Swimming Down the Gutter of Time with Sterne and The Scriblerian

48 adjudged the ‘‘idealist’’; Fielding, the ‘‘realist.’’ Fielding and Richardson as eighteenth -century adumbrations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Faulkner and Hemingway —great siblings with opposing ontologies—that is an interesting claim. Mr. Weidhorn’s commentary upon them, however, is old news. WRIGHT, GILLIAN. ‘‘Epictetus in Eighteenth -Century Wales: Timothy Thomas’ Manuscript Translation of the Enchiridion ,’’ Tr&Lit, 14 (Spring 2005), 45–63. From a manuscript dated 1744, we know that Timothy Thomas, the Anglican rector of a remote Welsh parish, translated Epictetus’s Enchiridion into an English work of learning and skill. Thomas incorporated scriptural references his readers would find apposite for the moral resonances they drew from the Greek text. Further, he rendered the original into a popular eighteenth-century idiom , following the style of satirical imitation associated with Pope and Swift. Ms. Wright traces Thomas’s connection through his brother William to the Earl of Oxford, and suggests this MS was a coterie text influenced by, if not influencing, the literary network associated with the Harleys from the 1720s through mid-century. The obscure Thomas and his translation have found a sensitive and thorough reader. SWIMMING DOWN THE GUTTER OF TIME WITH STERNE AND THE SCRIBLERIAN* Melvyn New In 2004 I published a small piece in these pages, in sympathetic response to an article by W. B. Carnochan concerning the reshaping of the canon in recent years; he had used the MLA bibliography to chart the fortunes of authors, noting significant drops, for example, in the number of studies on Dryden, Pope, and Fielding, but an enormous rise, from near obscurity to celebrity status, for Aphra Behn. Using the Scriblerian indexes for the 25-year period from 1973–1998, I found similar numbers. The gist of my findings was that scholarly work on such authors as Addison, Steele, and, most sadly, Dryden and Pope, was dropping precipitously, while scholarship on Behn went from no articles reviewed between 1973–1983, to only six in the next five years, 26 in the next five, and a whopping 62 articles between 1993–1998—that is 12 articles a year—and this did not take into account book-length studies. I begin my discussion where I believe it should begin—with the purpose of literary commentary as it relates to Prince Posterity, deftly invented by Swift. As I concluded in that earlier essay, ‘‘rather than being overly exercised by Behn’s meteoric rise, we must ask ourselves a larger question about the canon based on these numbers: is a canon expandable, as most of those laboring away today on Pix or Astell, Rowe or Oldham, would maintain, or is the canon a zero-sum entity? . . . If we add an author to our list, can we adjust our eyes and years upward as well, or do we subtract an author to make room? And if we do add and subtract, how do we justify our doing so?’’ 49 The question of swimming down the gutter of time, writing a work that would indeed be perused and commented upon, was uppermost in the minds of Scriblerian writers. It was, indeed, a period that witnessed an explosive development of commentary , scholarly and popular, on what we today deem ‘‘literature’’ as opposed to our ‘‘commentaries’’ on them. Poets and dramatists recognized almost immediately that with an enormous proliferation of available texts vying for recognition, the initial and continuing reception of their work would mean the difference between fame or obscurity, and even infamy was, for a few hardy souls, then as now, just as good as fame. Hence, for Dryden (think of The Rehearsal, if nothing else), for Swift, for Pope, the world of commentators (reviewers if you will) became of crucial significance, and much energy was expended in trying to shape and control what was said about their own writings—rewarding the favorable, carving up the others. In short, canon formation was already an issue in the eighteenth century, when authors realized instantly (and quite naturally, since their survival was at stake), that their existence depended on their readers—both their quantity and their quality. For good or ill, eighteenth-century authors embraced the problem of creating a receptive and perceptive audience for themselves, lauding those they...