Creative Destruction

By associating satire with Pope, and Pope with eighteenth-century literature, a thriving school of Romantic criticism invoked Joseph Warton’s notion of “pure poetry” to deprecate the former age. Never mind that the Romantic era was one of the great eras for satire—in the popular mind, satire and rationalism would be inextricably associated with Augustan “verse,” and lyricism and imagination with Romantic “poetry.” In The Practice of Satire Ashley Marshall revives the Pope Controversy with an unexpected twist: rather than argue that Pope was no poet, she argues that Swift, Pope, and Johnson were not representative of an age otherwise given to satire. Broadening the notion of satire to include more works, more kinds of works, and a wider range of satirical motives and effects, she offers an account of eighteenth-century literature more amenable to contemporary sensibilities than those of previous proponents and detractors of satire.

This is an ambitious and challenging book, deserving serious attention and serious criticism.

Creative destruction is an economic concept derived from Karl Marx to describe the displacement of one economic order by another. This oxymoronic notion resonates with Ashley Marshall’s account of satire: to be sure, satire and satirists can be “negative,” but they also defend principles, propose reforms, and strive to bring about desirable outcomes, such as keeping politicians honest and improving manners and morality. While Marshall is anything but a Marxist theory spinner, periodicity is of the essence in her account of literary history: each generation of satirists writes in a timely fashion, one order displacing another every twenty-five years or so as circumstances change. But she is also skeptical that satire itself has much to do with changing the social and economic order—for one thing, satirists can be found writing on both sides of any given issue.

Marshall bases her conclusions not on a small selection of supposedly like-minded works, but on a huge sample of 3,000 poems, plays, and novels written over the course of a century: “What makes this the Age of Satire is not (or not primarily) the literary value of a dozen tours de force, but the diversity of satiric possibilities and practices. Order-imposing assessments of a select canon have produced a misrepresentation of literary history: what actually exists is much more densely populated, much less logical in its change over time, and spectacularly multifarious” (13). Amen to that.

The Practice of Satire opens with a chapter discussing earlier surveys of the genre, demonstrating that they are based upon small and unreliable samples and problematic understandings of what satire is and does. There follows a chapter explaining how eighteenth-century opinions about the nature and value of satire were all over the map, but that critics then, unlike critics since, were very far from identifying it with the aspirations of eighteenth-century literature generally. The remainder of the book presents a survey of satirical works divided into temporal cohorts: 1658 to 1685, 1685 to 1699, 1700 to 1725, 1726 to 1745, and 1745 to 1770. This span corresponds to that assigned to “Augustan satire,” a concept it is Marshall’s purpose to demolish. This is a useful work of creative destruction, knocking the props from under criticism that, by a misleading synecdoche, mistakes the part for the whole, deriving notions of genre and period from inadequate samples.

Marshall presents herself as the kind of writer she often admires: positive rather than vindictive, engaged with issues more than characters, an attentive, honest broker suspicious of claims to high intellect or high art. No great admirer of literariness in others, she writes in plain, accessible prose descending at times into vernacular expressions not commonly used in scholarly books. There is little wit or humor in her discourse, but then such things have been overvalued in the past, not least by admirers of Pope and Augustan satire. Daniel Defoe is literally and inspirationally central to a study that is critical but tolerant, skeptical but optimistic, replete with observation, and not particularly tidy in...