The Strength of Weak Ties: Eliza Haywood’s Social Network in The Dunciad in Four Books (1743)

Abstract

This article uses visualizations of Eliza Haywood’s social networks, as described in The Dunciad in Four Books (1743), to make visible her relations with the other characters in the poem, and the nature of these affiliations. The tools used to generate these visualizations are GraphViz, an open source visualization software that creates topological graphs from sets of dyadic relations, and SHIVA Graph, an application used to visualize large sets of networks and navigate through them as through a map. In Eliza Haywood’s case, this model of social network analysis sheds new light on the nature of Pope’s attack on women writers and on the role Pope assigned to the novelist in the cultural space of early eighteenth-century London. These social graphs also make visible the poem’s main “connectors,” and its “hall of infamy” (i.e., the seventeen characters that seep into all the networks of the poem). By focusing attention on less dense clusters of relations, this model of social network analysis highlights what Mark Granovetter calls “the strength of weak ties,” or the role played by peripheral characters within the poem's plot network.