The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770

The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770 by Ashley Marshall. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. xx + 430. As Ashley Marshall began her career with an impressive series of essays and is already well known in eighteenth-century studies, scholars in the field have eagerly anticipated her first book. In many respects, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770 delivers what they have admired in her essays. It is well researched, ambitious, provocative, and generally sensible. Marshall sets out her whole vision of English satire for over 110 years after the Restoration of Charles II, making some challenging claims about how we should read satire during the period and indeed about literary historiography itself. Even if one does not always agree with her judgments, she presents a weighty and clearly articulated case that deserves serious consideration. It should be said at the outset that Marshall's scholarly methods are strongly marked by the influence of Robert D. Hume, her former supervisor and the dedicatee of this book. One might even say that Marshall attempts to do for satire what Hume did for drama in two important studies, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) and Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728-1737 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). In The Practice of Satire in England, there is the same wariness of existing literary categories and critical truisms, a similarly extensive range of primary texts, including many that have been neglected, and a parallel technique of reclassifying this broadened archive under new categories. If Hume gave us the distinction between "humane" and "reform" comedy, Marshall reorganizes satires into "modes" such as "Harsh Derogation," "Mockery and Ridicule," "Provocation of Thought," and "Exemplary Satire and Sympathy." Again emulating her eminent supervisor, Marshall makes an effort to position each work in its exact context in a particular decade or even year. She is highly impatient with scholars who generalize loosely about some "Augustan" era in which authors widely separated by time and immediate context, such as Dryden, Swift, and Pope, are treated as if they are all writing in the same year, with the same objectives, methods, and values. One believes Marshall when she says that, having read over 3000 satires, she could pin an unseen work to a particular decade or even half decade. This approach is fundamentally sensible: a few decades ago, at least, major scholars did routinely assume that a handful of canonical authors embodied the entire "Augustan" age, sharing not only a proclivity to satire but the same neoclassicism, high moral ideals, and commitment to social order. While Marshall dismantles these assumptions with great learning, however, one wonders how widely they are actually shared by eighteenth- century scholars in this particular decade. She claims that she is challenging a "myth of 'Augustan satire'" that was "put forth by Ian Jack half a century ago and [is] still largely dominant" (289). Nevertheless, through the efforts of scholars such as Howard D. Weinbrot, the use of "Augustan" to describe the era between 1660 and about 1750 has become so infrequent as to strike some scholars as defunct. In a 2007 review essay of two books by Weinbrot, for instance, John J. Burke Jr. pronounced that "The word Augustan has disappeared from our vocabulary." ("Reconfiguring the Idea of Eighteenth-Century Literature in a New Epoch: Moving from the Augustan to the Menippean," Eighteenth-Century Life 31:2 [2007]: 85). This was somewhat of an exaggeration. In the Blackwell Companion to Satire (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), published the same year, Rueben Quintero contributed an essay entitled "Pope and Augustan Verse Satire" that generally upheld the old notions of the "Augustan" age and of another category assailed by Marshall, "Scribblerian satire." She strongly denies that Pope, Swift, Gay, and, even more clearly, Henry Fielding can be ranked together as "Scribblerian" authors with a common mission and attitudes, despite their occasional collaboration. …