1688: Literature, Politics, and the Long Restoration

When William of Orange sailed to England in 1688—an act variously described as a response to a polite invitation, a coup, or a foreign invasion—he brought along a veritable toolkit for linking the emergent cultures of politics and literature: 40,000 men, 500 ships, 50 cannons, and one printing press.¹ William did not bring radical new political ideas: England had deposed and beheaded Charles I forty years earlier, and thus its modernization of political structures and philosophy was well under way. Neither did he bring modern print culture to England: Restoration England already had a lively print culture of polemical, sensational, devotional, philosophical, didactic, and ribald writing. Still, the events of 1688-9—the end of the Stuart dynasty and the settlement with parliament that saw William and Mary assume a limited sovereignty under a constitutional monarchy—have long been seen as a watershed moment in English history, credited with liberalizing England’s political system and with inspiring foundational laws and theorizations of democratic capitalism, including The “English Bill of Rights” (1689) as well as John’s Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689/90).² “1688” has been so crucial to histories of England that the historiography of 1688 has been a focal point of deliberation about the nature of historiography itself, in debates about Whig history and method.³ Literary critics have tended to rely on historical accounts of 1688 for periodization of both the end of the Restoration (though this journal resists that trend) and the history of the novel, as well as for the kinds of narratives—of progress, of secularization, and of the importance of individual rights and freedom—that underpin both the facts and norms of much literary scholarship in eighteenth-century studies and beyond. In short, liberal political history and modern literary history are related legacies of 1688. But while liberal history imagines progress towards the abstractions of secularity, individuality, equality, and universality, literary history of the long eighteenth century has long been associated with conservative elite culture and tradition. Thus, while they are disciplinarily distinct and in some respects philosophically opposed, these twin legacies of 1688 share a complex history of entanglements and estrangements, a history, moreover, in which the meaning of 1688 and the methods of scholars both figure centrally. This special issue of Restoration developed out of a panel at the 2014 ASECS meeting that explored this legacy of how politics and literature developed in relation to each other and in response to the ways that 1688 allowed English writers to narrate and to imagine their history and their values. The essays in this collection investigate 1688 through key concepts in liberalism—sovereignty, revolution, progress, rights, democracy, populism, party politics—as well as through key issues for literary history: historiography, aesthetics, satire, performativity, politeness.

Interpretations of 1688 have tended to be the province of historians. Readers of this journal are all familiar with the critiques of what has been called derisively the Whig interpretation of history—the tendency of Whig historians, for whom 1688 is key, to cast history as a struggle between the modernizing force of progress and the conservative pull of tradition. In this scholarly trajectory, 1688 is seen either as a salutary watershed of liberalizing progress (“the glorious revolution”) or as the conservative triumph over the radical politics of the civil war years (“the bourgeois revolution”).⁴ But both Whig historians and their revisionist critics have tended to assume a norm of history that is progressive and tied to class mobility, to secularization, to increasing emphasis on individuality, and to nationalism. A recent wave of scholarship on the revolution by historians has stretched the limits of this scholarly trajectory. For example, Tim Harris situates the revolution in its larger geopolitical context; Steven Pincus recasts the debate over the “revolution of 1688” as not one between ancients and moderns but rather as a competition between different visions of modernization; Scott Sowerby (recuperating James II from a very different perspective) finds conservative thinking to be instrumental to ideas of religious tolerance that we associate with liberalism; and Lisa Jardine and Jonathan Israel deem the...