The Whig Interpretation of Poetry

In 1997, David Womersley reminded readers of Augustan Critical Writing that those who deemed the British literary world to be palled by dullness were ardent Tories who responded to “a self-consciously modern programme for English poetry propounded in the 1690s and 1700s by Whig writers.” ¹ Womersley accordingly called for reassessing this overlooked and deprecated body of Whig literature. That effort came to fruition with the interdisciplinary “Cultures of Whiggism” conference at Jesus College, Oxford (2001), organized by Womersley, Paddy Bullard, and Abigail Williams; the conference proceedings volume (2005), for which Williams served as both an editor and a contributor, explores further the “Whiggish vision of literary aesthetics and literary history.” ² Bearing this distinguished Oxonian pedigree, Abigail Williams’s Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 makes a full-blown and forceful case for the significance of Whig aesthetics. Williams aims to resuscitate a corpus—perhaps even a canon—of partisan literature that was both popular and acclaimed by contemporaries.

Working in concert, Whigs like Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax; Richard Blackmore; Joseph Addison; and John Dennis developed a literary culture that celebrated and propounded Revolution principles, and also, more importantly here, Whig social and cultural values. Williams elaborates how Whig poets, writing frequently in the panegyric mode, extolled political, military, and economic modernity and liberty, as well as temperate Christianity, moral reform, and polite sociability. Moreover, the Whig literati established a pantheon of partisan luminaries, most prominently King William III and the Duke of Marlborough, but also a cohort of lettered statesmen like Montagu and Addison. Williams takes stock of their common storehouse of heroes, tropes, and rhetorical devices, and in the process, reveals Whig poetry’s framers and funders. She adjures us that when we neglect to consider Whig literature worthwhile, we ratify Tory criteria of value, perhaps unwittingly. Williams acquits herself well, and Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture succeeds in retrieving Whig poetic works and their wider cultural agenda from the interstices of literary history.

Williams begins with a dialogic history of Augustan satire. Chapter 1 juxtaposes Tory poems, like Dryden’s MacFlecknoe and The Medall and Pope’s Essay on Criticism, to works by their Whig targets and interlocutors, like Thomas Shadwell, Elkanah Settle, and John Dennis. In their disputes, Tories established a taxonomy of “bad” poetry that possessed (somewhat contradictory) attributes like ephemerality, hackish production, didactic zeal, or theological “enthusiasm,” or whose authors or subject matter were gauchely linked to commerce or the common. Williams describes the creation of a “satirical shorthand” (55) that Tories would reuse repeatedly across the period, from Dryden and Behn in the aftermath of the Civil War, to the Scriblerians after the Hanoverian accession, intertwining criticisms not only aesthetic but political.

Having covered reasonably familiar terrain, Williams returns to the beginning to recount instead “a distinct and vital poetic tradition whose perceived threat was seen to justify [a] sustained critical onslaught” (55). Chapters 2 through 4 chronicle the Whig side of literary history, with mileposts at the era of the Exclusion Crisis (1681–1688), the reign of William III (1688–1702), and of Queen Anne (1702–1714). Williams surveys the Whig critical and poetic corpus, with an emphasis on poetry addressing affairs of state, and proceeds sure-footedly from one micro-epoch to the next. Well-placed recapitulations of historical events and previous phases of her argument are especially helpful along the way.

Williams relates how the early Whigs, in opposing the governments of Charles II and James II, “claimed the voice of the people” (56), which was plainspoken, temperate, and celebratory of urban prosperity, as in Shadwell’s The Medal of John Bayes and The Tory-Poets. Yet especially after the defeat of the Exclusion effort, Whigs also critiqued the corrupt and courtly city and endorsed rural retirement and respectful piety. Williams identifies this as one of many tensions in a Whig literary culture capacious enough to encompass at once moderation and populism, city...