Allegory in the Courts

Abstract

This chapter focuses on allegory, which offered journalists and satirists a flexible tool for coded political criticism during the first decades of the eighteenth century. Allegory was a particular problem for prosecutors and plaintiffs, who were required to demonstrate that fictional names in allegorical worlds referred to real victims in England. Early on, the abandoned prosecution of Delarivier Manley for The New Atalantis (1709), an allegory (or secret history) of the Whigs and Queen Anne, revealed the limitations of courtroom procedures to link allegorical depictions to real-world individuals or institutions. As a result, allegorical satire flourished in the periodical press and especially in two of the most important journals of the 1710s and ’20s: The Craftsman and Mist’s Weekly Journal. The government failed to prosecute either periodical successfully until early 1729, when Chief Justice Raymond, building on the doctrine of ‘common intendment’, argued that jurors should rely on an abstract ‘generality of readers’ when confronted with allegory.