The Scriblerian Mock-Arts: Pseudo-Technical Satire in Swift and His Contemporaries

During the first three decades of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift and members of his circle—which included Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot and Thomas Sheridan—wrote a series of satires on the technical prose of the day, referred to in this article as the “Scriblerian mock-arts.” These included Swift’s “Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” Pope’s “Art of Sinking in Poetry,” Gay’s Trivia, and Arbuthnot’s Art of Political Lying. They appeared at a time of innovation in the genres of British literature: the rise of the novel, the publication of the first Enlightenment encyclopedias, and the triumph of the daily essay-journal were already well underway. The Scriblerian mock-arts are significant because they belong in a small way to that revolution in mediation, and they are designed as a commentary upon it as well. This article describes the conventions of this neglected sub-genre. It shows how the Scriblerian satirists used it to argue the absurdity of trying to specify in print certain forms of tacit or personal knowledge.

I forget whether Advice be among the lost Things which, Ariosto says, are to be found in the Moon: That and Time ought to have been there.

—Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects (1711)