (50). Todd reads no ironic distance
between Manley and Rivella, however, and her treatment of
the text as autobiography makes the fictional apparatus seem
confusing and distracting: ‘In her fictional autobiography,
[. . . Manley] tells the life of Rivella, a literary
character who yet claims to have written Manley's works"
(44). This use of a fictional representative of a real
figure is, however, a stock practice in the scandal
narrative, and Manley's invention of ‘Rivella" is a cue to

86

approach the text as an example of that form.

Jean Kern, Lennard Davis and Fidelis Morgan read the
text primarily as fiction. In ‘The Fallen Woman, from the
Perspective of Five Early Eighteenth- Century Women
Novelists,” StudiestEighteenthientnrleultnre 10 (1981):
457- 68, Kern expresses a common discomfort with scandal as a
narrative mode when she write that ‘[t]wo of these novelists
[that she examines] are women who have often been dismissed
as sensational scandal mongers -- Mary Manley and Eliza
Haywood” (467). Kern thus views Riyelle as an

‘autobiographical novel" about how a ‘fallen woman can

suPport herself" (462) In W
Lhe_Eng11sh_Nde1 (New York: Colubmia UP, 1983), Davis
refers to Riyella simply as a ‘novel,” in which the main

character ‘is meant unambiguously to be Manley” (118).
Davis uses Rivella as an illustration for his assertions
about the voyeurism of ‘news/novel discourse" and the
eroticization of the reading process in the period (116).
Fidelis Morgan' 5

Qf_Mrs1_Man1ey (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) assembles
passages from W, W
and other sources, such as Manley' 3 plays and letters, to
produce an account of Manley's life. Morgan writes that
‘all of Mrs. Manley’s autobiographical writing was intended
to be read as fiction" (20). While Morgan is surely right
in observing that Manley did not intend Rivella to be read
as autobiography, the way in which Manley presents the work
suggests that she meant it to be received not as fiction but
as a scandal narrative.

There are only two references to Ihe1Adyentures_Qf
Biyella as a scandal narrative in the work of Manley's
critics. April London cites Rivella as a ‘veiled
autobiography in the form of a chmnigmeandalense” in
‘Placing the Female: The Metonymic Garden in Amatory and
Pious Narrative, 1700— 1740, ” Eetter_d_or_£ree1__Br1tish
Wemen_Neyelists1_1610:1815, ed. Mary Anne Scholfield and
Cecilia Macheski (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1986) 103. London
interprets this positioning of the text as Manley's implicit
acceptance of a connection between the content of her work
and her own sexual wantonness. This reading overlooks the
complexities of the narrative, which indicate that Manley is
contesting, not embracing, this connection.

The other reference comes in Catherine Gallagher's
‘Political Crimes and Fictonal Alibis: The Case of

Delarivier Manley” in her book, Nehedes_StQL¥1_Ihe

M . 1. E l E W H 'I . I] H 1 l J
1610:1020 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994). Gallagher

otherwise characterizes Rivella as fictional autobiography,
but in her final reference to the text, she notes that it

‘itself is an h1stg1re_scanda1euse” (137). She does not
discuss, however, the ways in which it functions as a

87

scandal narrative, nor why Manley might present her life’s
story in this mode.

3 Richetti, EQnn1ar_E1etien_Befere_Bichardsen, 120.

4 PaUla BaCkscheider, Spectacular_Eelit1cs1_Iheatrieal

Bower1and1Mass1Culture_1n_Early1Medern_England (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), 104-12.

5 Leo Braudy, Ihe_Erenzy_ef_Reneun1_Eame_and_Its
Histery, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1997), 348. The

period’s more sceptical attitude toward aristocratic
conceptions of honor is encapsulated in Bernard Mandeville's
observation that ‘[i]n great Families [honor] is like the
Gout, generally counted Hereditary, and all Lords Children
are born with it. ” Mandeville, ‘Remark R, ” Ihe_£ah1e_of_the

Bees1_er1_Er1Mate_Vices1_Euhliek_Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1924) l: 199.

6 Alexander Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock,” 3.165 in The
, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (London:
Methuen, 1962) 2: 181.

7 The1Neu1ALalanL1s, Fidelis Morgan writes, ‘was read
by everyone from lords, ladies and politicians to the lowest
country bumpkins” (20). Although this might overstate the
case, it is at least right in suggesting that Manley's work
enjoyed broad appeal.

8 The101ctienar¥_ef1Natiena1131egraphy, ed. Leslie
Stephen and Sidney Lee. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973),

12: 921.

9 Gallagher, NehedyLfi_SLQL¥I 131-

10 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gess1p (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1985), 33.

11 Todd, ‘Life After Sex: The Fictional Autobiography
of Delarivier Manley,” 53.

13 Manley prefaces her assault on the Marlboroughs in
Ihe_Nefl1ALalanL1s, for example, with the observation that
‘all will be managed in the new reign by their advice" (14).

13 For an interesting treatment of gender, political

pampleteering and the public/private distinction, see Leah
Price, ‘Vies Privées et Scandaleuses: Marie-Antoinette and

the Public Eye," The_E1ghteenth_Centur¥ 33 (1992):176-91.

M Manley's political contributions were not limited to

88

the scandal narrative; she also wrote pieces of propaganda
that were, as Ros Ballaster notes, indistinguishable from
those of her male counterparts. See Ballaster, Seductiye

Ebrms1_Wemen_s1Amator¥_Eictien_frem11684:1140 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1992) 121.

15 Clare Brant, ‘Speaking of Woman: Scandal and the Law
in the Mid- -Eighteenth Century,” in Women1_1ex151_and

Hifiteries11151521160, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 254.

16 Delariver Manley, Ihe_NewdAta1ant1s, ed. Ros
Ballaster (New York: Penguin, 1991), 14-15.

N Ballaster, Seductiye1EQLmS 128.

18 For a discussion of the equation drawn between
prostitution and publication in the eighteenth century, see
Catherine Gallagher, “Who Was that Masked Woman?’ The
Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra
Behn,” in Reread1ng_Aphra_Behn1_History1_Iheor¥1_and
Cr1t1eism_, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville: Univ. of
Virginia Press, 1993), 65— 85. Reprinted in NehedyLS_SLer.

19 See Ballaster, “A Genius for Love' : Sex as Politics
in Delarivier Manley's Scandal Fiction” in Seduct1ye_EQrms,
114-52.

20.Authorship has been attributed to Jonathan Swift,
but Donald F. Bond concludes that there is no firm evidence
in support of this conjecture (Taller, 434n).

21 The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon,
1987) 1:439-40.

22 John Wilson Bowyer notes a 1709 reference to
‘Scandalosissima Scoundrelia” as an allusion to Manley in
Ihe_Celebrated1Mrs1_Centliyre (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press,
1952), 152.

23.Edmund Curll, ‘To the Reader” in M1511Man1e¥LS
H1stery_ef_Her_Qun_Life_and_Times, 4th edn. (London, 1725).

Quoted in Ralph Straus, Ihe_0nspeakah1e_0nrl1 (New York:
Augustus M. Kelley, 1974), 44.

24 John Dunton describes Gildon as a ‘Whig Author” in
his L1£e_and_ELLQLS (London: J. Nichols, Son, and Bentley,
1818) 2: 784.

25 Straus, Unfipeakab1e_flurll, 44.

89

2“ Delarivier Manley, The_AdMentnres_ef_311ella1_er1
the_H1stQry_ef_the1Auther1ef_the_Atalan11s in The_NeMels_ef
0e1a1111er_Man1ey, ed. Patricia Koster (Gainesville,
Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1971), 2: 735.

27 William Warner argues that Manley ‘intrigues her
reader with a narrative which is structured to seduce the

reading body into pleasure. ” See Licensing1Enterta1nment1
The1E1eIat1en_ef_Neyel_Read1ng_1n_Brita1n1_1684:1150
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1998) 99.

‘” Ballaster, Seductiye_EQrms, 147—50.
29 See William, ed. Ballaster, 222-29.

30 Susanna Centlivre, Ihe_Maan_BemitchLd1_or1_Ihe
0e111_tQ_Do_ahQnt_Her (London, 1709). The prologue is
spoken by a male actor and was penned ‘by a Gentleman”; it
asserts the cultural authority of a man (Richard Steele, in
the form of Isaac Bickerstaff) to identify others' flaws,
while castigating that behavior in a woman (Manley). The
prologue begins:

Our Female Author trembling stands within,

Her Fear arises from another's Sin

One of her Sex has so abus'd the Town,

That on her Score she dreads your angry Frown.

Manley thus functions as a foil for Centlivre, whose

innocent intentions are proclaimed by disowning Manley’s
supposed vituperation.

1” Kathryn Shevelow, Wemen_and_Erint_Culture1_Ihe

Consiruetien_ef_Fem1n1n11y11n_the_Early_Periodical (New
York: Routledge, 1989), 97.

32 Gallagher, NobodyLs_SLer, 503-504.

90

CHAPTER THREE
INVENTING GRUB STREET: THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE AND THE

PROFESSION OF AUTHORSHIP

‘Whoever hath an ambition to be heard in a crowd,
must press, and squeeze, and threat, and climb
with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted
himself to a certain degree of altitude above
them."

Jonathan Swift, A1Iale_ef_a_Tuh1

The debate over scandal and satire was a debate over
what belongs in print; writers in the period were similarly
engaged with the question of who belongs in print. Both
debates sprang from a sense of dissolving cultural control
and authority.2 The developments in publication that
contributed to the bourgeois public sphere's emergence --
the proliferation of presses, the relaxation of constraints
on publication, the affordability of printed matter —-
destabilized authorship. Writing was now a commodity sold
in a literary market, authors could earn a living from their
work, and the text, with the passage of the 1709 Copyright
Act, was recognized as the author's creative property.3 The
professionalization of authorship made the author's cultural
status uncertain; writing's entry into the market, in some

eyes, threatened to turn authoring into just another form of

91

compensated labor. The figure of the working author is a
common one in early eighteenth-century writing, familiar to
us as the ‘Grub Street hack." The hack, I will argue, was
an invention of self-appointed literary elites, such as
Pope, Swift and Addison, a way of placing themselves outside
the market they sought to dominate by associating it
exclusively with the SO‘Called writer for hire. This figure
of the hack was invented to stigmatize the participation in
print culture of writers who were seen as unfit for the
authority publication implied; the formulation of the hack
challenges Habermas’s notion of the eighteenth-century
British public sphere as a space of open participation. The
emblematic product of the hack's intervention in the public .
sphere, furthermore, was scandal writing; together, the hack
and scandal were exiled from legitimacy in the sphere of
public exchange.

The story of the Grub Street hack, as we have come to
know it under the tutelage of canonical eighteenth-century
authors, is the story of intrusion, of uneducated,
lower-class individuals taking to writing when, with the
collapse of controls on publication, it became a means of
making money. It is, as Dustin Griffin has remarked, the
familiar narrative of a fall, the ‘Scriblerian myth of
corruption,” in which literature, the ‘province of learned
gentlemen” is overrun by ‘illiterate hacks thrusting up from
below.”4 The hack came to denote the diminishment of

literature by the corrupting influence of market forces and

92

the simple availability of publication. Thus, the hack
functioned as a concept through which to regulate not just
authorship but the public sphere itself, a constraining
stigma on the form and source of public discourse.

Grub Street was an actual street in London near
Moorfields and Bedlam, where many struggling writers did in
fact live. ‘Grub Street” as a term for commercial writing
was first used in 1630 by poet John Taylor, and gained
currency during the Civil War, when the vying factions hired
writers to work as pamphleteers. It was a common phrase by
the time of the Restoration, ‘when the professional writer
became a familiar part of society.”5 The physical reality
of Grub Street is the premise of hackdom's most extensive
chronicle, Pat Rogers's GLuh_SLIeeI1_Studiea_1n_a_fiuh£u11ure
(1972). Rogers argues that an understanding of the hack's
actual conditions is necessary to appreciate fully the
canonical satire of Pope and Swift, and to comprehend the
imaginative power that the metaphor of Grub Street exercised
over them. Rogers's literalist treatment of this metaphor,
however, while providing useful information about the
history of Grub Street the place, never questions, and
consequently reinforces the distinction between hacks and
literary writers. Rogers positions himself against critics
who have argued that the hack writers -- ‘the victims of

Augustan satire” —— are inconsequential:
I shall contend that it 15 profitable to adopt, at

least for a moment, the Dunce's eye View. By
studying the victim in his natural habitat, we do

93

gain considerable insight into the procedures and
motivation of the satirist. By taking seriously
the replies which the hack made to Swift, for
instance, we may often find out more about the
Dean's intentions than if we restricted ourselves
to the presuppositions of Renaissance humanism, or
the dennées of Anglican rationalism. It is, apart
from anything else, a favourite device of the
Scriblerian party to beat down an opponent with
his own weapon. Footling writers the Dunces may
have been -- many certainly were -- but their
existence was no footling thing for the course of
English satire.6

Rogers's supposition that the hack is an empirical
phenomenon to be studied in his ‘natural habitat” and his
insistence that he has worked to give only a history of the
hack, to ‘present a world,” while ‘not engaging in the
theory of literature" (14-15) has dated his book. For the
hack Rogers puts under the microscope is an imaginative
construct, a metaphor for what authorship should not be.
That flesh and blood authors were subsumed by this
construction to the point that Rogers could take such a
naively empirical approach emphasizes rather than
contradicts its imaginative force.

Authorship was at an uncertain moment in its history in
the early eighteenth century because the author's relation
to the emergent marketplace was unestablished. In the
balance was the cultural stature authors could maintain if
writing were to be recognized as paid labor and the status
of being published were generally accessible. The
professionalization of authorship, which emerged with the
literary market, was a source of contention, as particular

writers sought to reconcile exclusivity with the commercial

94

conditions of writing.7 The development of the market
system was in part the result of political upheaval in the
seventeenth century. In response to the Long Parliament and
the Civil War, opposing factions used pamphleteering to
enlist support. The pamphlets of the Civil War set a
pattern that would define early print culture: each
publication tended to ‘provoke one or more hostile
retorts.”8 Patronage was the receding model of literary
dissemination, by which the imprimatur of the patron was the
point of access to publication; in exchange for the honor
and status they accrued through their association with the
work, patrons provided authors with social and material
reward.9 The market system took away this gatekeeping
function performed by the patron, installing instead the
bookseller as the point of access to publication.10
Booksellers mediated between authors and the public,
deciding what to publish on the basis of what they could
expect to sell. The focus of publication thus shifted from
the patron's approval to the public's -- an emergent reading
public which, some felt, lacked standards of judgment and to
whose pleasure authors would cater. These combined
attitudes -- that the author is now unfavorably beholden to
public approval and that the market determines literary
success -- are concisely expressed in Pope's Art_ef_fiinking
1n_EQetry, where he declares that the ‘true Design" of
modern authors is ‘Profit or Gain; in order to acquire

which, ‘tis necessary to procure Applause, by administering

95

E1easure to the Reader: From whence it follows demonstrably,
that their Productions must be suited to the present
Taste.”11

The market represents the loss of traditional cultural
authority and, while periodicals such as the Iatler and
SpectaLQr worked to shape ‘present Taste,” opponents of the
market system saw the availability of print, combined with
the lure of profit, as outstripping such efforts.12 A.1736
illustration from the Grnb_fitreet_leu£na1 (no. 147) conveys
the resulting sense of cultural disorder. In a three-part
engraving, titled “The Art and Mystery of Printing
Emblematically Displayed,” the viewer sees the various
stages of the printing process performed by a series of
grotesque creatures.13 In the first panel, an ass assembles
the type; in the second, an assortment of animals print the
pages; and in the final panel, a devil hangs the printed
pages -- prominently titled Cases_ef_lmpeieney -- to dry.
The illustration suggests a publishing world turned upside
down, in the hands of those least likely to exercise
judgment or to act on behalf of the public good. In the
example it affords of a published text (Cases_ef_1mpetency),
furthermore, the illustration intimates the supposed
tendency of unregulated publication to produce scandal
writing. Scandal discourse is positioned as a sort of
lowest common denominator, at which the uneducated body of

authors and the unschooled reading public can converge.

96

Fears of cultural disorder -- which find their
consummate expression in Pope's Dune1ad -- were fostered by
actual diminution in legal control over publication. When
Parliament allowed the 1662 Licensing Act to lapse in 1695,
it eliminated pre-publication censorship and restrictions on
the quantity of master-printers and legal printing
presses.14 The quantity of published printed matter
increased and this proliferation alarmed those who favored
more restrictions on access to print. Mark Rose has argued
that Parliament's decision not to renew the Licensing Act
was recognition of the market’s dominion over publication.15
While Parliament was prepared for literature's absorption
into the market economy, however, not all authors shared
that equanimity. The literary marketplace made the writer's
work a commodity. This self-evident observation underlies
much of the anxiety about print culture and the public
sphere that provided the impetus for creation of the hack.16

While we need to look at the hack as a constructed
image of commodified authorship and to recognize that
published writers in this period were all participants in
the market, there is nevertheless a useful distinction to be
made between two kinds of authors: those who resisted the
market and those who did not.17 The former group, including
Pope, Addison, and Swift present themselves as specifically
literary writers, writing within a classical tradition for
purposes that transcend market interests. Swift and Pope,

as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White point out, perceive the

97

market as a grotesque that must be contained in the name of

a refined public sphere:

Swift and Pope perpetually identify the scene
of writing with the fairground and the carnival
and in both writers the festive repertoire is
satirically deformed by the vicious competitive
circumstances of the literary market. The
‘marketplace' has become ‘the market' and the
individual aspiring poets denigrate each other by
trying to associate eleryene else with the
vulgarity of the fair whilst repudiating any
connection which they themselves might have with
such a world.18

In fact, though, Stallybrass and White are describing a
fairly constricted circle of authors who were in any
position to repudiate this connection. The latter group are
most familiar to us through their characterization by the
first set; they do not resist writing as a form of labor and
as such are portrayed as corrupt, mercenary authors. In
many cases, we know them best as the dunces of the Duneiad.
Among them are Ned Ward, John Oldmixon, John Dennis, Charles
Gildon, Eliza Haywood, Manley, Colley Cibber, and John
Duckett. There prominently, too, is Daniel Defoe who, in
his Yind12a110n1211the121e55 (1718), defends writing as a
form of work and sympathetically portrays the concerns of
authors most dependent on their own labor: ‘It is a
Misfortune to Authors both in Prose and Verse who are
reduc'd to the Necessity of constant writing for
Subsistence, that the numerous Performances, publish'd by
them, cannot possibly be so correct as they might be, could
more Time be afforded in the Composure.”19 The hurried

composition Defoe here describes is a product of the

98

marketplace; the aristocratic tradition of letters, in which
writing is the culmination of education and is pursued at
leisure, has a different relationship to time.20 Defoe,
however, defends writing as paid work: booksellers and
authors ‘should be permitted the Liberty of Writing and
Printing of either [political] Side for Bread, free from
Ignominy; and as getting Money is the chief Business of the
World, so these Measures cannot by any means be esteem’d
Unjust or Disreputable, with regard to the several Ways of
accumulating Wealth, introduc'd in Exchange;A11ey, and at
the other End of the Town” (21).21

While Defoe defends writing as a legitimately
compensated form of work, those who resist the market depict
paid writing as disreputable. Behind the distaste for
writing for money was the conviction that compensation could
only compromise the author.22 .As John Brewer has explained,
‘Literature for profit could not be unsullied and unbiased;
tainted with lucre, it became a hideous grotesque --
distorted, partial and blind.”23 If the new literary market
was driven by writing for profit, then that market was
inherently suspect and the bulk of exchange within print
culture fell outside the bounds of literary worth. This is
precisely the stance taken by Pope and Swift, who express
overt hostility to the eighteenth century’s proliferation of
print, which figures in their writing as a culturally

destructive torrent.24

99

In his Ia1e1Q£_a_Iub, Swift links the volume of
publication and authors with the ephemerality of their
works. His narrator, one of the ‘Grub Street brotherhood”
(38), dedicates his text to ‘Prince Posterity” and puzzles
over the flickering existence of their collective texts:
time’s ‘inveterate malice is such to the writings of our
age, that of several thousands produced yearly from this
renowned city, before the next revolution of the sun, there
is not one to be heard of [. . .1” (20). In the ‘Martin
Scriblerus” preface to the Dunciad_yarierum, Pope writes
that the ‘occasion and the cause which moved our Poet to
this particular work” is that he ‘lived in those days, when
(after providence had permitted the Invention of Printing as
a Scourge for the Sins of the learned) Paper also became so
cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors
cover’d the land.”25 Pope proposes to his readers that the
expansion of authorship is a threatening development;
indeed, he goes on to take up the cause of the ‘honest
unwriting subject” whose peace was not only ‘daily molested,
but unmerciful demands were made of his applause, yea of his
money, by such as would neither earn the one or deserve the
other” (49). Pope envisions a public sphere invaded by
inept writers who -- by their very participation -— diminish
and pollute that sphere; the non-participant, the ‘unwriting
subject” is the hero here. The occasion of Pope's Duneiad,
in other words, is resistance to precisely the open,

participatory public sphere Jurgen Habermas locates in

100

eighteenth-century Britain and of which he cites the Duneiad
itself as evidence.

The print culture that Habermas sees as necessary to
the functioning of the public sphere was, for
contemporaries, disruptive of it.26 Print, Habermas
suggests, is a device for addressing a broad, necessarily
inclusive public sphere. But this participatory public
sphere can also be construed as such a variety of print
voices that there is no recognized body of authority; print,
rather than being a vehicle for critical-rational consensus,
becomes a device of faction. The proliferation of print is
itself antithetical to meaningful critical-rational debate,
Swift suggests in his Tale_ef_a_Iub127 Instead of print
culture serving the rational public sphere, in the eyes of
eighteenth-century figures such as Pope and Swift, it
actually undermines it. When Pope praises the ‘honest,
unwriting subject,” he endorses a model of literary culture
in which certain sanctioned authors produce the texts
received by a passive reading public. The literary market,
however, was propelling print culture in a different
direction, one in which publications elicited and provoked
response, in which readers were also writers and in which
the standard for participation was interest on the part of a
bookseller. The so-called hacks' participation in print
culture thus represents to Swift and Pope the loss of
literary authority rather than only its redistribution. The

hack is a result and force of disorder, as echoed in the

101

repeated image of the literary marketplace engulfed in an
almost nauseating proliferation of writing that finally, in
Book IV of Pope’s Dunciad, overwhelms and destroys
civilization.

The early eighteenth century is shot through with
references to the ‘scribling itch,” an image that explicitly
links participation in print culture with a lack of control;
the impulsiveness that Pope and Swift locate in the market
becomes a force within the writer's own person. In ‘On
Poetry: A Rhapsody” (1733), Swift explains how to
‘distinguish, which is which, / the Poet's Vein or scribling
Itch” (73-74).28 .Addison inveighs against ‘a certain
Distemper [. . .] as Epidemical as the Small-Pox": the ‘Itch
of Writing.” In the consequently voluminous ‘Species of
Scriblers," Addison sees a lamentable perversion of
printing's promise: ‘It is a melancholy thing to consider
that the Art of Printing, which might be the greatest
Blessing to Mankind, should prove detrimental to us, and
that it should be made use of to scatter Prejudice and
Ignorance through People, instead of conveying to them Truth
and Knowledge.”29 When the power of public discourse is
available to all, Addison maintains, the quality of exchange
falls and public life as a whole is diminished. Addison's
lament for print as a means of serving the public good is at
the same time a gesture of self—promotion: as one capable of
recognizing ‘Prejudice and Ignorance," his comment implies,

he can put print to its proper use. Participation threatens

102

authority and distinction; implicit in Addison's complaint
is the notion that the power of publication has fallen into
the wrong hands.

The relationship between literary authority and the
construction of the hack is illuminated by Marlon Ross's
perceptive study of print and authorship. Ross examines
this sense of misplaced authority, and rightly sees in it a
self-authorizing impulse on the part of the Scriblerians.

He refers to a distinction between writers and authors that
is at the brink of erasure in the eighteenth century:
‘Scriblerians, fearful of losing the cultural distinction
between [. . .] false authority and authentic authority, set
out to keep this distinction intact.”30 From the time of
scribal culture, Ross argues, legibility signified
importance and was devoted to writing that should be
accessible to more than just its creator. Print ‘solidifies
and intensifies the difference” between private ‘scribbling”
and publicly relevant, shareable text. At the same time
that print heightens the difference between the legible and
illegible, the public and the private word, its very
accessibility threatens through dilution the authority it
connotes. Can print carry the same value of authority when
it is available to all writers? The problem, as Ross
suggests, becomes even more complex because print, formerly

connoting authority, begins to confer it:
At first, uniform script is the effect of

authority, not the cause of it. But as print
gains ascendancy, this relation is reversed.

103

Originally, to be an authority is to be scripted.
But with time, to be printed is to be an
authority. Early eighteenth-century writers are
caught in the swivel moment of this process of
reversal, not only when print begins to give the
stamp of authority, but also when authority begins
to become fragmented by the possessibility of
private knowledge. (236-37)

Print confers authority on material as publicly
relevant, but ‘false authority” is easily confused with the
‘authentic authority of that which is printed because it
commands our attention” (237). Traditional authors such as
Pope, Swift and Dryden distill in their figure of the hack
this sense of false authority; the very conception of false
authority, furthermore, repudiates the direction in which
print culture was developing, as participation was valued
over privilege. This earlier understanding of print as an
exceptional form of discourse was implicit in the law’s
deeming libel a separate and more serious crime than
slander.31 .As print became more available, it also became
less authoritative, a change that reflected and encouraged
the discursive nature of eighteenth-century print culture.32
Scandal writing was a product of this changing conception of
print. As an emblem of the new conditions of publication,
it was closely associated with the Grub Street hack; scandal
and the hack became tightly bound together, one a form
without literary standing, the other a writer without
literary authority.

The most influential text, of course, in establishing

the figure of the hack is Pope's Dunc1ad. It is, on one

104

hand -- as I will examine in the next chapter -- Pope's
catalog of personal invective against other writers; on the
other, it is an elaborately conceived screed against the
print culture of which it is itself an emblematic product.33
The targets of his satire are the ‘dunces,” those
representatives of commodified literature who signify the
collapse, Pope contends, of cultural value. The intensity
of Pope's interest in his subject is attested to by the
poem's varied manifestations. Pope published the Dunc1ad
first in 1728, as a three-book poem; in 1729, he published
the Dnnciad11arierum, in which he expands his attacks on the
dunces through extensive, mock-scholarly notes. In 1742,
Pope returned to the Duneiad yet again, publishing a fourth
book, a kind of grand finale, in which the ascendancy of the
goddess Dulness envelops civilization in darkness and chaos.
In 1743, Pope republished the entire work as the Dunciad11n
EQuL_BQka and substituted Colley Cibber for Lewis Theobald
as king of the dunces. POpe had long nursed a sense of
personal and professional pique against Cibber and many of
the other figures in the poem, and he memorably avenged his
grievance in a poem that vilified writers inhabiting the new
publishing world and the scandal that characterized it --
even as the poem itself participated in both.

The_Dnnc1ad opens with the imputation that popular
culture has invaded the territory of elite endeavor: Colley
Cibber ‘brings / Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings.”34

In the variorum notes, Pope explains that the amusements of

105

the Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield, ‘formerly agreeable only
to the Taste of the Rabble, were, by the Hero of this Poem
and others of equal Genius, brought to the Theaters [. . .]
to be the reigning Pleasures of the Court and Town” (01 I:
n2).35 The opening lines set the stage for the poem, in
which literature has been seized by dunces. The action of
the poem is the effort by the goddess Dulness, ‘Daughter of
Chaos and Eternal Night” (I: 12) to reclaim the power she
held in pre-literate times. The hacks, or dunces, are the
agents of that reassertion. Within Bedlam, the famed London
madhouse, ‘[o]ne Cell there is, conceal'd from vulgar eye, /
The Cave of Poverty and Poetry” (I: 33-34). From it issue
the literary effluvia that Pope attributes to his age:
‘Journals, Medleys, Merc'ries, Magazines" and ‘all the Grub
Street race” (I: 42-43).

As the poem proceeds through the four books of its
final version, the dunces celebrate their king's
enthronement with games that enact Pope's characterizations
of the literary market: booksellers chase down the chimera
of a poet; authors vie in competitions of flattering
patrons, creating noise and diving through mud. The sound
of the dunces is a meaningless clamor:

Now thousand tongues are heard in one loud din:
The Monkey-mimicks rush discordant in;
‘Twas chatt'ring, grinning, mouthing, jabb'ring
all. (II: 235-37)
The voices of print culture, Pope asserts, are a nonsensical

jumble, aping the writing of legitimate literary authority

106

that he locates in his own text.
When Dulness takes the king to her temple and casts in
Jr1gis mind's eye a vision of Britain under her sway, she

(:zcanjures up Grub Street:

What aids, what armies to assert her cause!
See all her progeny, illustrious sight!
Behold, and count them, as they rise to light.
As Berecynthia, while her offspring vye

In homage to the Mother of the sky,

Surveys around her, in the blest abode,

An hundred sons, and ev'ry son a God:

Not with less glory mighty Dulness crown'd,
Shall take thro' Grub-street her triumphant round;
And her Parnassus glancing o’er at once,
Behold an hundred sons, and each a Dunce.

(III: 128-38)
IPCDIpe thus configures the Grub Street hacks as a multitude,
earl army of dunces who threaten to vitiate England's cultural
J.j_jEe; the imagery of the dangerous mass is a sharp
<2c>11nterpoint to the public sphere as a space that is, at
Ileeaast theoretically, open to all.

A cluster of qualities gathered around the image of the
1'l‘c‘itczk: lower—class origins, desire for profit driven by
(fleetsperate circumstances, readiness to libel to relieve these
Clircumstances, literary ignorance, and an affinity for the
nuaarket. This convergence of characteristics is memorably
E31.1ggestedin Richard Savage’s 1729 pamphlet, An1Auther_Ie_be
IQEELL. Savage, the source of much of the personal
1Information about fellow writers that his friend Pope
Eafitploited in the Dune1ad, depicts an archetypal hack, the
tleellingly-named Iscariot Hackney. The pamphlet advertises

I“Lackney’s availability for hire; to establish his

107

(:Lredentials, he provides an autobiographical sketch: ‘when
my Mother was pregnant of me, she was delivered of a
jpakonster. It was observed also, at the time of my Birth,
-t;]nat a Weezle was heard to shriek; and a Bat (tho' at Noon
1:)21y) flew into the Roome, and settled upon the Midwife's
tfirjrist, just as she received me.”36 Behind Savage's fantasy
.j.ss a more genuinely argued sense of disturbed order. The
bat at noon that heralds the infant Iscariot Hackney's
aatrfirival parallels Savage's own sense of outraged harmony,
vvlleen he describes in the preface the intrusion of
ll<>tder-class individuals into the upper-class realm of

authorship:

Most of the Persons are of very low Parentage, and
without any Pretence of Merit, are aspiring to the
Rank of Gentlemen. Thus they become ill
Oeconomists, Poverty is the Consequence of ill
Oeconomy, and dirty Tricks the Consequence of
their Poverty. Tho’ they are sad Writers, they
might have been good Mechanicks, and therefore by
endeavouring to shine in Spheres, to which they
are unequal, are guilty of depriving the Publick
of many that might have been its useful Members.
(ii)
3:11. fact, as Pat Rogers has shown, most of those labeled
1"lacks were not members of the lower class; the majority were
frommiddle-class families, ‘the WASPs, as it were, of that
Eilra" (281). Savage, however, implies that the privileged
Status of authorship is coveted by men and women trying to
eaEscape poverty. Their effort is misguided, he maintains,
:kDEecause their basic unfitness for authorship predetermines
tllueir failure, so that the poverty they are fleeing through

Eauthorship is in fact perpetuated by their work as authors.

108

(Ifhis is an opinion Pope also voices, asserting that the
“<dull and malicious” writers of his day were created by

“ 2111115355 and Royerfy; the one born with them, the other
<::<ontracted, by neglect of their proper talent thro'
.55431feconceit of greater abilities” (D! 50). Their
IIIgaliciousness is a product of their desperation; the scandal
xxrlriting that embodies this maliciousness is a symptom of the
vvcrwong people participating in public discourse. Savage does
r1c>1: see the expansion of publication as extending the
k>c>11ndaries of who can be an author; rather, he works to
c:c>11vince his readers that those boundaries are inviolable.
Stiles attempted evasion of these limitations, he contends, is
{Deejrsonally detrimental to the authors, who cannot prosper,
Eirlcfl to the public, which is denied the useful work the
VV1::iters would otherwise be doing. An anonymous poem of
1'7133, ‘The Art of Scribling, Address'd to All the Scriblers
C315 'the.Age,” expresses a similar view. The poet first

Situates writing and trade antithetically:

I can’t endure, though ten times better paid,
To exercise my true Profession -- Trade;

Like all my Tribe, my proper Sphere I scorn,
Business I hate -- I was a Scribler born.37

I“lacks, the poet suggests, reduce writing to an easy form of
C3<3mpensated labor; seeking to escape their ‘proper Sphere"

(DZE work by authoring, they instead devalue authoring into a

form of work:
Besides, the Truth to speak, I'm lazy too,
And can't endure corporeal Work to do;

And though by writing, I live very ill,
One Good I find -- ‘tis done by sitting still.

109

I own for Learning, I have none at all;

As little Wit -- but I've an inward Call;
And what need proper Parts, or Education,

To those that have a scribling Inclination?38

trfihe poet’s mocking reference to an ‘inward call” alludes to
‘t;11e Dissenters' view that such a call authorizes one to
:Ejureach, a conception of authority that runs against the
c:111turally dominant model endorsed by the Church of England.

'ITIie hack is a character of absurdity in the poem, driven to

‘Vchite by the most pragmatic impulses -- compelled to work,
1163 chooses an endeavor that appeals to his laziness for the
13:11mp1e reason that he is blind to its intellectual demands.
‘The hack” can be neatly captured in the poem's speaker
(>1: in Savage’s Iscariot Hackney because it is an imaginative

I>Jr<3jection into which actual authors were absorbed. This

Cllleality of abstraction is key. The reader's conviction that

t:ln;is ‘Grub Street race” poses the dangers Pope claims for
thL, for example, depends on a belief in duncehood as he
CZCDIijures it. It is the swarming of the dunces in the poem
iinto an undifferentiated mass of literary incompetence and
‘Tean1al motives, Brean Hammond has argued, that holds the
IDCDem.together; once we consider them as individuals,
Citiscovering their range of abilities and the varied nature

(DIE their texts, we begin to question Pope's characterization

Eilnd ‘so the garment of duncehood unravels.”39 Hammond’s
Sense of duncehood’s fragility turns on the spectrum of
ilialent that Pope groups together as dunces; but the simple

ESplit that Pope assumes between, as Ross articulates it,

110

false and authentic authority, relies on a dichotomous
understanding of literary value.40 The hacks are
necessarily an undifferentiated group because the idea of
the hack was developed to embody the illegitimacy in
contrast to which the legitimate announces itself.41 The
issue of the distinction between satire and libel is
analogous; writers such as Pope employ the tactics of libel
while maintaining that their texts are not libelous.‘12 The
libel becomes that against which satire defines itself,
burying and reburying the ambiguities that threaten

di stinction.

William Warner, in his discussion of the elevation of
novel reading, makes an argument that applies, too, to the
Situation of the author: ‘The success of the elevated novel
in the 17405 [. . .] pushes the early novels of Behn,
Manley, and Haywood into the margins of literary histories,
where they nonetheless never quite disappear, but serve
instead as an abject trace or degraded ‘other' needed to
Secure the identity of the ‘real' (that is, legitimate)
I'1c3Vel.”43 Authors such as Pope and Swift used the idea of
the hack to reassert their own dominance over the growing
Itlass of print culture. The Grub Street hack is at once
discredited as a source of literary value and put forward to
eI‘uphasize the importance of that value. The hack's degraded
Status is made clear in the parasitic imagery frequently
used to describe it.44 Addison, for example,

philosophically reasons that ‘every nobler Creature is as it

111

tarere the Basis and Support of Multitudes that are his

_j.nferiors."

This Consideration very much comforts me, when I
think on those numberless Vermin that feed upon
this Paper, and find their Sustenance out of it: I
mean, the small Wits and Scribblers that every Day
turn a Penny by nibbling at my Lucubrations. This
has been so advantageous to this little Species of
Writers that, if they do me Justice, I may expect
to have my Statue erected in Gruhzfitreet, as being
a common Benefactor to that Quarter.45
1?11e host is primary in the parasitic relationship; it is the
ssc>urce of that which is coveted by the parasite, and so the
:Lxruagery captures the hierarchical relation authors such as
chirdison perceive between themselves and other writers. This
:iIrLagery is also an ironic choice because, as I have above
ESIJJggeSted, the status of legitimate author is dependent on
t:}1<a figure of the hack for its (negative) expression.
The notion of the beset author in print culture is also

Eixrticulated by Swift, who claims an imperiled position that

1.55 itself an assertion of primacy:

[. . .] ev'ry Critick can devour

My Work and me in half an Hour.

Would Men of Genius cease to write,

The Rogues must dye for Want and Spight,
Must dye for Want of Food and Rayment,
If Scandal did not find them Payment.46

The economic vulnerability that is built into the
<2<Jnception of the hack becomes the explanation for venial
1~1terary production, as Pope notes when he writes that
“ [o]ur indulgent Poet, whenever he has spoken of any dirty

C31 low work constantly puts us in mind of the Poverty of the

Cfoenders, as the only extenuation of such practices" (0!

112

j:I.n270). Swift characterizes the legitimate author as a
3:10n-complicit provider for the hacks, who feed parasitically
(:>ff his reputation; their financial wants makes them
;zreceptive to libel. In this way, libel is construed as the
eauffect of allowing individuals unsuited to authorship to
t:£ake part in print culture, a point Richard Savage makes
eascplicitly: ‘Should not R-ch—rd M—r—l-y rather have been
blacking Shoes at the Corner of Streets (to which, it is
vveall known, his industrious, and more prudent Younger
E31rcmher submitted) than black’ning Reputations in the
WW and W?" (An
251J;thor_tg_he_Lett iii). In contrast to the proclaimed
E>111311c-spiritedness of the personal satirist, the libeler,
Savage contends, is motivated by misguided ambition and
Sheer indifference to others, a sadism he highlights in

I scariot Hackney:

I was fond of tearing away the Legs and Wings of
Flies, of picking out the Eyes of some little
Bird, or laming some favourite Lap-Dog, merely by
way of Amusement. This was only a Sign, that one
time or other I should have 111- -nature enough for

a g;eaL_fl1L. Now I understand to be a great_fl1t
is to take a Pleasure in giving every Body Pain,
and to shew no Mercy to a Reputation, which is
dearer to some Fools than perhaps a Limb, or an
Eye. (2)

Disregard for reputation is, in Swift’s writing,
<Ciharacteristic of the public sphere in his day. Publicity
‘Vvas transformed by print culture, he suggests, as it fell
jrnto the hands of writers prepared to exploit publicity for

tlheir own gain. As Dustin Griffin observes, the Scriblerian

113

View was that ‘[l]iberty of the press had degenerated into
licentiousness and libel.”47 Pope attributes libel to
freedom of printing, stating that ‘Liberty of the Press was
so unlimited, that it grew dangerous to refuse [scriblers]

either [applause or money]: For they would forthwith publish

slanders unpunish'd [. .] .”43 Pope valorizes his public

revelation of private flaws when he justifies himself as a
‘ satirist,” as I will discuss in the next chapter; in the

hands of writers who improperly crave public attention, Pope

maintains, such exposure is denigrated to a mere device for

securing this notice.

Swift imagines his own vulnerability to the hacks in
‘Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," where he describes his

reputation besieged by an eager Grub Street:

Now Grub-Street Wits are all employ'd;
With Elegies, the Town is cloyed:
Some Paragraph in ev'ry Paper,

To curse the Dean, or bless the Drapier.
(165-68)49

He is helpless to intervene on his own behalf. The

‘ Scriblers of the prevailing Party," Swift explains in a
footnote, ‘which he always opposed, will libel him after his
Death" (n.168) . Death silences Swift, allowing others to
represent him without his response; his inability to write
for himself leaves him defenseless before the machinery of
public representation. His death, he suggests, will
O(:casion a public appropriation of his life by the

unscrupulous publishers and hacks who will seize on its

Ihoney-making possibilities:

114

Now Curl his Shop from Rubbish drains;
Three genuine Tomes of Swift's Remains.
And then to make them pass the glibber,
Revis'd by Iihbalds, Meere, and Cibber.
He'll treat me as he does my Betters.
Publish my Will, my Life, my Letters.
Revive the Libels born to dye;
Which Pope must bear, as well as I. (197—204)

savvift positions himself and Pope as the victims of a
JL:ibelous print culture; they endure, rather than participate
j_11, scandalous exchange. The question of how to cope with
1.11bel occupies Swift in the ‘Delany” poems, ‘To Dr. Delany
c>r1 the Libels Writ against him” and ‘To a Friend who had
been much abused in many inveterate Libels.” Swift demands
C>If tds friend, ‘What's to be done? shall wit and learning
czkuxose, / To live obscure and have no fame to lose?”50 The
earuxjurance of libel, Swift implies, is the price to be paid
1.11. coming forward to battle for the sake of public
Cij.scourse. The cost of evading those libels is an obscurity
tiriat cedes the public sphere to detractive exchange and
C>tiher writing unworthy of print. Like Pope, Swift relies on
tilie imagery of a swarm that simultaneously suggests the

(Zliltural threat posed by the hacks and their personal

lixiconsequence:

Shew me the same numerick Flea,
That bit your Neck but Yesterday,
You then may boldly go in Quest
To find the Grub-Street Poet's Nest.51
IJibel writing becomes, in Swift's treatment, the price that
glemuine literary authority must bear in the new print

CZ‘ulture, and against which it must struggle to ensure that

tlhe values of Grub Street do not become the values of

115

literary culture. Swift defines himself and those deemed
fellow-writers in their opposition to the hack, an
opposition both relational and active.

Scandal writing thus functions to the Grub Street
hack's inventors as an indicator of the pUblic sphere's
corruption by market forces and a device through which to
advance their call for an exclusive conception of
authorship. Scandal writing and the hack are mutually
reinforcing concepts: publication of scandal writing lowers
the standard for public discourse, thus drawing more hack
writers into the print culture through the lure of easy
libels, which in turn pour into the market in ever—greater
quantities. Scandal and the hacks are, by this account,
both prevailing currents within print culture and yet of
neglible significance. Unsurprisingly, as I will
investigate in the next chapter, the individuals designated
as hacks resisted this picture, reinscribing self-excused

authors such as Pope within the context of scandal writing.

116

NOTES

1 Jonathan Swift, A11ale_ef_a_Tuh in The_Prese_Werks of
Jenathan_5m1fit, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1939) 1: 33.

2 The issue of authority was of broad concern in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England; as Earl Miner
has commented, ‘[t]he interfusion of literature, religion,
politics, social organization and economics in the
[seventeenth] century made proper authority a revolutionary
issue of the state of letters as well as politics." Miner,
‘Introduction,” L1terary_Transm1ss1on1and1Auther11y1_Dryden
and101her_flriters, ed. Earl Miner and Jennifer Brady
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 1.

3 For discussion of the Copyright Act, see Mark Rose,

Authors_and_0wners11Ihe_Inyentien_ef_Cepyr1ght (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1993) 42- 49.

4 Dustin Griffin, ‘Fictions of Eighteenth- Century
Authorship,” Essays_1n_Critieism.43 (1993): 182

5 Philip Pinkus, Grub.Street_Striand_Bare (Hamden, CT:
Archon, 1968) 13, n.1.

6 Pat Rogers, Gruh_Street1_Studies11n_a_Subeulture
(London: Methuen, 1972) 3.

7 The notion of the ‘professional” writer is itself
ambiguous. Brean Hammond, for instance, argues that
‘self—crowned laureates” (including Dryden, Pope and Gay)
presented writing as a fundamentally anti-professional
activity, even while benefiting from the conditions of the
marketplace. While Hammond suggests that privileged authors
treated professionalism as a corruption of authorship, Linda
Zionkowski contends that they used professionalism as a tool
of exclusivity, a ranking of work that placed writing beyond
the bounds of lesser forms of labor. In this way, the
professionalism of writing becomes an extension of class
distinctions. See Hammond, Brefess1onal_lmag1natiye_Writing

- ' ” (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1997); and Zionkowski, ‘Territorial Disputes in
the Republic of Letters: Canon Formation and the Literary
Profession,” E1ghteenth_Century_Iheery_and_1nterpretatien 31
(1990): 3- 22 and ‘Strategies of Containment: Stephen Duck,
Ann Yearsley and the Problem of Polite Culture,”
Eighteenth2Century_Life 13 (1989): 91-108. Background on

writing and professionalism in England can be found in
Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan_England1_Professiens1_State_and

117

Socie1¥111§80:1110 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982).

8 Alexandre Beljame, Men_ef1Letters_and_the_English
Eubl1c_1n_the_E1ghteenth_Century1_1660;11441_0ryden1
Add1sen1_2ope,, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, trans. E. O. Lorimer, lst
English ed. (1881; London: Keegan Paul, 1948) 155.

9 Paul Korshin, ‘Types of Eighteenth- Century Literary
Patronage,” E1ghteenth:£entury.&tud1es 7 (1974): 453-69.

Also on patronage, see A. S. Collins, Authership_1n_the_DayS
Qf_JthsQn (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929) and J. W.

Saunders, The_Erefession_of_Eng11sh1Letters (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).

10 For discussion of the new commercial conditions of
writing, see, for example: Terry Belanger, ‘Publishers and
Writers in Eighteenth-Century England," Beeks_and_the11

' ' - , ed. Isabel Rivers
(New York: St. Martin's, 1982) 5—26; Deborah D. Rogers, ‘The
Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century English Literature,”
CLLQ 18 (1989): 171-78; John Feather, ‘The Commerce of
Letters: The Study of the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade,”
E1ghteenth2Century_Stud1es 17 (1984): 405-24; Martha
Woodmansee, ‘The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and
Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author',"

Eighteenth:Century_Stud1es 17 (1984): 425- 48

11 Alexander Pope, Ihe1Art_ef_Sinking_1n_Eeetr¥, ed.
Edna Leake Steeves (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968) 11.

12 See, for example, Timothy Dykstal, ‘The Politics of

Taste in the Spectator, The_E1ghteenth1Centur¥ 35 (1994):
46— 63.

13 The_Gruh_Street_Journa1.(London, 1736).

14 See, for example, Christopher Hill, ‘Censorship and

English Literature," The.Co1leeted_Essa¥S_Qf_ChrisLQpher
H111, vol. 1 (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1985) 54—55.

15 Mark Rose, Authers_and_Quners1_lhe_1n1entien_ef
Copyright, 33-34.

16 See Brean Hammond, ‘Scriblerian Self-Fashioning,”

Ihe_Yearbeek_ef_English_Studies 18 (1988): 109-124. Hammond

notes that in Scriblerian eyes, ‘mechanical" writers
intended their texts only to have material value (113).

17 See Kathy MacDermott, ‘Literature and the Grub
Street Myth,” Literature1and_H1sthy 8 (1982): 159-69.

118

13 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The_£o1111cs_and
Eeeties_ef_1ransgress1on (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986) 104.

19 Daniel Defoe, A1Vindicat1en_ef_the12ress (1718; Los
Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1951) 21.

20 See Hammond, ‘Scriblerian Self-Fashioning,” 111.

21 As a Dissenter, Defoe was banned from attending
Oxford and Cambridge. He was educated instead at the Rev.
Charles Morton's academy at Newington Green, a school
devoted to teaching the sons of Nonconformists. Instead of
emphasizing Greek and Latin, the curriculum was heavily
weighted toward modern science and philosophy and the study
of the English language. Thus, Defoe did not share the
classical background of writers such as Pope, Swift and
Dryden. See Paula Backsheider's biography, Dan1e1_Defiee1
H1s_L1fe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) and her study
of Defoe in relation to his contemporaries, Dan1e11Defee1
Amh1t1gn_and_1nnoyat1en (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1986),
especially chapter one, ‘The Bent and Genius of the Age,”
3-11.

22 On models of professional authorship, see Dustin
Griffin, ‘The Beginnings of Modern Authorship: Milton and
Dryden,” Milten10uarterl¥ 24 (1990): 1-7.

23 John Brewer, Ihe_R1easures_ef_the_1mae1natien1

Ehg1ish_Cu1tnre_in_the_E1ghteenth_Century (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1997) 144.

24 Linda Zionkowski observes that Swift and Pope
employed the notion of a ‘glut” of publications polemically,
to preface ‘discussions of who did or did not belong to the
literary ‘profession'” (‘Territorial Disputes” 4).

25.Alexander Pope, ‘Martin Scriblerus, of the Poem,”

The_Duneiad_Variorum in Ihe_Beems_of_Alexander_Bepe, ed.
James Sutherland (London: Methuen, 1965) 5: 49.

26 See Eric V. Chandler, ‘The Public Sphere and
Eighteenth- Century Anxieties about Cultural Production in
England,"Sem1eties_1295, ed. C. W. Spinks and John Deely
(New York: Peter Lang, 1996) 111- 19. See also Dustin
Griffin, ‘Fictions of Authorship,” 188-91.

27 For example, Swift's narrator in the Ia1e_ef_a_Inh
comments on the sheer worthlessness of much printed
exchange: ‘What is then become of those immense bales of
paper which must needs have been employed in such numbers of
books? Can these be wholly annihilate, and so of a sudden,

119

as I pretend? [. . .] It ill befits the distance between
your highness and me, to send you for ocular conviction to a
jakes or an oven, to the windows of a bawdy-house, or to a
sordid lantern. Books, like men their authors, have no more
than one way of coming into the world, but there are then
thousand ways to go out of it, and return no more" (Erase

Works_ef_lenathan_Sn1ft, ed. Herbert Davis, I: 21).

28 Ihe_Poems_ef_Jenathan_Suift, ed. Harold Williams
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1958) 2: 642.

29 Spectater, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon,
1965) 4: 590.

3° Marlon B. Ross, ‘Authority and Authenticity:
Scribbling Authors and the Genius of Print in

Eighteenth-Century England," Ihe_Censtruetion_ef1Authership1

Iexrual_Apprepr1at1en_1n_Law_and_Literature, ed. Martha
Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke UP, 1994) 238.

31 For a discussion of the relation between character
and literary authority, see L. S. Horsley, ‘Rogues or Honest
Gentlemen: The Public Characters of Queen Anne Journalists,”

Iexas_Stud1es_1n1Literature_and_Language 18(1976): 198-228.

32 Elizabeth Eisenstein notes that literary property
rights focused on the text as the work of an individual
author, thus transforming cultural concepts of authority by

‘undermin[ing] older concepts of collective authority." See
Eisenstein,
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979) 2: 122.

33 See Carole Fabricant,‘Pope’s Moral, Political, and

Cultural Combat,” The1E1ghteenLh10entury 29 (1988): 165—87.

34 Dune1ad_1h_EQur_Beeks I. l- 2. Quotations hereafter
not cited as 01 for the Dnne1ad11ariernm refer to the
Duneiad11n1Eour1Beeks.

35 See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's discussion
of Pope' s effort in the Duneiad to exclude the material of
popular culture from the refined public sphere in The

Po11t1es_and_Poeties_of_Iransgress1on, 109-118.

36 Richard Savage, An1Auther_to_be_Lett, ed. James
Sutherland (1729; Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library, 1960). Another work by Savage in the same

vein is The_Authers_ef_the_Iewn (London, 1725).

37 ‘The Art of Scribling, Address'd to All the
Scriblers of the Age” (London, 1733) 4.

120

38 ‘The Art of Scribling,” 4.

39 Brean Hammond, “Guard the Sure Barrier’: Pope and

the Partitioning of Culture,” Repe1_New_Cen1exts, ed. David
Fairer (New York: Harvester and Wheatsheaf, 1990) 231.

4° Hammond writes that ‘[n]ot only is it the case that
the social circumstances of the dunces included in Pope’s
poem are considerably varied [. . .] but their literary
abilities are equally diverse” (“Guard the Sure Barrier,'”
231).

41 See Frederic V. Bogel, ‘Dulness Unbound: Rhetoric
and Pope's Dnneiad," BMLA 97 (1982): 844-55. Bogel argues
that the Duneiad's ‘rhetoric at once establishes and partly
erodes the distinctions on which Pope's verse usually
depends, and it does not because Pope secretly envies the
dunces but because the creation of meaning depends as much
on the power to undo distinctions as on the power to
establish them” (846).

42 See Claudia Thomas, ‘Pope and his Duneiad
Adversaries: Skirmishes on the Borders of Gentility,”
: II' E! . E I i 2 .I. 1 E
EighteenthenthrLSatire, ed. James E. Gill, Tennessee
Studies_1n_L1teratnre, vol. 37 (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P,
1995) 275-300.

43 William Warner, L1eensin91Enter1aimnent1Jhe

Elexat1en_of_Nolel1Read1ng_1n_Brita1n,_1_6_8_t1150 (Berkeley:
U of California P, 1998) 43.

44 On eighteenth-century uses of insect imagery, see
Paul Fussell, “The Vermin of Nature': Hierarchy and Moral
Contempt, " Ihe_RhererieaJ_Werld_Qf1Augs_taLHumanism1_Eth1cs

and_lmaeery_fmm1501f_t_to_Bnrke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965)
231-61.

45 Iatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987)
3: 187.

46 ‘To Doctor Delany,” 69-74 in W
Smith, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958) 2: 502.
See also Arno Loffler, “Respublica Grubstreetaria' The

Scribblers in Swift's Poetry," EmceedineuthLEirsr

WWW, ed. Hermann J. Real and
Heinz J. Veinken (Munich: Wilhelm Vink Ferlag, 1985) 145- 56.

47 Griffin, ‘Fictions of Authorship,” 182.

48 Pope, ‘Martin Scriblerus, of the Poem,” Duhe1ad

121

YarioruminBoemmLAlexandeLPepeS: 50.

49 Swift, ‘Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” 165-68,
Peems_Qf_Jenathan_SloLift 2: 558.

5° Swift, ‘To a Friend who had been much abused in many
inveterate Libels,” 7-8 in Eeems_ef_0enathan_501ft 2: 506.

51 Swift, ‘To Doctor Delany,” 141-44 in Eeeme_ef
Jonathan_Su1f_t 2: 504.

122

CHAPTER FOUR
REPUTATION, THE PUBLIC SELF AND THE ‘PAPER WARS”: THE CASE

OF ALEXANDER POPE

‘[I]t is evident,” Daniel Defoe observes, ‘(tho' it
seems a Paradox) that it is a Reputation to be
Scandalized.”1 While English law conceived of reputation as
a form of personal property -- one's own ‘good name” —- that
could be protected as such, Defoe's comment suggests that
the self is actually constructed in the public sphere, that
identity is constituted rather than potentially violated by
publicity. Scandal, apparently destructive of reputation,
actually confers it, as Defoe explains when he amplifies his
riddle-like observation: the person who is the object of
scandal ‘is allow'd some Merit, when Envy attacks him, and
the World might not be sensible of it in General, without a
public Encounter in Criticism; and many Authors would be
Buried in Oblivion were they not kept alive by Clamours
against their Performances” (15). The author, Defoe
suggests, literally lives in the public eye; publicity
produces the public self. The famous case of John Partridge
exemplifies this phenomenon. When Jonathan Swift published
a pamphlet predicting the death of the astrologer John
Partridge and followed that prognostication with an
announcement of Partridge’s demise, an elegy and an epitaph,

Partridge was forced to demonstrate to the public his

123

continued life, publishing advertisements and writing to
Ireland's postmaster (a friend of Swift’s, who in turn
published Partridge's letter).2 Partridge’s success was
partial at best; the Stationers’ Company struck his name
from their rolls of authors.3 One pamphlet that took part
in the joke, Squ1re_B1ekerstaff_Deteeted, purports to be
Partridge's relation of events the night he ‘died” and his
fruitless efforts to convince others that he is alive. When
a sexton comes to find out details for the funeral,

Partridge protests:

Why, Sirrah, says I, you know me well enough; you
know I am not dead, and how dare you affront me
after this Manner? Alack-a-day, Sir, replies the
Fellow, why it is in Print, and the whole Town
knows you are dead [. . .]. Why, it is strange,
Sir, says he, you should make such a Secret of
your Death, to us that are your Neighbours

[. . .].4

In eighteenth—century print culture, it was not just
texts but selves that circulated and proliferated. These
selves were a convergence of the categories of private and
public. As the home and family were increasingly marked as
the environment of true identity, as the space termed
‘private life" was carved out as the origin of the subject,
the private self, ironically, became publicly relevant. The
privileging of the private self and the ideology of merit
spurred public purchase on private life. Claims to public
authority were increasingly mediated by appeal to private
behavior. While the premise of such appeals was exposure --

the private life revealed, in support of or in detriment to

124

public standing -- the process of public representation was
in fact the process of invention, as the Partridge episode
illustrates. Print had the power to produce identity as it
represented a private life.5 The life so presented was a
fiction spawning other fictions, as different writers
offered up competing representations. The case of Alexander
Pope reveals this process with unusual clarity, for
representing Pope was a much-pursued activity in the first
half of the eighteenth century, prompted in large part by
Pope's own claims of authority in representing himself and
others.

The direction of Pope's representations is toward
establishing his place in relation to other writers. In the
preface to Gulliyeriana, a collection of attacks on and
replies to Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, Jonathan

Smedley expresses surprise that these “Itlue_51ngnlar_2eeple

should so outwit themselves, and should fall into such a
eemmen_Erenzy_ef_Se1f;Cenee1t, as needlessly to insult other
Writers, to despise them, to bid Defiance to them, and, of
Consequence, to raise a Paper:flar.between themselves and a
uhele.Arm¥_ef1Authers.[. . .].”6 This ‘Paper War” was
waged in part in the pamphlet attacks on Pope and in Pope's
own works. As J. V. Guerinot has noted, the ‘libellous,
almost purely personal attack, usually in the form of a
pamphlet, was a common thing."7 Over a thirty-three year
span, Alexander Pope was the subject of some 150 pamphlets,

many in response to the Duneiad. Critics have, until

125

recently, tended to disown the pamphlets, which attack Pope
on personal ground —- his religion, family background,
personal character, and physical deformity. Pope's satires
and other poems do not simply precipitate the pamphlet
attacks; they participate in discourse with them and employ
the same tactics.8 The pamphlets mark Pope’s works as
themselves instances of scandal writing. Pope's
contemporaries read the Dune1ad, for example, as an assault
on individual writers more than as a satire about the state
of culture, and they recognized it as a calculated bid for
public authority. These writers, dismissed by Pope as
libellous ‘dunces,” were quick to point to the defamatory
elements of his own texts. The pamphleteers were also
concerned with responding to Pope's representations:
rebutting Pope's claims for himself, putting forth
alternative views of him, attempting to clear their own
names of charges Pope made against them or to change the
public's perception of them. Reputation was key to
establishing public credibility in early print culture and
thus became the battle ground of the paper wars.

Pope depicts himself dominating his contemporary
authors. He is wearied, in the ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,”
by lesser writers' unrelenting recognition of and deference

to his literary authority:

What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide?

They pierce my Thickets, thro' my Grot they glide.

By land, by water, they renew the Charge,

They stop the Chariot, they board the Barge.
(7—10)

126

All fly to Iu1tham, and in humble strain
Apply to me, to keep them mad or vain. (21-22)9

The other writers are the foundation on which Pope builds
his public self: a private self under siege.10 They force
Pope to mete out literary judgments: ‘Seiz'd and ty'd down
to judge, how wretched I! / Who can't be silent, and who
will not lye.” (33-34). Having established in the first
eighty lines of the poem the public recognition of his
literary authority, Pope delivers his assessment of the
working writers generally. The Dunciad, he avows, reveals
‘[t]hat Secret to each Fool, that he's an Ass” (80). Pope's
ridiculing of other writers, he reasons, is hardly damaging
to them because they lack the discernment to recognize his

condemnation:

You think this cruel? take it for a rule,
No creature smarts so little as a Fool.
[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
Who shames a Scribler? break one cobweb thro',
He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew;
Destroy his Fib, or Sophistry; in vain,
The Creature's at his dirty work again;
Thron'd in the Centre of his thin designs;
Proud of a vast extent of flimzy lines. (82-94)

Pope hinges his position as author in relation to the
scribbler, who is entirely without self-awareness. It is a
lack of self-consciousness, an oblivion to missing talent
that provides a counter-point to Pope's own unself—conscious

literary command as child poet:

Why did I write? what sin to me unknown
Dipt me in Ink, my Parents', or my own?
As yet a Child, nor yet a Fool to Fame,
I lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came.
(125-28)

127

 

Pope deliberately represents himself as a poet who became
such without deliberation. The intentionality of
publication, however, requires different treatment; he
describes an initiation into authorship in which he is
anointed by the representatives of traditional literary

authority:

But why then publish? Granlille the polite
And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write;
Well-natur’d Garth inflam'd with early praise,
And Cengrele lov’d, and Swift endur'd my Lays;
The Courtly Talbet, flamers, Sheffield read,
Ev’n mitred Reehester would nod the head,

And St1_Jehn's self (great Dryden's friends
before)

With open arms receiv'd one Poet more.

Happy my Studies, when by these approv’d!

Happier their Author, when by these belov'd!

From these the world will judge of Men and Books,

Not from the Burners, Qldmixens, and Seeks.
(135—46)

Even as Pope positions himself as the successor in a
literary tradition, he is haunted by the accession to
publication of a new group of writers (‘Burnets, Oldmixons,
and Cooks") and scandal writing's access to posterity -- he
augments his self-justification with a denunciation of the
purveyors of scandal, promising their muteness before future
audiences. He goes on in a footnote to the final line above
to assert that it is sanctioned words such as his own that
will survive, not those of ‘Authors of secret and scandalous
History” (Pope's note, 146). When Pope presents himself as
a source of disinterested, impersonal literary discourse, he
suggests that his own writings of personal attack are

somehow above the fray, an impression buttressed by his

128

 

catalog of his own forbearance in the face of constant
personal attack (147-74). Pope claims for himself an
imperial distance (‘I sought no homage from the Race that
write; / I kept, like Asian.Monarchs from their sight”
[219-201) and independence that places him squarely outside

the competitive literary marketplace:11

Oh let me live my own! and die so too!

(‘To live and die is all I have to do:’)

Maintain a Poet's Dignity and Ease,

And see what friends, and read what books I
please. (261-64)

Far from participating in libelous writing, Pope
maintains, he is driven only by service to virtue, a stand
he portrays as heroic and self-sacrificing. Pope suggests
that he is simply the victim of others' defamations, a
burden he bears for being willing to expose anyone's vice,
regardless of rank (‘A Knave's a Knave, to me, in ev'ry
State” [361]). He justifies his own defamatory writing in
the Dnneiad by depicting himself as the long-enduring victim

of such attacks:

Full ten years slander'd, did he once reply?
Three thousand Suns went down on Welsted’s Lye:
To please a Mistress, One aspers'd his life;

He lash'd him not, but let her be his Wife:

Let Budgel charge low Grubstreet on his quill,
And write whate'er he pleas’d, except his W111;
Let the IWQ.Cufls of Town and Court, abuse

His Father, Mother, Body, Soul, and Muse.

Yet why? that Father held it for a rule

It was a Sin to call our Neighbour Fool,

That harmless Mother thought no Wife a Whore, --
Hear this! and spare his Family, James_Mere!
Unspotted Names! and memorable long,

If there be Force in Virtue, or in Song. (374-87)

129

Pope uses the claim of long-standing abuse, as well as
an upbringing that taught him not to slander or libel, to
legitimate his attacks on others in the Duneiad, the
wellspring of the pamphlets against him. The prefatory
material of the Duneiad shows Pope situating his text within
an ongoing controversy about publicity and reputation. Pope
understood well the appeal of scandal, and he simultaneously
promises to satisfy the readers' appetites and to maintain a
scrupulous commitment to justice. He will dispense with the
teasing cover of invented names in order to protect the
innocent —- and also to capture more assuredly his intended
victims. ‘1 make no doubt,” declares the fictional editor,
Martin Scriblerus, ‘the Author's own motive to use real
names rather than feigned names, was his care to preserve
the Innocent from any false Application” (Dnne1ad_yar1erum
8). Pope positions himself as the opponent of libel, as he
prepares to attack the reputations of his now clearly
identified targets. Throughout the Dnneiad, Pope voices a
righteous indignation that, he suggests, shields him from
imputations of scandal. His writing is prompted only by the
justness of his cause.

The commentary that accompanies the poem in its
yer1ernm edition is largely devoted to expanding the
defamatory references to individuals in the verse itself.
Pope claims for this commentary both the status of truth and
the pleasure inherent in discovering a secret, even when its

subject is beneath notice: ‘the reader cannot but derive one

130

 

pleasure from the very Obscurity of the persons it treats
of, that it partakes of the nature of a Secret, which most
people love to be let into, tho' the Men or the Things be
ever so inconsiderable or Trivial” (Dy 8).

It is the dunces' very evanescence, Pope contends, that
compels him to expose them. He will need to include in his
work historical facts that will acquaint future readers with
his soon-to-be forgotten subjects, a measure Pope represents

as a gesture of magnanimity from his own poetic immortality:

Of the Person it was judg’d proper to give some
account: for since it is only in this monument
that they must expect to survive (and here survive
they will, as long as the English tongue shall
remain such as it was in the reigns of Queen ANNE
and King GEORGE) it seem’d but humanity to bestow
a word or two upon each, just to tell what he was,
what he writ, when he liv'd, or when he dy'd. (DI
8)

For those by whom Pope feels more personally wronged,
he devises his poem as a kind of mark of Cain: ‘If a word or
two more are added upon the chief Offenders; ‘tis only as a
paper pinn'd upon the breast, to mark the Enormities for
which they suffer'd; lest the Correction only should be
remember'd, and the Crime forgotten” (D1 8).

Pope depicts himself as the innocent victim of the
dunces' vicious libels. In response to the Dnnciad, Pope
charges, the hacks conspired to prove him one of their own:
‘I perceiv'd that most of these authors had been (doubtless
very wisely) the first Aggressors: they had been try’d till

they were weary, what was to be got by railing at each

other; no body was either concern’d, or supriz'd, if this or

131

 

that Scribler was prov'd a Dunce: but every one was curious
to read what could be said to prove Mr. POPE one, and was
ready to pay something for such a discovery” (01 12). The
distinction between Pope and the dunces, which Pope
propounds in the poem was, of course, not so self-evident,
perhaps even to Pope. The_Dunc1ad in this sense becomes a
defensive gesture, as Helen Deutsch has noted: ‘[T]he Grub
Street phenomenon [. . .] made Pope's literary career
economically possible, and Pope himself potentially
indistinguishable from a host of other ‘scriblers.’ What
better way to show their insignificance, and mark his own
enduring value, than to confine the dunces to the hell of a
historical particularity?”12

Pope suggests that the detraction against him is highly
marketable, thus indicting together the dunces and the
commodified system of literature. While he has been
attacked on a personal level, Pope contends, he has attacked
others only on the grounds of their writing. In the ‘Letter
to the Publisher," signed ‘William Cleland” but generally
accepted as Pope's, the author insists that ‘ill success
[. . L] had transported [Pope’s critics] to personal abuse,
either of him or (what I think he could less forgive) of his
friends. They had call'd men of virtue and honour Bad Men,
long before he had either leisure or inclination to call
them Bad Writers” (01 12). While the attacks they made were
personal, however, their animus was professional: ‘Now what

had Mr. POPE done before to incense them? He had published

132

 

those works which are in the hands of every body, in which
not the least mention is made of any of them” (01 12).

Pope goes on in the ‘Letter to the Publisher” to claim
a public moral imperative. Cleland's letter has been
occasioned by his indignation at the abuse Pope has
suffered, and he has been moved to compile notes on the
abusers for the publisher to include in the poem's
commentary. Pope uses Cleland's letter to claim his own

disinclination to write such a commentary:

I should still have been silent, if either I
had seen any inclination in my friend to be
serious with such accusers, or if they had only
attack'd his writings: since whoever publishes,
puts himself on his tryal by his country. But
when his moral character was attack’d, and in a
manner from which neither Truth nor Virtue can
secure the most Innocent [. . .]. Then I thought,
since the danger is common to all, the concern
ought to be so; and that it was an act of justice
to detect the Authors [. . .]. (01,12-13)

Pope explains the defense of his private life on grounds
familiar from his justifications of exposing others: justice
and the public interest. Cleland also announces a private

concern for Pope's reputation, and indeed for his own:

I am one of that number who have long lov'd and
esteem'd Mr. POPE, and had often declared it was
not his Capacity or Writings (which we ever
thought the least valuable part of his character)
but the honest, open, and beneficent Man that we
most esteem’d and lov'd in him. Now if what these
people say were believ'd, I must appear to all my
friends either a fool or a knave, either impos'd
on my self, or imposing on them: So that I am as
much interested in the confutation of these
calumnies, as he is himself. (21 13)

Pope suggests, on one hand, that all ‘Cleland” must do is to

133

 

show the public the true, private Pope; on the other, he
alludes to a need constantly to maintain reputation, as
Cleland explains that his intervention is motivated in part
by a need to preserve others' favorable assessment of his
own judgment.

While many critics have taken Pope and Swift at their
word and agreed that they attacked other writers on literary
rather than personal grounds, Pat Rogers has rightly noted
that the two modes of attack cannot be properly seen as
distinct: ‘[K]nown personal defects will be exploited in the
[Dunciad] to heighten the specifically literary misdemeanors
of the authors and booksellers presented. Other failings,
diagnosed under the cultural aspect, will be dramatised to
reinforce the personal innuendo against a particular
figure.”13 While Pope positions his poem as an antidote to
the scandalous public sphere, an arm of retribution that
will grasp those whom the law cannot reach, it exploits
scandal as a means of discrediting, personally and
literarily, Pope's professional enemies.

Pope affects a position of injured, bemused innocence
that met ill-reception from his targets in the Duneiad.

John Henley, for example, author of HQW_NQW1_GQSSip_EQpeZ
(1736) situates Pope squarely in the exchange of scandal;
indeed, he intones, Pope is a master of it. Henley responds
to his depiction in the Duneiad by labeling Pope a
scandalmonger (‘The World love's Remahee, and Mr. POPE can

hit that just Taste at the Expence of any Man's or Family’s

134

Reputation”) and a sort of vigilante: ‘Mr. POPE, by the
Conceit of his Talents, Wit, Numbers, Popularity, and
Diction, thinks himself entitled to destroy and blast the
Credit of every or any Person, right or wrong, so all
others, on the like Imagination of superior Force or Skill,
might murder, hack and maul as they pleased.”14 He
suggests, too, that a public letter to Pope is thoroughly
appropriate, as Pope himself exploits whatever elements of
his private life might improve his public standing:

There can be no Absurdity in writing to you by
way of the Press; was I to make a m1serah1e

punn1ng Distinction between written and pr1nted
Letters, [. . .] the Wit would be higher than you,

my Lord Belinghreke, or the Dean, often condescend
to treat us with in your Hash of familiar
Epistles, lately published; however, to send a
Letter in Print, open to the World, has the
Sanction of your Practice, and what is it, which
that will not authorize? Was I to send it written

to you by the Post, you would print11t1_1f_¥eu
W. (1-2)

Henley accuses Pope of himself ignoring any distinction
between public and private discourse, so that written (not
printed and therefore not public) discourse will be
catapulted by Pope into the public sphere if he believes
that such eXposure is to his advantage.15

In the advertisement before the ‘Epistle to Arbuthnot,”
Pope negotiates the difficult terrain of condemning personal
satire by others while engaging in it himself. As usual,
the crux of his justification is his own veracity: those
depicted will recognize themselves because there is ‘not a

Circumstance but what is true.” He has omitted the names of

135

those who have attacked him: ‘I shall have this Advantage,
and Honour, on my side, that whereas by their proceeding,
any Abuse may be directed at any man, no Injury can possibly
be done by mine, since a Nameless Character can never be
found out, but by its Truth and Likeness” (95). Pope
simultaneously effaces and asserts his power as writer,
claiming on the one hand to be a mere recorder of what is
true, boasting on the other of his capacity to produce a
perfect likeness. Mimesis is at once Pope's alibi and
self—proclaimed achievement.

In the ‘First Satire of the Second Book of Horace
Imitated” (1733), Pope continues the project he takes up in
the ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" of defending himself against
charges of over-particularity in his writing. The poem
takes the form of a dialogue between Pope and his friend,
William Fortescue, as Fortescue prepares Pope for a legal
defense of his writing. While Pope notes incredulously that
‘There are (I scarce can think it, but am told) / There are
to whom my Satire seems too bold,”16 Fortescue counsels
caution, urging Pope to abandon satire, either giving up
writing or at least turning to verse that merely pleases.
The poems that take personal aim, Fortescue warns, make him
hated, but Pope responds that his writing is aimed only at

those who deserve it:

Satire’s my Weapon, but I'm too discreet
To run a Muck, and tilt at all I meet;
I only wear it in a Land of Hectors,
Thieves, Supercargoes, Sharpers, and Directors.
(69-72)

136

 

Pope makes his personal attacks heroic; he is ‘arm'd for
y1rtue, when I point the Pen” (105). He goes even further
in ‘Dialogue II” of the ‘Epilogue to the Satires," where he
raises his work to an almost mystical level:

O sacred Weapon! left for Truth’s defence,
Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence!
To all but Heav'n-directed hands deny’d,
The Muse may give thee, but the Gods must guide.
Rev'rent I touch thee! but with honest zeal;
To rowze the Watchmen of the Publick Weal,
To Virtue’s Work provoke the tardy Hall,
And goad the Prelate slumb'ring in his Stall.
(212-19)

While Pope enshrines his exposure of others as a public
service, in the Duneiad he depicts other authors' scandal
writing as literal dives into the gutter. The dunces
assemble at Fleet Ditch to compete in Dulness's game of
plunging into the filth:
‘Here strip, my children! here at once leap in,
Here prove who best can dash thro' thick and thin,
And who the most in love of dirt excel,
Or dark dexterity of groping well.
Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around
The stream, be his the Weekly Journals bound,
A pig of lead to him who dives the best;
A peck of coal a-piece shall glad the rest.’
(2: 275—82)
The line that Pope draws between his defamatory writing
and that of most of his contemporaries is legitimacy. His
work, he declares, is authorized by its truth and its
public-interestedness, while the work of the dunces is
characterized by self-interest: they libel because it pays.

While the pamphleteers against Pope have been generally

regarded as practitioners of libel, quite a few take issue

137

with the practice of invading private life for the purposes
of public dispute. They object to Pope's use of defamatory
accusations about their lives in order to denigrate their
standing as authors. Leonard Welsted, for example, writes
that ‘no Attack in Print upon a Man's Poetical Character
ought to be repaid by Lampoon and Virulence upon the Moral
Character of his Antagonist.”17 Lewis Theobald, king of the
dunces in the original Duneiad and Duneiadryarierum,
provoked Pope's ire when he criticized the poet's edition of
Shakespeare. In reply to Pope's depiction of him, Theobald
published A1Letter_te_Mr1_Mist (1728); in it, he argues that
Pope's labels of duncehood can be tolerated, but his

personal attacks cannot:

My Notion is, that a Beetieal War should confine
itself to Demerits in the Science of Poetry; and
all the Attacks be levell’ d either against
failures in Genius, or against the Pretensions of
writing Witheut one: But to draw into the Quarrel
Parts of priyate_eharaeter, to fall on Persons
independent even of the Fraternity of Writers, is
intentionally to declare War against human
Society. They, therefore, who oppose a Writer
indulging himself in that bad Strain, employ their
Pens in the common Cause of Mankind: And such a
Writer should think it particular good Luck, if he
is pursued as Eair_Game, and not hunted down as
one of a Eefa_Natufe; a Beast_Qf_Efey, that ought
to have a Price set on his Head.18

Theobald’s objection to Pope’s writing uses as a standard of
condemnation the publication of the private self, but the
separation he posits between private and public was itself a
matter of ambiguity. Craig Calhoun has defined the private
as ‘simultaneously that which is not subject to the purview

of the state and that which concerns personal ends distinct

138

from the public good, the res_publiea or matters of
legitimate public concern.”19 Theobald appeals to this
latter sense of privacy, suggesting that Pope has
overstepped the bounds of fair exchange when he draws into
the debate Theobald’s private self, a matter not of
legitimate public concern. In the satire debate, satire is
justified (and scandal is reviled) on the grounds of public
good. But Calhoun indicates the complexity of identifying
the private when he further argues that ‘[d]ifferent public
discourses commonly invoke different distinctions of what is
properly ‘private' and therefore not appropriately addressed
in public discourse or used to settle public debates” (85).
The discourse of scandal, which constituted a significant
dimension of eighteenth-century print culture, is one
example of such public discourse with a differing conception
of the private.

Pope himself fully exploited this ambiguity surrounding
privacy. In his poems, Pope produces a private self for
public view. Helen Deutsch has characterized Pope's career
as one ‘designed to place the most private gestures in the
public eye,” while Dustin Griffin remarks that Pope, ‘though
always personal, is never private.”20 This quality of
Pope's writing is, I argue, an assertion of public value
through appeal to the private life and, beyond that, a
realization of the private self in its public display. The
gestures to which Deutsch alludes are not so much placed in

the public eye as conceived there. In his advertisement

139

prefacing the ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” Pope describes the
poem's occasion as a wresting back to himself the power to
depict his private life:

This Paper is a Sort of Bill of Complaint, begun
many years since, and drawn up by snatches as the
several Occasions offer'd. I had no thoughts of
publishing it, till it pleas'd some Persons of
Rank and Fortune [. . .1, to attack in a very
extraordinary manner, not only my Writings (of
which, being publick the Publick may judge) but my
Bersen, Morals, and Eamily, whereof to those who

know me not, a truer Information may be requisite.

(597)
The project of the poem, as Pope presents it here, is purely
corrective: both to register the various wrongs committed
against him and to redress the depiction of him made by Lord
Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in ‘Verses to the
Imitator of Horace” and ‘An Epistle to a Doctor of Divinity
from a Nobleman at Hampton Court.” It is only reluctantly,
Pope insists, that he publishes the poem; he airs his
complaints against other writers in order to defend his
private life. He distinguishes here between the publicness
of his writing and the implied privateness of his ‘Person,
Morals, and Family.” It is striking, however, that he
nevertheless acquiesces to the appropriation for public
discussion of these private facets of his life. Rather than
railing against their public status, Pope indicates only a
determination to provide ‘those who know me not” (ie. the
public) with ‘truer Information.” Pope's ‘Epistle to
Arbuthnot,” like other of his texts, is an effort to

intervene in this process, to stem the proliferation by

140

firmly fixing his reputation and that of others. Delarivier
Manley, too, intervenes in this process, but her
intervention in the interest of self-representation is
undertaken in a way that shows she is fully conscious of the
fluidity of any public presentation of self. Pope, by
contrast, makes himself ever more vulnerable to the process
through his very determination to control it.

In his ‘Epistle to Cobham” —- one of the ‘Moral
Essays,” published in 1734 -- Pope sounds a note of
scepticism as to the ultimate knowability of any person,
even oneself. He describes the inconsistencies of
personality that exist not just between people generally but
even within a given individual: ‘That each from other
differs, first confess; / Next, that he varies from himself
no less.”21 This variety is further colored by the
observer's perceptions, so that the ‘true” person is doubly
unknowable, both because of the multiplicity of personality
and the particular vision of the observer. We are, Pope
explains, fundamentally unknowable even to ourselves because
the causes of our actions cannot be limited to rational

explanations:

Oft in the Passions' wild rotation tost,
Our spring of action to ourselves is lost:
Tir'd, not determin'd, to the last we yield,
And what comes then is master of the field.
As the last image of that troubled heap,
When Sense subsides, and Fancy sports in sleep,
(Tho' past the recollection of the thought)
Becomes the stuff of which our dream is wrought:
Something as dim to our internal view,
Is thus, perhaps, the cause of most we do.

(41-50)

141

Pope’s scepticism concerning the knowability of character
cuts to the very premises of scandal writing: ‘Not always
Actions show the man: we find / Who does a kindness, is not
therefore kind” (61-62). He salvages some level of
comprehensibility with the introduction of the ‘ruling
passion,” that impulse that most nearly draws together and
explains an individual’s actions.22 ‘Cobham” goes beyond
the problem of identity to the problem of representation.
When Pope rails against scandal writing, he is presuming
that the self can be misrepresented; that his own thinking
suggests to him the complexity of representation leads him
to focus on the maliciousness of scandal writers as a way of
denoting scandal and differentiating it from satire. While
he maintains in ‘Cobham” that we cannot know another
person’s motives, he becomes expert at identifying them when
he writes about others, especially when he writes
defensively on his own behalf.

Pope claims for himself a perfect transparency -- a
transparency that gives him license to the reputations of

others, too:

I love to pour out all myself, as plain
As downright Sh1ppen, or as old Mentagne.
In them, as certain to be lov'd as seen,
The Soul stood forth, nor kept a Thought within;
In me what Spots (for Spots I have) appear,
Will prove at least the Medium must be clear;
In this impartial Glass, my Muse intends
Fair to expose myself, my Foes, my Friends.23

The exposure of others that Pope here justifies, however, is

immediately compromised by his own lack of candor, which is

142

seized on by the pamphleteers. Pope's physical condition is
the most evocative example of such obfuscation. Pope likely
suffered from Pott's disease, or tuberculosis of the spine,
a condition that compressed his chest and hunched his back
as his vertebrae collapsed, causing him pain and weakness.
It also contributed to his small stature; Pope's adult
height was only four and a half feet. In his Liyes_ef_the
English_2eets, Samuel Johnson includes a thorough

description of Pope's frail state. He was

so weak as to stand in perpetual need of female
attendance; extremely sensible of cold, so that he
wore a kind of fur doublet under a shirt of very
coarse warm linen with fine sleeves. When he rose
he was invested in boddice made of stiff canvass,
being scarce able to hold himself erect till they
were laced [. . .]. His legs were so slender that
he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of
stockings, which were drawn on and off by the
maid; for he was not able to dress or undress
himself; and neither went to bed nor rose without
help. His weakness made it very difficult for him
to be clean.24

Appearance, which would seem a matter of public self, became
in Pope’s case a closely guarded feature of his private
life. Pope was ‘the most frequently portrayed individual of
his generation” (Deutsch 12) and Voltaire observed that
‘[t]he picture of the prime minister hangs over the chimney
of his own closet, but I have seen that of Mr. Pope in
twenty noblemen’s houses.”25 While Pope’s image was a
familiar part of the public domain, that image was a
carefully edited one. No formal portraits depict Pope's
deformity and only three sketches do: a pen and ink drawing

by William Kent of the grotto at Twickenham, with a small

143

figure of Pope included; a red crayon drawing by William
Hoare made without Pope's knowledge, as he stood conversing
in Prior Park; and a doodle by Lady Burlington of Pope at
cards.26 When Joseph Warton published his edition of Pope's
works in 1797, he printed as paired frontispieces an
engraving of Pope’s profile in the Roman style and Hoare's
drawing. Deutsch, whose book provides the most sustained
consideration of the influence of Pope's deformity on his

work, remarks:

Warton's unprecedented choice of frontispieces
puts on show the causal connection between Pope's
canonization of himself as author and the
subsequent desire on the part of his reader for
‘an Unique of this celebrated poet" [from Hoare's
inscription on the back of the drawing]. Pope,
for better or worse, by making himself a celebrity
has made his person public property. The
voyeuristic public is eager to have the whole of
it be represented. (36)
The pamphleteers' revelation of Pope's true condition to
readers is not prompted by admiration or voyeurism. Rather,
for them it functions as a metaphor for the illegitimacy of
the position Pope claims for himself. John Dennis, in just
one example of a common trope in the pamphlets, insists that
Pope's readers read his body, on the assumption that Pope's
own physical state rebuts the claims for authority he
himself makes: ‘Deformity of this Libeller, is Visible,
Present, Lasting, Unalterable, and Peculiar to himself.
‘Tis the mark of God and Nature upon him, to give us warning

that we should hold no Society with him, as a Creature not

of our Original, not of our Species.”27 Exposing Pope’s

144

physical condition in the pamphlets is a version of exposing
his character. Unveiling his true physical state,
furthermore, is proof of self-interested elision on Pope’s
part, and so problematizes his own impulse to expose others.
Pope's body becomes a site of contention in determining his
reputation —- both for contemporaries and for posterity --
because his body becomes the text underlying everything that
he produces. Indeed, Pope’s body is in itself a scandal: a
private truth revealed in rebuttal to his self-presentation

as a formidable combatant for virtue:

Hear this, and tremble! you, who ‘scape the Laws.
Yes, while I live, no rich or noble knave

Shall walk the World, in credit, to his grave.

TO VIRTUE ONLY AND HER FRIENDS, A FRIEND

The World beside may murmur, or commend.28

The contrast between Pope’s actual and projected selves
is stark, as Carole Fabricant has commented. ‘Popeian
self-dramatization" makes the reader ‘riveted above all on
Pope's roles as the avenger, the god-like bully, the warrior
tilting in the fields of corruption, the potent,
bigger-than-life hero: an ironic and outrageous and touching
contrast to the figure Pope actually cut as a physically
fragile, deformed, almost dwarfish poet who walked about in
frequent fear of his safety.”29 Interestingly, Fabricant’s
comment echoes the pamphleteers' project; like them, she
sees Pope's physicality as a literal embodiment of a self
that erases the image he has presented. Armed with the
knowledge of Pope's actual condition, her reading implies,

we construct a different vision of the poet than that which

145

Pope promotes. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, angered by
Pope's reference to her in ‘The First Satire of the Second
Book of Horace Imitated” (‘From furious Sapphe scarce a
milder Fate, / P-x'd by her Love, or libell’d by her Hate”
[83-841), published ‘Verses Address'd to the Imitator of
Horace,” she reached behind the poet's postures of physical,
poetic and social influence:

One over-match'd by ev’ry Blast of Wind,

Insulting and provoking all Mankind.30

Pope's concealment of his fragile body behind a

swaggering posture provided the pamphleteers with exactly
the premise of delving into the private life on which
scandal writing (whether deemed libel or personal satire)
depends. George Duckett, for example, in the 1729 pamphlet
E E] i , 3 i I E JJ'I'J'I E . '1,
positions himself as an advocate for a public that has been
-- and will, without his assistance, in the future be --

duped:

What Courage, what Allies, what Stature must
future Ages conceive this Giant Warriour to be
aided with [when they read the Duneiad] They will
imagine him at least to be Seven Foot high, beyond
the Growth of his Contemporaries, both in Stature
and Understanding. Will they not be surprized,
when I assure them, and I do hereby assure them
(for, I, Sir, put in my claim to Immortality, too,
by being annexed to you) that this same Gyant, was
but about four Foot and an Half high, of a
Structure a little irregular, and his genius Low
and indecent as his Form.31

In this passage, Duckett enacts revelation, showing

146

posterity the ‘real” Pope that lurks behind his writing.
Duckett draws on a self-portrait that is only implied; he
offers a revised reading of the author to supplant the one a
reader gathers from the Duneiad and many of Pope's other
writings. Pope's body functions as a rebuttal to the
Duneiad; the maliciousness of that text is revealed when his
similarly twisted body is uncovered. Pope denounces attacks
that center on his private self; he simultaneously uses that
self to validate his writing. Duckett reverses the
equation, using Pope's private self to denounce his writing.
Jonathan Smedley, in contrast, turns Pope's condition into a
mitigation of malice that belittles Pope’s self-announced

cultural authority:

The Frame_and_Make_ef P----'s Body is thrown
into the favourable Scale, and inclines People to
excuse and forgive him; for it is generally
remark’d, that crooked, minute, and deform'd
People are peevish, quarelsome, waspish, and
ill-natur'd; and the Reason is, the Saul has not
Room enough to persuade and expand itself thro'
all their nibbed, tiney Parts, and this makes it
press sorely on the Brain, which is of a yielding
Substance; and this Pressure again causes frequent
Irritations and Tuinges_en_the_NerMes, which makes
the crooked Person exert his Hands, his Feet, and
his Tongue, in sudden Starts and Kits, which are
very uneasy to himself, and which prove
disagreeable and outrageous, often, to others.32

This depiction is hardly that to which Pope aspires; it is
in accordance, instead, with the very image of involuntary,
destructive writing that Pope and others characterize with
derogatory references to the ‘scribling itch."

Ironically, the power and authority that Pope claims

147

for himself when he writes lines such as ‘In this impartial
Glass, my Muse intends / Fair to expose myself, my Foes, my
Friends” is of a piece with the exposure by which he also
suffers. This is what leads him into the flimzy
distinctions between scandal and satire that are woven
through his verse and that form the core of poems such as
the ‘Epistle to Arbuthnot,” ‘Imitation of the First Book of
the Second Satire of Horace” and the first and second parts
of the ‘Epilogue to the Satires.” J. V. Guerinot, in
introducing his bibliography of pamphlet attacks on Pope, is
almost apologetic for engaging the genre. But the pamphlets
are not just defamations of Pope; they are, although in
almost every case less expertly crafted, in the same vein as
much of Pope's satire. What is striking about the pamphlets
and Pope's own texts is the degree to which the act of
scandal writing is implicated in determining public
authority. Pope builds his authority on denunciations of
scandal writing, then uses such writing to secure his own
position. Pope continually situates his work in a classical
tradition of satire as a way of distinguishing it from the
popular market of literature in his own day. But the
pamphleteers pull him back, returning him to the
contemporary context and putting Pope in a defensive
position as they remind readers that Pope himself employs
the tactics of libel. And while, in this ‘Paper—War" the

status of any particular writer is in a state of perpetual

148

revision and rebuttal, the cultural centrality of scandal is

steadily reinforced.

 

In July 1742, Colley Cibber published A1Letter1tQ1Mr1
Pepe, in response to Pope's treatment of him in The_WeW
Dnne1ad (March 1742). Cibber responds to charges Pope has
made against him, carefully delineating between their
respective investments in their reputations: ‘I wrote more
to be Fed, than to be Famous [. . .]. And I own myself so
contented a Dunce, that I would not have even your merited
Fame in Poetry, if it were to be attended with half the
fretful Solicitude you seem to have lain under to maintain
it.”33 Cibber smarts particularly under Pope's line that
‘Colley has his Lord and Whore,” observing first that such
unfounded accusation could as well be turned on Pope.
‘Would not the Satyr have been equally just?” he demands.
‘Or would any sober Reader have seen more in the Line, than
a wide mouthful of Ill—Manners? Or would my professing
myself a Satyrist give me a Title to wipe my foul Pen upon
the face of every Man I did not like?” (44-45). Cibber’s
accusations do not remain in the hypothetical realm,
however; he relates a story of years before, when he, Pope
and Lord Warwick went ‘to a certain House of Carnal
Recreation, near the Hay-Market; where his Lordship's
Frolick propos'd was to flip his little Homer, as he call'd
him, at a Girl of the Game, that he might see what sort of
Figure a Man of his Size, Sobriety, and Vigour (in Verse)

would make, when the frail Fit of Love had got into him

149

 

[. . .]” (47-48). The ‘smirking Damsel” leads Pope into
another room, Cibber recounts, and finally ‘observing [Pope]
had staid as long as without hazard of his Health he might,
I threw upon the Door upon him, where I found this little
hasty Hero, like a terrible Tom tit, pertly perching upon
the Mount of Love! But such was my Surprize, that I fairly
laid hold of his Heels, and actually drew him down safe and
sound from his Danger” (48).

The image of Pope as the ‘Tom tit” seeded itself in the
popular imagination: ‘[f]our engravings and at least six
pamphlets, all focusing on the bawdy house story were
shortly in circulation.”34 The anonymous pamphlet, Sauney
and_0911e¥ (August 1742) claims to recount the aftermath of
the Letter's publication, imagining Pope's reading of the
Letter and ensuing furious visit to confront Cibber. Sawney
and_0e11e¥ plays upon the insinuations of Cibber's story
while using the imagery of the ‘Tom tit" story to undermine
Pope’s contention that he operates above the level of libel.

The pamphlet's Cibber taunts Pope:

I know Thee, next, a Waspish Thing,
Whose Bus'ness is to buzz and sting;
Replete with Malice, Spleen, and Spite,
I know that thou can'st Libels write;
From sacred Throne to Stage profane
Each spotless Character can'st stain,
But thus thy Satire's guiltess grown,
Who slanders all Men, slanders heme;
As impotent in Spite as Leye,

Centempt alone by each you move.35

Cibber's story in the Letter is intended to humiliate

Pope by emasculating his public image, but the humiliation

150

 

is not really enacted by making public a private
embarrassment.36 Rather, Cibber offers an appearance of
exposure: we see an image of a private Pope, but the truth
of the story is ultimately irrelevant. His private self is
disconnected from his public image, which itself is
manipulated through claims to display his private self.
Pope sought recourse by demonstrating to the public the
fictionality of the tale. In a letter to his friend William
Warburton, who edited his complete works, Pope instructed
him to include in the notes of the revised Duneiad an
account of Boileau’s Epitre VII, which Pope identifies as
the literary model for Cibber's story.37 Such documentation,
however, was no match for the image of Pope that the public
had already seized on and elaborated.

The pamphlet A1Pepp_npen_EQpe is another example of the
public production of Pope's private life. The pamphlet was
published anonymously on June 1, 1728; Pope believed Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu to be the author, and it was so
attributed in the Grub_Street_JQurnal. It is a
‘compensatory fantasy of Pope’s humiliation” (Guerinot 115),
in which the poet, strolling along the Thames and
‘meditating Verses for the publick Good,” is approached by
two men who, ‘knowing him perfectly well, partly by his
Back, and partly by his Face,” begin to converse with him
about the Duneiad:

on a sudden, one of the Gentlemen hoisted poor
Master Pepe the Poet on his Back, whilst the other

drew out from under his Coat, a long birchen Rod
[. . .] and with the said long Rod, did, with

151

great Violence, and unmerciful Hand, strike Master
Pepe so hard on his naked Posteriors, that he
voided large Quantities of Ichor, or Blood

[. . .]. As soon as this inhuman Whipping was
over, the two Gentlemen made off, and left poor
Master Pepe [. . .]. When Mrs B——-, a good
charitable Woman, and near Neighbour of Master
Repe’s [. . .] chancing to come by, took him up in
her Apron, and buttoning up his Breeches, carried
him to the Water-side, where she got a Boat to
convey him home [. . .].38

The pamphlet dramatizes the desire for revenge on Pope for
his poem by which it, too, is motivated. Pope is denigrated
by the appellation ‘Master” and, of course, by the
administering of a disciplinary beating. The pamphlet ends
with a description of Pope after the attack. He has been
driven mad and ‘continually raves for Pen, Ink, and Paper.”
It is a sad spectacle, the narrator intones,

but we cannot too much admire the Wisdom of
Providence, which brings this Man to the Lash,
whose wanton Wit has been lashing of others. And
that this Madness leads him to rave for Pen, Ink,
and Paper, whereof he has made so ill a Use, and
which has been the Cause of the present Misfortune
he labours under. We hope, when he returns to his
Senses, he will make a better Use of them, and

then may say with holy Da11d1_Tth_eeee_rer_me
that_1_haye_been_affl1cted. (323)

The pamphlet clearly reads as fantasy, but Pope’s
response is revealing. On June 14, he published an
advertisement in the Daily_RQst denying that any such attack
had occurred: ‘Whereas there has been a scandalous Paper
cried about the Streets, under the Title of, A_Pepp_npen
Pepe, insinuating that I was whipped in Hamzflalks, on
Jjnnggiay last. This is to give Notice, that I did not stir

out of my House at all that Day, and the same is a malicious

152

 

and ill—grounded Report. Ae_£;”39 Pope's response indicates
the momentum that scandal writing had gained, such that so
clearly imagined an account would elicit so literal a reply.
The reputation created in print had taken on a life of its
own, to the point that Pope could not afford to ignore such
a pamphlet. Its sheer contrivance does not diminish its
effect; the appearance of public revelation of the private
is sufficient. In his answer, Pope seems both to recognize
the power of A_Pepp_upen_Pepe to influence his reputation
and to be quite oblivious to the immateriality of the
pamphlet’s veracity.

Scandal writing claims to unveil the hidden, private
life; it thus contributes to the production of the concept
of privacy and is invested in the demarcation of public and
private realms. At the same time, however, scandal's
purpose is to violate the very boundary between public and
private that it posits and encourages. Furthermore, as
scandal writing multiplies, when one libel is answered with
another, when each representation of a private life elicits
a counter-representation, the very act of revelation is
undermined by, ironically, exposing this revelation as in
fact a matter of representation and invention. Scandal thus
functions through these simulacrums of exposure -- and it is
not thereby undone because the private selves publicly
produced take on autonomous existences that do not require
their limitation by the actual circumstances of an

individual’s life. Libel laws, attempts to contain print

153

culture, and tireless efforts to regulate reputation are

ultimately overcome by the productive power of print.

154

NOTES

1 Daniel Defoe, yindieatien_ef_the_Press (1718; Los
Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1951) 15.

2 Jonathan Swift, ‘Prediction for the Year 1708”; ‘The
Accomplishment of the First of Mr. Bickerstaff’s
Predictions, Being an Account of the Death of Mr. Partridge,
the Almanack-Maker”; ‘A Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff,
Esq.” in Prese_Werks_ef_Jenathan_SWift, ed. Herbert Davis
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939) 2: 139-64.

3 Irvin Ehrenpreis, SWift1_the1Man1_his_flerks_and_the
Age, 3 vols. (1967; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983) 2: 208.

4 Squ1re1B1ekerstaff_Deteeted in Prese1Werks19f
Jenathan13Wift 2: 220. Davis notes that Addison attributed
authorship of the text to Congreve (Erese_flerks II: xiv).

5 For discussion of the development of the concept of
private life, see Nancy Armstrong and Lennard Tennenhouse,
a: «.9'0. ' ° .0' ' - . e o e - .oo .oo

the_Qrigins_ef_Persenal_L1fe (Berkeley: U of California P,
1992) 150-59.

6 Jonathan Smedley, Gull1Mer1ana1_er1_a_Feurth_Melume
of1M1seellan1es (London, 1728) x.

7 J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope.
1111:1111 (London: Methuen, 1969) xxvii.

3 For discussion of the pamphlet genre and the
development of the public sphere, see Alexandra Halasz, The
U- ,‘ o . ‘ o ' o ' out. - .00 0‘ ’ o ' 03- ‘ 'o

Earl¥1Medern1England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).

9 Poems_ef_Alexander_Pqpe, ed. John Butt (London:
Methuen, 1967) 4: 96-97.

10 See Ian Donaldson, ‘Concealing and Revealing: Pope' s

Epistle1te1Arbuthnet,” Yearbeek_of_Eng11sh_srud1es 18
(1988):181-99.

11 On Pope and the literary marketplace, see Anne Hall
Bailey, ‘How Much for Just the Muse?: Alexander Pope' s
Dnneiad, Book IV and the Literary Market," The_Eighteenth
Century 36 (1995): 24- 37.

12 Helen Deutsch, iResemhlanee_and101sgraeei1_Alexander

155

 

WW (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1996) 184.

13 Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies jn a Subculture
(London: Methuen, 1972) 181—82.

14 J0“ Henley, WW

' O U .
A .9 .. I . . o .0 og‘. . . . ‘ 9.-

te_be_reasted (London, 1736) 10-11.

15 For background on Pope’s contrivance to have Curll
publish his letters, see James McLaverty, ‘The First
Printing and Publishing of Pope's Letters,” Library 6th
ser., 2 (1980): 264-80; and Pat Rogers, ‘The Case of Pope v.
Curll,” Library 5th ser., 27 (1972): 326—31.

16 Pope, ‘First Satire of the Second Book of Horace

Imitated,” 1-2, W, ed. John Butt
(London: Methuen, 1961) 4: 5.

17 Leonard Welsted, Qne_Ep_istle_trLMr_._A1_P_ope (London,
1730) vi.

18 Lewis Theobald, A Letter te Mr. Mist, reprinted in
Alexanderiana, ed. Jonathan Smedley (London, 1728) 326-27.

19 Craig Calhoun, ‘Nationalism and the Public Sphere,”

a_Grand_Diethemy, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997), 81.

2° Deutsch, 171; Dustin Griffin, Alexander129pe1_lhe
Peet_1n_the_Peems (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978) 12.

21 POpe, “Epistle to Cobham,” 19-20, Poems.eLAlexander
Pepe, ed. F. W. Bateson (London: Methuen, 1961) 3: 17.

22 On Pope and character, see David B. Morris,
Alexander_P_ope:__The_Genius_eLSense (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1984) 179- 213. For an extended discussion of the ‘Epistle
to Cobham” and questions of identity, see Christopher Fox,

.‘ .oo 0- o ‘- c ’ 0‘0. .00 o. o 0‘
Early1E1ghteenthzflentury_Br1tain (Berkeley: U of California
P, 1988).

23 Pope, ‘First Satire of the Second Book of Horace

Imitated," 51-58, Poems_ef_Alexander_Pope 4: 9-11.

24 See Samuel Johnson, Life_of_Pope in Liyes_ef1_the
Enelish_Peets, ed. George Birbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon,
1905) 3: 197.

156

25 Voltaire, ‘Letter XXIII: On the Regard that ought to

be shown to Men of Letters,” WW
Nation, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994) 113.

26 See William Kurtz Wimsatt, PortraitmLAlexander
Pope (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965).

27 John Dennis, ‘A True Character of Mr. Pope,” Ihe
WW, ed. Edward Niles Hooker
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1943) 2: 105.

28 Pope, ‘First Satire of the Second Book of Horace
Imitated,” 118-22.

29 Carole Fabricant, ‘Pope's Moral, Political, and

Cultural Combat,” Ihe_E1ghLfienth_Century 29 (1988): 171.

30 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘Verses Address' d to the
Imitator of Horace,”
Poems, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1977) 269.

31 George Duckett, WW
InfallibilitLExaminLd (London, 1729) 3.

32 Smedley, Gulliyeriana xi-xii.

33 Colley Cibber, WW,
ed. Helene Koon (1742; Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark

Memorial Library, 1973). Koon’ s biography of Cibber
provides useful background to the incident; see Koon, Colley
Cibber1_A_Biography (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1986).

34 Helene Koon, ‘Introduction,” A_Letter_frgm_Mry
C1bher.tQ_Mr1_EQpe, xii; see also Maynard Mack, Alexander
Pope;_AyLifie (New York: Norton, 1985) 779.

35 Samney and Colley and Other EQpe Bampblets, ed. W.
Powell Jones (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial
Library, 1960) 7.

36 For a discussion of Cibber’s tactics of humiliation,
see Kristina Straub, ‘Men from Boys: Cibber, Pope, and the

Schoolboy,” WWW
Sexua1_ldeology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 67-88.

37 Pope, ‘Letter to Warburton, 6 November 1742,”
WWW, ed. George Sherburn
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1956) 4: 425—26.

38 Egpp_flpgn_EQpfi, reprinted in Smedley, Alexander1ana

157

 

38 Eopp_flan_BQpe, reprinted in Smedley, Alexanderiana
322-23.

39 The paij Post, June 14, 1728.

158

5
IF

 

CONCLUSION

In this dissertation, I have presented a two—pronged
argument. First, I have argued that the concepts of scandal
and the hack were developed to legitimate satire and the
professional author. Writers of personal satire pointed to
scandal as the defamatory genre, thus suggesting that their
own work, as satire, was distinct from detractive practices.
Similarly, authors participating in but nevertheless
ambivalent about the literary marketplace invented the hack
as the embodiment of commercial authorship. In both cases,
the construction of the high form is contingent on the
acceptance of a concomitant low form with which the
disreputable elements of the former are associated.

This opposition between high and low forms is mirrored
in the period's conceptions of privacy and publicity. In
the second part of my argument, I have attempted to
establish that scandal writing served as the conduit through
which public authority in the period was mediated by private
life. In keeping with emerging notions of subjectivity,
scandal writing was predicated on the notion that public
standing should be contingent on private character.
Political and cultural authority could be affirmed or
undermined with the exposure of actions in the private
realm. As accounts of private lives circulated in print
culture, however, competing representations of the private

self (Pope's self-portrayals and those by his rival writers,

159

 

c

 

 

for example) revealed that self as constructed in, rather
than existing independently of, print. These proliferating
selves did not conform to libel law's conception of identify
as a stable entity accurately and adequately expressed in a
similarly unchanging reputation. Like the Grub Street hack,
the private self produced in print is a fiction presented as
faithful depiction. The two lines of my argument come
together in the idea of the constructed nature of scandal
writing and its object: the private selves scandal writing
claimed to expose were as much inventions as the very
concepts of scandal and satire, literary author and hack.
Scandal writing, treated primarily by critics such as
Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter and Lennard Davis as a
contributor to the emergence of the novel, merits study in
its own right. It exemplifies one dimension of changing
attitudes toward public authority in the period, as such
authority became increasingly contingent on public approval
and such approval was granted or withheld in part after the
evaluation of private character. Consideration of scandal
writing also expands our notions of public discourse beyond
the boundaries of Habermasian critical-rational debate to
include the highly personal but publicly relevant discourse
of scandal. The examination of scandal writing thus
contributes to recent efforts to theorize and historicize
the categories of private and public, and advances a more
complete picture of the eighteenth-century British public

sphere.

160

 

This dissertation also takes part in an on-going effort
to re-evaluate our conceptions of high and low culture in
the period. In my argument, I have sought to break down the
distinction between satire and scandal, literary and hack
authors, and to suggest that these differences were
purposefully invented in the period. When we circumvent
such a hierarchical understanding of print culture, we
broaden the explorable terrain of eighteenth-century
literature to include genres like scandal narratives and
pamphlet attacks. An awareness of this strain of
eighteenth-century writing also destabilizes customary
literary classifications, insisting that we read some of the
most familiar examples of high literary satire as themselves
instances of scandal writing.

The careful delineation of satire from scandal in the
period was an important dimension of the project of
legitimating the professional author at the expense of the
working writer. Contemporaries saw in defamatory writing a
kind of public discourse they feared would come to define
emerging print culture, and they sought to contain it under
the stigmatizing labels of libel and scandal. When we
approach scandal writing as a significant eighteenth—century
genre, we read through these efforts at suppression as
themselves indications of scandal’s consequence and
reconfigure our understanding of eighteenth-century print

culture as a whole.

161

 

 

B I BL I OGRAPHY

162

 

 

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