The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, 1660-1785

The Restoration period begins in 1660, the year in which King Charles II (the exiled
Stuart king) was restored to the English throne.

England, Scotland, and Wales were united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union.

The period is one of increasing commercial prosperity and global trade for Britain.

Literacy expanded to include the middle classes and even some of the poor.

Emerging social ideas included politenessa behavioral standard to which anyone

might aspireand new rhetoric of liberty and rights, sentiment and sympathy.

Religion and Politics

The monarchical restoration was accompanied by the re-opening of English theatres

(closed during Cromwell's Puritan regime) and the restoration of the Church of
England as the national church.

Church and state continued to be closely intertwined. The Test Act of 1673 required
all holders of civil and military offices to take the sacrament in the Anglican Church
and deny transubstantiation; those who refused (e.g., Protestant Dissenters and Roman
Catholics) were not allowed to attend university or hold public office.

King Charles II, though he outwardly conformed to Anglicanism, had Catholic

sympathies that placed him at odds with his strongly anti-Catholic Parliament.

Charles had no legitimate heir. His brother James (a Catholic) was next in line to the
throne. Parliament tried to force Charles to exclude his brother from the line of
succession. Charles ended this "Exclusion Crisis" by dissolving Parliament.

The Exclusion Crisis in a sense created modern political parties: the Tories, who
supported the king, and the Whigs, who opposed him.

Once crowned, King James II quickly suspended the Test Act. In 1688, the birth of
James's son so alarmed the country with the prospect of a new succession of Catholic
monarchs that secret negotiations began to bring a new Protestant ruler from Europe
to oust James.

In 1688, William of Orange and his wife Mary (James's daughter) landed in England
with a small army and seized poweran event known as the Glorious or Bloodless
Revolution.

James II fled to exile in France. For over 50 years his supporters (called Jacobites,
from the Latin Jacobus, for James) mounted unsuccessful attempts to restore the
Stuart line of Catholic kings to the British throne.

Queen Anne, another of James II's daughters, was the next monarch (1702-1714).
Anne's reign was a prosperous time for Britain, as the War of the Spanish Succession
(1702-1713) created new trade opportunities.

England, Scotland, and Wales were united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union.

As Anne, like Mary, had no heirs, the succession was settled upon the royal house of
Hanover. A long line of King Georges (I-IV) ensued, which is why the eighteenth
century is also known as the Georgian period.

We now associate the term "Whig" with liberalism and "Tory" with conservatism, but
the principles behind these two parties remained fluid and responsive to political
circumstance throughout the period.

Robert Walpole, a Whig politician who served under both King George I and George
II, held a parliamentary seat from 1701 until 1742. Walpole was the first man to be
described as a "prime" minister.

During King George III's long rule (1760-1820) Britain became a major colonial
power. At home and abroad, George III's subjects engaged with a new rhetoric of
liberty and radical reform, as they witnessed and reacted to the revolutions in France
and America.

The Context of Ideas

The court of King Charles II championed the right of England's social elite to pursue
pleasure and libertinism.

King Charles II authorized two new companies of actors. Women began to appear on
stage in female roles.

Dogmatism, or the acceptance of received religious beliefs, was widely regarded as

dangerous.

Charles II approved the Royal Society for London for the Improving of Natural
Knowledge (1662). The Royal Society revolutionized scientific method and the
dispersal of knowledge.

The specialized modern "scientist" did not exist; Royal Society members studied
natural history (the collection and description of facts of nature), natural philosophy
(study of the causes of what happens in nature), and natural religion (study of nature
as a book written by God).

The major idea of the period (founded on Francis Bacon's earlier work) was that of
empiricism.

Empiricism is the direct observation of experience, which infers that experience

(including experimentation) is a reliable source of knowledge. John Locke, George

Berkeley, and David Hume all pursued differing interpretations of empiricism, and the
concept itself had a profound impact on society and literature.

Writers (including women such as Mary Astell) began to advocate for improved
education for women during this period.

Around 1750, the word "sentiment" evolved to describe social behavior based in
instinctual feeling. Sentiment, and the related notions of sensibility and sympathy, all
contributed to a growing sense of the desirability of public philanthropy and social
reforms (such as charities for orphans).

Increased importance was placed on the private, individual life, as is evident in

literary forms such as diaries, letters, and the novel.

Conditions of Literary Production

The Stage Licensing Act (1737) established a form of dramatic censorship in which
the Lord Chamberlain pre-approved and licensed all plays for performance in London.

Censorship of other print material changed radically with the 1710 Statute of Anne,
the first British copyright law not tied to government approval of a book's contents.

Copyrights were typically held by booksellers.

The term "public sphere" refers to the material texts concerning matters of national
interest and also to the public venues (including coffeehouses, clubs, taverns, parks,
etc.) where readers circulated and discussed these texts.

Thanks to greatly increased literacy rates (by 1800, 60-70 percent of adult men could
read, versus 25 percent in 1600), the eighteenth century was the first to sustain a large
number of professional authors. Genteel writers could benefit from both patronage
and the subscription system; "Grub Street" hacks at the lower end of the profession
were employed on a piecework basis.

Women published widely.

Reading material, though it remained unaffordable to the laboring classes, was

frequently shared. Circulating libraries began in the 1740s.

Capital letters began to be used only at the beginnings of sentences and for proper
names, and the use of italics was reduced.

Literary Principles

Literature from 1660 to 1785 divides into three shorter periods of 40 years each,
which can be characterized as shown below.

1660-1700 (death of John Dryden): emphasis on "decorum," or critical principles

based on what is elegant, fit, and right.

1700-1745 (deaths of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope in 1744): emphasis on satire

and on a wider public readership.

1745-1784 (death of Samuel Johnson): emphasis on revolutionary ideas.

England's Augustan age was modeled on that of Rome, when Augustus Caesar reestablished stability after civil war following Julius Caesar's assassination. English
writers, following the restoration of King Charles II, felt themselves to be in a similar
situation, in which the arts (repressed under Cromwell) could now flourish.

English writers endeavored to formulate rules of good writing, modeled on classical

works, but with a new appeal to the passions, in simple, often highly visual, language.
This embrace of new (neo) aims and old models is called "neoclassicism."

Horace's phrase, ut picture poesis(meaning "as in painting, so in poetry") was

interpreted to mean that poetry ought to be a visual as well as a verbal art.

Augustan poets began the century's focus on nature, by examining the enduring truths
of human nature.

The classical genres from which Augustan writers sought to learn included epic,
tragedy, comedy, pastoral, satire, and ode. Ensuring a good fit between the genre and
its style, language, and tone was crucial.

Augustan writing celebrates wit, or inventiveness, quickness of thought, and aptness

of descriptive images or metaphors.

The heroic couplet (two lines of rhymed iambic pentameter) was the most important
verse form of Pope's age, for it combined elegance and wit. Poets also continued to
use blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, not closed in couplets).

Not just aristocrats and classically educated scholars wrote verse: ordinary people also
began to write poetry, often featuring broad humor and burlesque, thereby creating a
distinction between high and low verse.

Restoration Literature, 1600-1700

Dryden was the most influential writer of the Restoration, for he wrote in every form
important to the periodoccasional verse, comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, odes,
satires, translations of classical worksand produced influential critical essays
concerning how one ought to write these forms.

Restoration prose style grew more like witty, urbane conversation and less like the
intricate, rhetorical style of previous writers like John Milton and John Donne.

Simultaneously, Restoration literature continued to appeal to heroic ideals of love and

honor, particularly on stage, in heroic tragedy.

The other major dramatic genre was the Restoration comedy of manners, which
emphasizes sexual intrigue and satirizes the elite's social behavior with witty
dialogue.

Eighteenth-Century Literature, 1700-1745

The Augustan era of writers like Swift, Defoe, Pope, Addison, and Steele was rich in
satire and new prose forms that blended fact and fiction, such as news, criminal
biographies, travelogues, political allegories, and romantic tales.

Early eighteenth-century drama saw the development of "sentimental comedy" in

which goodness and high moral sentiments are emphasized, and the audience is
moved not only to laughter, but also to sympathetic tears.

The theatre business boomed; celebrity performers flourished; less important were the
authors of the plays.

James Thomson's poems on the seasons, beginning with "Winter" (1726), carried on
the earlier poetic tradition of pastoral retreat and began a new trend of poetry focused
on natural description.

The Emergence of New Literary Themes and Modes, 1740-1785

Novelists became better known than poets, and intellectual prose forms such as the
essay proliferated.

The mid-eighteenth century is often referred to as the "Age of Johnson" after the
renowned essayist Samuel Johnson, who in 1755 wrote one of the first English
dictionaries to define word meanings by employing quotations taken from the best
English writers, past and present.

By the 1740s the novel rose to dominate the literary marketplace, with writers like
Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne defining the form and its
modes of representing the private lives of individuals.

The late eighteenth century saw a medieval revival, in which writers venerated and
imitated archaic language and forms. One important development of this movement
was the Gothic novel, which typically features such forbidden themes as incest,
murder, necrophilia, atheism, and sexual desire.

Late eighteenth-century poetry tends to emphasize melancholy, isolation, and

reflection, in distinction to the intensely social, often satirical verse of earlier in the
period.

Continuity and Revolution

Some critics place the end of the eighteenth century at 1776 (linking it to the
American Revolution); others at 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution); still
others at 1798 (the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge'sLyrical Ballads).

Later Romantic writers, who valued the idea of originality, also prized the meaning of
"revolution" which signified a violent break with the past and often represented their
work as offering just such a break with tradition. However, changes to literary forms
and content occurred much more gradually than this use of the word "revolution"
might suggest.