In Our Time - The Scriblerus Club

Episode Date: June 9, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Scriblerus Club. The 18th century Club included some of the most extraordinary and vivid satirists ever to have written in the English language. We are given giants and midgets, implausible unions with Siamese twins, diving competitions into the open sewer of Fleet-ditch, and Olympic-style pissing competitions: "Who best can send on high/The salient spout, far streaming to the sky". But these exotic images were part of an attempt by Pope, Swift and their cadres to show a world in terrible decline: "Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires,And unawares Morality expires.Nor public flame, nor private dares to shine;Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!Lo! Thy dread empire, Chaos! Is restored:Light dies before thy uncreating word".So wrote Alexander Pope in his great mock epic verse, The Dunciad. Who were the Scriblerans? And what in eighteenth century society had driven them to such disdain and despair?With John Mullan, Senior Lecturer in English, University College London; Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English, Royal Holloway, University of London; Marcus Walsh, Kenneth Allott Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the 18th century Scoblerus Club included some of the most extraordinary and vivid satirists ever to have written in the English language.

We're given giants and midgets, implausible unions with Siamese twins, diving competitions into the open sewers of third. Fleet Street and ripe, lewd language. These exotic images were part of an attempt by Pope, Swift and their friends to show a world in terminal decline. Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires, and unawares morality expires. Nor public flame, nor private dares to shine. Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine.

Lo, thy dread empire, chaos is restored. Light dies before thy uncreating word. So wrote Alexander Pope in his mock epic verse the donciard. Who were the Scriblerans and what in 18th century society had caused them such disdain and despair? With me to discuss the Scribleros Club is John Mullen, senior lecture in English at University College London, Marcus Walsh, Kenneth Allett Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, and Judith Hawley, Senior Lecture in English at Royal Holloway University of London. John Mullen, can you give us a sense at the end of the 17th beginning of the 18th century

of the coffee house culture out of which this club emerged? Yes, I mean, it's a... London's a place where for the literate and the ambitious man, the business of socialising in a kind of semi-public way has taken on a new importance. And the coffee house is the great place where people do this. It's a place where you go to exchange news, but also to try and win friends and influence people.

and when the young Alexander Pope, and we're going to talk about it a bit on this programme, first arrived in London as a very ambitious young writer, he went to coffee houses, and he hung out with people who mattered there. So are we talking, when you say it emerged, can you give us just one or two strokes in, sketches in why it emerges dead in that way?

It was coffee houses they were selling coffee, and they had newspapers in it and so on. Yeah, it's a sort of, as a generalisation, I think it's a shift of influence from a kind of courtly culture where the court is where you go if you want to become somebody to a different more modern, more kind of urban culture where the centres of influence are more dispersed and no longer at the court.

And one of the great clubs, which is in a way a precursor of the Scribleris Club, the late 17th and early 18th century, is the Kit Kat Club, which became very famous because, one of its members, Nella, the painter did portraits of its members. And these people, I mean, they're important people. Lots of them are aristocrats and government ministers as well as writers. But they meet in a private room in a tavern, originally, to kind of exert influence on each other's behalf.

The Popans were part of that Kid Cat Club, and Addison and Steele. They're very famously connected, obviously, with the spectator, but also with the club life. What attracted them to this club, these young literary men? You talked about influence. You talked about the court moving. So you can understand by Irish Democrats and politicians went there. And we have to remember that Addison was a politician,

and Steele was a politician, and literary men saw themselves as part of an influential political circuit. But are Pope and Swift going there for the same reason? Yeah, you're going there to advance yourself. And this is still a society in which all sorts of forms of patronage matter very much. And that's how you advance yourself. If you're a writer, you don't become famous or you don't think of yourself as aiming for fame by selling lots of books.

You aim for fame by attaching yourself to people who matter. And they may simply be rich patrons or they may be powerful writers. And Addison, for instance, Pope attaches himself to Addison, who presides at Button's coffee house as a kind of secular prince of culture. So we have them with this. And then they split away and form their own club. Julius Hawley, why did they split? And what did they want to do with their own club, this Scriblerus club?

They split for a number of reasons. The first is that the Uigs and Tories, which are the major sort of political groupings, not exactly parties, but sort of tendencies and political alliances, they were in dispute over a number of issues, including control of power and places, the kind of patronage that John's been talking about, but also on a few issues such as the War of Spanish Succession, which was being fought at this time.

And there's a strong divide between the Whigs and Tories on this issue. The Chief Minister Robert Harley, who was, by this time, sort of attached to the Tory cause, was keen to end this war. And in effect, he recruited Swift to write for him against the war. Swift was keen to attach himself to political powers, John says, for his own sake, but also to advance friends of his.

And so he brought in his friend, the Irish clerican poet Thomas Parnell. Pope was becoming dissatisfied with Addison and Steele and how they lauded it over the literary world. And Pope was encouraged to join this grouping, partly wanting to find congenial people. That sense of belonging is very important to them. So they formed this club

But it was the writers who formed this club. Does that make it a distinctive club at this stage? Well, it's writers and politicians. Harley's there. Also, Harle's sometimes colleague, sometimes rival. Henry St. John Weichamp, Bollingbrook, is sometimes a member of the group. The glue is really John Arbuthnot, who is a court physician and a general clubbable guy, and he held them together as a social group.

And Barclays around and so on. And there they are. I think it's worth pointing out to listeners. this stage that Swift and Pope started by trying to court patronage from the Whigs, back to John Mullins' point, thought they wanted to as influence, and having, as it were, failed to do that, they then were suborned to, tempted into, by this great man Harley, effectively, our first Prime Minister, rather than Walpole, to support the Tories. So would they regard that as a major shift, or just to take up Mullins' point, as sort of the way that if you didn't get on

that way, you're got on that way? It's partly that. As I said, these weren't part is with rules and membership and so on. It is partly about shifting alliances. But there's also a significant cultural shift between the Whigs and the cultural difference between the Wigs and the Tories. And this leads us into the sort of the Scriblerus project and the heart of the satire.

Should we talk about Whig culture a little bit? No, I want to say that actually they backed the wrong horse really, didn't they? Because having been, after looking at it in political terms, having sort of chased the wigs and being sort of put off, They didn't persist long enough. They whipped across the Tories. This man, Harley, was a brilliant man.

Got Holder Swift, made him right, made him proper Gandai's rope. Sprung Defoe out of Newgate jail, had Defoe in his left pocket and then Swift in his right pocket. So he was working on. Then the death of Queen Anne, then the entry of the Hanoverian, George I first, outgo the Tories. In come the Whigs. And then the Sclerberra's Club is in trouble. The influence they've been looking for has deserted them. Yes, they completely disperse on them.

the death of Queen Anne. Arbeth not loses his court position, loses the premises where they used to meet. Harley and Bollingbrook are threatened with impeachment. Harley is actually imprisoned in the tower. Bollingbrook flees to France and for a while joins the Jacobites. And Swift is in fear of, certainly fear of prosecution, flees back to Ireland with Parnell. The death of Queen Anne is crucial to the ending of this group. So they are scattered. But in that year, Marcus Walsh, what they've done is they've associated themselves around the writing of, let's call it a book. Perhaps you can find a better word for it. It's the memoirs of the extraordinary life works and discoveries of Martinez Scriberer.

Now, what was that and what fun did they have with it? The memoirs of Martinus Scableris is a satire chiefly on learning. It's not especially a political book. It's a book which sets out, as Pope puts it, to ridicule all false. tastes in learning. And insofar as it's a story about a character, it's a story about a man who, in Pope's words, had capacity enough and had dipped into every art and science, but injudiciously in each. There isn't really a narrative, there isn't really a story, nobody dies and nobody gets married. Well, actually, several people get married, but it's not a comedy.

You couldn't get married without being a comedy. In fact, not only two people, but three people get married at one stage, but more of that later. There are a number of episodes, and there are all of them episodes which are in one way or another, parodic or bellesques of certain kinds of false learning. The father is Cornelius Scriblerus. The son is Martinez. Martinez is not born at the beginning of the story. We learn much about Cornelius' pedantry, his antiquarianism.

his possession of a crusted and obscure shield upon which the newly born Martinez is born in for his baptism. We learn about Cornelius's interests in ancient prescriptions regarding diet. He dietic himself according to Galen's prescription in order to beget his son and prescribes a very minimal diet for Martinez, the reward of which is looseness. And after that you get a whole seal. of pirates of different kinds of knowledge, medicine, anatomy, the law criticism.

So they were piling into this book and it had tremendous effects because part of this book, as it were transmuted into book three of Gulliver's travels later, the basis of what was happening in this book became the springboard, at least for the Dunciad for Pope's great work. Was this the centre of the club? Did they gather on Saturday nights and say, did they all bring pages to it? I'm trying to get a feeling of this place in London then. 1713, they're meeting in a place, these 30 or 40 people, and what do they do? Do they bring stuff to the table?

What happens? They, it's a small group, of course, and they clearly bring writing, and there is clearly some kind of formal activity. John Gay is described as the secretary of the club, and he took down ideas, but no doubt there was writing in their own separate homes and there was discussion of the writing. It's clear that Arbuthnot wrote a good deal of Martin Scribleris. It's clear that Pope revised a good deal of it. And this process went on, in fact, not only in 1713-14, but for years afterwards. It wasn't, it was written in, and most of it was written in 1713-14, as you say, the club was reformed temporarily now. But it wasn't published until 1941. So, I'm very sorry, 1741. It's the eyesight, it's the edge.

1741. So what's, why is that gap? Are they frightened to publisher? It's not a piece of writing which belongs to one person. It's not a piece of writing, which is a project with a publisher in mind. It's part of a whole body of writing of all, of many different kinds which emerge at different dates and take different forms of publication. Perry Bathis, which will come on to later, the art of falling in poetry, is separately published. The Martinus Scriblerus is published amongst Pope's miscellaneous works in 1741. There are much more formal works, I think, which are products of these meetings, three hours after marriage, for example,

which have their own life on the stage and in print. But Martinus Scribleris is much more. more episodic, it's much more a product of scattered papers, scattered writing, scattered thinking, around a theme. John Mullen, Marcus talked about their abhorrence of false knowledge. Can you just tell us what the false knowledge was they were tilting at? And did it come out of a big sulk that they'd been pushed out of the sun of the radius of power?

Anyway, leave that to once. That's a secondary question. But so what was this false knowledge that they're hammering? Well, I mean, it's modern intellectual life, really. I think it's important to realize that what they're doing is not unprecedented because you talked a little bit about sort of the dates, about the meeting and then separating a meeting again. I mean, to my mind, the whole Scriblerus project starts off really quite playfully,

and that's one of the reasons. I think the memoirs of Martinus Scribleris, which is an early, as it were, playful work. They almost do it for themselves. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons it's not published. They're not trying in that work, as it were, to shock or excite people. And their project becomes, in a way, darker as it goes on, as their game playing becomes something much more like a sort of preoccupying

critique of the sort of stupidity of modern intellectual life. So there's an old tradition, which is the tradition of, I don't know, writers like Moore and Erasmus and Rabelais, even has a name, Cyril Luder. You show your learning by playing with it, by parodying, by mocking, and by enjoying doing that and displaying your erudition in kind of facetious ways. And in a way, that's what they're doing at the beginning. But you said, and the interesting, just to take out one of the points there, You said they were against modern intellectual life,

modern intellectual life of the early 18th century. And they do seem to be railing against that, increasingly darkly, as you say, increasingly vehemently. They seem to have an anti-enlightenment agenda. Yeah, well, I think that's one way of looking at it. I mean, these writers are different, and I think Swift is more profoundly anti-modern than Pope is. But essentially, the idea that, if you like,

we're going to know more tomorrow than we knew yesterday, to put it very bluntly. Seems to them, increasingly seems to them, a bizarre modern vanity. The idea that in all sorts of walks of life, what they call natural philosophy, what we call science is the most obvious one, but also in technology in the business of commerce and the financing of the state, which they're deeply suspicious of, which they're deeply suspicious of, which they seem as a wig form of corruption rather than a kind of form of sort of increasing progress.

All these tendencies that you can put it under one word actually, the tendency to enter a world of projects and projectors. The idea that there are people who can improve things, that seems to them the great modern vanity. And it's an idea that's there in, as it were, intellectual life in writing as well as it is in science or finance. I need to round up this section, Judith Hawley. Can you briefly tell us about Swift's early book written, I think, in 1696, published in 1703?

So it's 10 years before the Glorishka. But it's very germane to it, the battle of the books, where what John Mullen is saying is, we can talk about it in terms of the battle of the books. Now, can you just briefly tell us what that is about and why it's important? Yes, the Battle of the Books is an allegorical tale of a fight in a library between books by the ancients, people like Aristotle, Homer and so on, and the moderns, people like bacon and so on. And it's part of a larger war, the war between the ancients and the moderns.

And to pick up on what John was saying about this attack on modern culture, the scribalians, as they backed the wrong horse in Queen Anne, also backed the wrong horse in arguing that the ancient. ancients had discovered everything that was worth knowing. And it's not just discoverers, it's to do with a sense of values. For the Scriblerans, for Swift, for the ancients, the classical texts, Homer, Virgil, Cicero, and so on, were living texts.

They embodied values which a gentleman absorbed whole in his education and kept with him and the knowledge of human nature that the ancients had was enduring, and it's all a gentleman needed. Whereas the moderns employing techniques of empirical research, scientific dissection and so on, applied these techniques to the writings of the ancients. They treated them as dead works which could be dissected with philology. And there was a Pope produced an edition of Shakespeare in which the leading scholar of the day discovered 50 faults errors received.

And Pope was incandescent with fury at this. He said something like, I haven't got it in front of me, and gentlemen can read everything that the author reasonably wants him to understand at one glance, as it were. So this was a real, very, very interesting battle. Yes, it's still, yeah, it's a very interesting battle, isn't it? It seems like a minor dispute. The battle of the books was prompted by an argument over the... Books in a library fight each other.

The ancient fights are modern. It's very funny. There's a spider and there's a bee bringing the wax and honey, sweetness and light, and that's the ancients and the modern... as bringing out. So it's very good. It is very good. Just so people know what it's all about.

Yes. If they haven't read it in the last week or two. The whole point of the spy goes, it were, generates stuff out of itself. And that is kind of what moderns do. They just kind of have mad ideas and then follow them. Whereas the bee sucks from the wisdom that is there. And get honey and wax sweetness and light.

But Swift takes that on. We've got the bat of the books. Now I've got the Sclibaris. Now we've got book three of Gulliver's travels, where he hammers the raw society and science. And this is really interesting to come back. to the Enlightenment project, they will not have this examination, they will not have

the examination of the texts, they will not have, you've sent it up, how many sunbeams can you get out of a cucumber and so on, they won't have this enlightenment project there. So you see, there's a line going through Swift there, is that a critique of modern society, he wants to fix the language as well, doesn't it? Yeah, well, I think Swift, I mean, Swift takes it a lot further than Pope, and I think has a much darker view of things. Swift thinks that, as it were, the new faith in experience and measurement

and the capacity of human beings to expand knowledge is itself a kind of madness, a kind of enthusiasm to use the current word. And people go mad for projects and they go mad for scientific projects but also for financial projects. And in case we should think that that is a kind of bizarre. sort of unrealistic view of things. We should remember that there are kind of strange crises in these men's life. In terms of Swift's conviction, for instance, that the whole sort of new world of commerce and finance is mad,

there is a huge stock market collapse in 1720, the South Sea bubble, which seems to vindicate him. But, you know, he actually believes that Newtonian science, as we would call it, is just another crazy idea. Marcus, can you go into Gulliver for us in terms of this seeing human nature at the time from many different angles as, either very small, very large, very stupid, as a mad project? Can you just give us some flavour from Gulliver of that? Certainly. The key book, from this point of view, is the third book of Gavis travels, the visit to the Academy of Lodagh.

Gardo and the island of Laputa, where he sees the experiments of the, what is in effect, the Royal Society being carried out in front of him. These experiments are bizarre. They're actually based on real accounts of experiments, the philosophical transactions, though what Swift gives us are the most extreme versions of those experiments, returning excreted to its original constituents, extracting sunshine out of cucumbers. Blowing up dogs. Blowing up dogs, indeed. And at some points, Gulliver is an observer, and he is our reasonable guy watching the experiments being carried out

and not committed to them. He watches a man producing random textual outputs from a word frame, something we'd recognise, I guess, as a computer. And the inventor of this says that, I want all the credit for this, and Gulliver himself, the ironist at this point, says when I return to England, I will be sure to give you all the credit and take none for myself. On the other hand, Gulliver himself is conned, and he's conned both at the small and at the larger scale.

He meets the Strollbrooks, for example, the people who live forever. And when he hears about them, he's enraptured. And these are a miracle, and they are a miracle in allegorically of science, though they're not a miracle of science in the narrative itself. And he gives us a rapturous account of all the things he would do were he a Strolbrug and lived forever. But these Strolbrugs, of course, are, as John has pointed out, an aspect of a much darker side of Swift's vision.

They're about old age, they're about what happens to all of us when we get old, and Gulliver becomes disabused. But there's another sense in which Gulliver never becomes disabused. he never becomes disabused of his vanity, his pride. And right at the end, he returns to England, having met with the rational horses, the Huinims, and having become convinced that pure rationality is the way forward. And he concludes the tale by telling us that he is prepared to accept

and indeed expects all kinds of vice in human life, but the only vice he will not accept is pride. But can I, before we move on from you, Can you just give us the quotation from the giant king of Bombingan, to whom Gulliver has been boasting about the virtues and qualities of, let's call it, the British way of life at that time, and then the man very carefully sums up what has been said to him and finishes. Have you got the sentence in Rwolding?

Yes, indeed I have. Yes, Gulliver finds himself telling not only the king of Brobtingnad, but also his win in master in book four about the wonders of European civilization, which include the invention of gunpowder, for example, by which you can explode a city and watch hundreds of bodies falling from the sky to the infant diversion of all the spectators. So that's in book four.

And when the King of Brobdignag, here's his account, in fact, of parliamentary government in England, the King of Brobdicknag's conclusion is that... And the social and the way you get on and the way the law works. The way the society works is described very coldly. And actually, in one way, realistically, actually totally corrupt

and faintly lunatic. He then concludes with this terrific sentence. That the human race are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. Right, now we move to the Duncee.

Well, I think Gulliver says something rather brilliantly like where you've got to, dear reader, you know, you've got to realise this man has kind of had very confined views, his lives in this very peculiar pace, and you'll just have to be tolerant of him. The brilliant thing about Gulliver, I mean, just before we remember it,

is that it is another of these kind of mock books. The whole point of what we're talking about is it's Gulliver's account. Swift's not there. Swift doesn't tell you what he thinks. So it's Gulliver's failure to comprehend constantly what he's saying that is the kind of, as much the point of the book as the sort of reflections of 18th century society in encounter. Is one allowed to say that the conviction of the prose in that particular speech

leads one to think that that will be Swift's view of human nature. Yeah, but the joke is based on the fact that it's a view of human nature which is derived from Gulliver's own boast. Dunciad. So this club, 1713, the great figures emerging are Swift and Pope.

There was John Gay here at the Beggas Opera. There's Parnel, there's Arbuthnot, and all the various persons around it. But the Dunciad can be, not to come out of it, but Pope obviously went to the one of the two founders of that club. It was first published in 1728. Can you outline the story for us?

And why he wanted to write it in the first place? It did come out of the Scriblerus project. It's part of this satire on false learning and a satire on the modern tendencies and culture, including materialism. You know, people writing for money is part of the project. And it's a mock epic, so it's a parody of things like the Iliad and the Aeneid. So it has an anti-hero at its centre at Dunce.

Now, part of the point of this anti-hero is that the modern hero is not heroic. He can't do very much. much, which leads to a lot of problems with the plot. He basically has to sit there while things go on around him. And also the modern hero is interchangeable. In the first version, it's a character called Tibald, who's a version of the Shakespeare scholar Theobald. In the later version, the last version, it's Collie Kibber, who's the poet laureate.

And in the first book, we're introduced with a sort of parody of Virgil to a statement of the subject, the mighty mother and a son who brings. the Smithfield muses to the ear of kings, I sing. So the goddess dullness chooses the dunce as her hero. And he's the Smithfield muses. This is the east end of London where poverty and vice and crime and low forms of entertainment are based. And the progress of the poem is the march of this kind of dullness,

dumbing down and so on, westwards towards the fashionable districts of town and to the court. In the first book, not very much happens. We have to move on a bit faster than that. If not very much happens, can we skip it? In the second book, this non-entity is celebrated with a series of games. And we've alluded to these before. This is a sort of modern Olympics, perfect for the city of London.

There's a pissing competition where publishers have to see who can produce the most year-in and then win a prize. And my favourite game is when the journalists have to prove how low their preparedness. astute by diving into the fleet ditch. Dark dexterity of groping well. That's right. They dive into a sewer. Yes, they dive into a sewer.

And one goes down so far, they fear he's never going to come up again. I'm very pleased the one on the modders of this programme is never knowingly relevant. Well, it is, I mean, it is, the first three books of the Dunciad, which comprised the whole thing when it first came out. I mean, it is recognisable.

I know relevance is the enemy, but it is recognisable. It's Grub Street. It's a world of publishing. What I'd like to know, Junior, could this be said to have some truth in it, that Pope was

stung by the criticism of him on the level of scholarship. He was very badly stung. He is a man of the novice, genius. And he started out to get the people who'd got him. Great forwardly, I mean,

Tibald is Theobold. He'd got him. He was going to get him. And he did get him make a fool and a dance. How did he move from that, rather narrow base, personal bitterness, to expand it to a very massive critique of the whole of the way society was going? Can you just tell us that? Yes, it's this sense that this tiny little act, the criticism of his scholarship,

is a sign of a much wider malaise. And the people that he opposed are not real gentlemen. You know, you referred to the sense of the gentleman being able to understand everything that the author means at one term. The people he opposed is a people who have to write for money. And Tibald is a professional scholar. He's not a gentleman. He can't rely on his background.

He has to do things for money. So it's a money thing. And then how does it broaden out from the money thing to include the whole of society, morality, religion? The whole thing is taken on. And at the end, it's great Anak comes in. So how does that, Mark, because you want to take this up. I mean, how do we go here?

There is an important connection between genuineness of knowledge, genuineness of language and morality. A gentleman sees at once all that a to know that could possibly intend. Pope writes, as you pointed out, in the first note to the Dunciad. And there is a distinction between the life of the gentlemanly mind, a humanist kind of learning, which, as Judith pointed out, is involved with the writing of the ancients and the new professionalism. And it's about money, certainly. But it's also about a new methodology. And that is true for the humane sciences

as it is for the natural sciences. And just as a concern for good thinking, good writing in the ancients, has a moral connection for Pope and Swift as for earlier humanist writers for Rasmus or Rabe, for example. So there's a connection between good thinking in the natural sciences. you concentrate on the meanest works to be found in nature, then you are not thinking about God. There needs always to be a concern for the Scriblerians with the final cause, with God himself. And a theology which is polemical or which is concerned with purely mortal or mechanical or rational issues is not a theology.

which in the end goes to the issue of how men and women should live well in society. So every kind of learning is relevant. John Mullen, did they use particular, did they actually use, you mentioned Rabelah earlier on, did they actually use deliberately shocking language to jolt their readers to. Yes, I think they did, although I think what would shock them sometimes is different from what would shock us. I mean, we notice how it's full of audio and pissing competitions in the Dunciad

and Gulliver kind of pedantically tells you about, defecating and how in the land of dwarves they deal with all his shit in Gulliver's travels. We think that's shocking. Actually, I think a lot of the time what shocked people with the Dunciad, for instance, was the weird way that Pope combines kind of religious symbols and language with this kind of debased world. So, for instance, one of the wonderful things about the Dunciad, if you're a kind of literary critic,

is that it takes the great religious, poem of the English language, Milton's Paradise Lost, and turns it on its head. It's absolutely full of paradise lost. But this is an uncreated world, a world of darkness, a world where somehow these kind of modern writers and philosophers have managed to reverse the process of creation. Judith, what impact did it have at the time, the Dunciad? The Dunciad had enormous impact, and it led to different versions of it. Pope was actually setting out to have impact. He was setting out to provoke, and he very much liked to sting people into response, so he could then say, look how they're all attacking me, although he had started it. So he published a three-book poem,

and then when people attacked him, he incorporated their criticisms into a sort of mock scholarly apparatus. And then when Collie Kibber attacked him in a provoked response, he published the Donsead in four books. It's one of the immediate impacts, apart from the sort of, of how it's all fed into the Danciat and his sense of the awfulness of culture, is that this figure of Scriblerus and this idea of Scriblerian satire got taken up more widely. And although it comes out of this particular group and so on, Brian Hammond talks about there being a mode called Scriblerian satire. And various people, including Henry Fielding, when he first tried to launch himself in public,

called himself Scriblerus Secundus. Marcus, would it be true to say that had Queen Anne not died, that there wouldn't have been this intensity of satire, that it was provoked by the politics of the time, both by the party politics, by the withdrawal of patronage from these men? I wouldn't want to understate the importance of politics to all of this. It makes a tremendous difference. It creates a Scrablerian diaspora,

1714 and that has an effect on how the Danciad and Gulliver's travels are composed, but also I think that you can overstate the importance of politics in this. The satire, which is Scriblerian, is not only a product of this moment, it also precedes this moment in the Battle of the Books written in the first years of the century and in the Tale of a Tub published with the Battle of the Books in 1704. this line of attack on human vanity of attack on false kinds of learning in judicious learning

and of the connection of false learning with a new commercial society and a new kind of immorality antedates all of this and it provides an intellectual line which goes all the way to essentially. You could say that they have as it were an illusion which is destined to be shattered at some stage

the illusion that men of literature and men of power can somehow be in alliance in a virtuous state and I mean, they're doomed to discover. It's a very classical idea, isn't it? I mean, going to Cicero and so. But it's almost like tectonic plates, isn't it? We're coming to, they, the screams of agony on the part of Swift and Pope,

and they are screams on the part of Swift. He petitions Queen Anne. It's nothing to do with it. To put the, to set to the language, to ascertain the language, it must not change anymore. It's changed enough. It must be like Latin. It must be like Virges, it can always be the same. This is the great cry of the classicists, the modern world, the Enlightenment Project, as I just go before, is to be resisted.

In that sense, we talk about and who are still, we are still talking about as examine human nature, but they're fighting as they must see it, a massive rearguard action. Yeah, I mean, the only qualification for the act, the only thing that makes Swift somebody we still read rather than a sort of grumpy or maddened reactionary is that he put that sense of modernity, in its madness into these satires. And his satires, which were all incidentally published anonymously, they didn't have even his name on, were all written, as it were, in a voice other than his own.

So most famously, there's a modest proposal where somebody suggests that you can solve the problems of overpopulation and starvation in Ireland by getting the Irish to eat their babies. But as it were, Swift creates somebody who has got a brilliant idea, a project indeed. Here's a great idea. Now, Swift doesn't tell you what to make of that.

He gives over his works to these strange, mad, modern voices. And that's what makes them satire rather than just sort of complaints. And they're all better writers. You know, we have come to value the dunces a bit more than we used to. We don't entirely believe Pope when he puts them all in the bottom of the Fleet River. Yeah, Defoe. He made Defoe a dance. And Eliza Hayward and all sorts of people. we now read again, but they're better writers.

You know, it's quite simply that the Dunseyead is a great poem. At the time when it came out, did people say, no, this is wonderful. But it's wrong. He's just wrong in this analysis of society. Did anybody put forward a counterblast? Well, it's hard to say because this sense of their wrongness depends on hindsight, doesn't it? Now the moderns have won the battle. But it isn't necessarily clear at the time that this is.

is the case. Right. Yeah, and I mean, there are, you know, this is a deeply combative literary world. One of the reasons that what the Scriblerians was doing were not so unusual. Everybody's writing against everybody else. And there are literary figures

who were, as it were, pro-modern. Daniel DeFoe's first published work was called an essay on projects. It's not ironical. It's totally, you know, it's a whole load of suggestions. Some of them very good. Education of women, better roads. some of them slightly weird and swift-y and sounding attacks on books to fund better lunatic asylums, for instance.

And he, you know, he was a man with lots of good new ideas. But there was this thing that they got into where they described what they deplored in Marcus, with such relish that they were actually telling us in ways that we would appreciate the things that they said we should deplore. I think that's true of the Danciad, isn't it? That there's a kind of the first three books. Would you use the word hypocrisy, though? Would I use the word?

Well, Marcus, you're passing it around between the three years. I think I would not use the word. I would always talk tonight in what he hated, you know. I think that's what satirists often do, isn't it? And the mode of satire is irony, isn't it, which is, well, the poinemes describe is saying the thing which is not. They don't speak in their own voices, they don't speak straight. They're always concealing what they want to say. So in that sense it's hypocritical, but maybe not in a lot of sense.

He loved his hacks, didn't he? I mean, his poem, you know, the dance he had like a little glass box and he puts them inside and watches them crawl around. I mean, he cultivated his hatreds. I think he's fascinated by his enemies. We've talked about the issue of editing, and clearly Pope was very taken aback indeed by Theobald's Shakespeare restored, published in 1726,

which destroyed what he had done in his edition of Shakespeare, published 1723 to 5. Pope had edited Shakespeare as a gentleman poet. Theobald had edited Shakespeare as a professional. But Pope always wanted to be an editor in a way that Danciad is an edited text. It's a self-edited text, a brilliant piece of contextual contemporary editing. I don't want to talk about hypocrisy. I think I would be happy to talk about, particularly in Pope's case, a kind of tension between a new world which he at some level of his being would like to belong to,

and which in some way he applauded. nature and nature's laws lay hidden light, God said, let Newton be and all was light. Nature's laws were hidden night. Then along came Newton and gave the light. Along came Bentley also and gave the light. Along came Theobald.

And Pope was concerned about that and he attacked Bentley's writings and Theobal's writings, but he wanted to be part of it too. So there's a tension. There's a kind of hypocrisy about money. though perhaps. There's all this stuff about commerce and Grub Street. You know, one of the most important facts about Pope is that he's one of the very few poets in the history of the language who made himself a rich man from poetry and then turn round and wrote a great mock epic about the Grubstreet race.

The happy fugitives of the Grubstreet race. So there's a kind of hypocrisy perhaps in that. Judith, do you think briefly that there's a sense in which a lot of this would not have happened without that one year of there being the Slibera's club? I think so. I think it's that coalition of a fine mind that really works. And one of the things that I like about it is that it's such a collaborative project. Nobody quite knows who wrote what, and I think it allowed them to adopt different voices, to experiment in different ways. And in a sense, they're often hankering after that period of collegiality,

which they never quite recapture. What about you, John, briefly? Well, I mean, the Scribleris Club kind of became a sort of verge. virtual thing, didn't it? And they wrote wonderful letters to each other. And so it existed as a kind of an ideal of collaboration out there, even while they were isolated from each other. Well, thank you very much, Judith Hawley, John Mullen and Marcus Walsh. And next week I'll be discussing pagan gods in the Renaissance. And on this philosopher thing, Marx has taken a lead, which beats me, but still thousands of people are voting. There you go. Thanks for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio.