Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England by Roger D. Lund (review)

When John Sitter, playing on Alexander Pope's famous truism, asserts that Augustan wit is "Nature in ambiguity dressed," he draws attention to what has become a critical commonplace: wit is defined by its indefinability. English writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries understood they were living in an "Age of Wit," but they were uncertain about what precisely wit was. They were considerably more certain about what wit was not, and thus contemporary treatments of the subject tend to define "true wit" negatively, by opposition to the perceived improprieties and unnatural deceits associated with "false wit." Roger D. Lund echoes Sitter's witticism in his book, observing that "there was never a point in the later-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, when critics and philosophers agreed as to exactly what wit might signify" (132). Rather than attempting to clarify the distinction between true and false wit, the nature and function of judgment, or the efficacy of verbal language, Lund examines the ways in which a variety of writers exploited wit's very ambiguity in order to challenge religious and political orthodoxy. In Lund's original reading, "heterodox wit" represents a threat to the establishment of church and state because it uses the conventional devices of rhetoric in surprising ways. As a result of what he identifies as the "subversive potential of irony and wit," English writers came to distrust those rhetorical modes that had given the "Age of Wit" its characteristic "literary identity" (4-5).

Lund surveys the period's most compelling statements regarding wit, citing the usual authorities as well as a broad range of lesser-known poets and critics who problematize the "instability," "perplexity," and "enigmatic quality" that distinguish witty discourse (12). He quotes from An Essay on Criticism (1711) and Spectator nos. 58-63 (1711), but he juxtaposes his predictable discussion of Pope and Joseph Addison with interesting commentary on Henry Barker, Charles Gildon, Isaac Barrow, Mary Astell, and Richard Blackmore, whose Satyr against Wit (1700) epigrammatically questions "What well-form'd Government or State can last, / When Wit has laid the People's Virtue wast?" (7). Lund's book is easily the most comprehensive study of Augustan wit since D. Judson Milburn's The Age of Wit 1650-1750 (1966), and the most pointed analysis of the paradoxes of true wit since Sitter's Arguments of Augustan Wit (1991). The book treats Milburn and Sitter as representative examples of "traditional efforts to confine wit within a purely literary system" (4). Lund seeks instead "to outline the process by which writers of every description struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public discourse of the age" (4).

The Politics of Wit shifts from the typical focus on wit as a strictly verbal or rhetorical phenomenon to seeing wit as a pervasive cultural problem—one that affected the witty and the witless alike. Lund re-contextualizes the period's well-known anxieties over wit by showing that critical discussion of raillery or ridicule frequently had ideological resonance and, conversely, that debate concerning heterodoxy often turned on matters of style and on the uses and abuses of rhetoric. For example, he partially accounts for the controversy provoked by the publication of Leviathan (1651) by pointing out that Hobbes's contemporaries reacted as vehemently against his "philosophical drollery" as they did against his dangerous theories. If Hobbes was frequently attacked as an atheist and materialist, he was just as often criticized for his overreliance on similitude, circumlocution, and understatement, for his mock-seriousness, and for his "jingling upon words" (48-49). Many freethinking writers were, in their own day, as notorious for the stylistic form of their books and pamphlets as for the blasphemous or seditious content. As Lund demonstrates, wit's perceived insidiousness meant that the suppression of dissent in Augustan England required both the "control of heterodox ideas" and the "proscription...