Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 by Abigail Williams (review)

64 even a penitential story serves an erotic end when performed by an appealing actress . But Ms. Scott moves quickly from this point and literally, in this case, to the next illustration, an even briefer discussion of some of the engravings accompanying Shore’s story during the eighteenth century. In the end, one wishes Ms. Scott had promised less and provided more. Cynthia Richards Wittenberg University ABIGAIL WILLIAMS. Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681– 1714. Oxford: Oxford, 2005. Pp. 1 ⫹ 303. $90. As Ms. Williams points out in her Introduction , it has long been a cliché to speak of the political victors of the early eighteenth century as the literary losers. Those Whig poets, dismissed and ridiculed by Dryden and members of the Scriblerus club, while rarely read today, were in fact popular and successful artists in their own time and, as Ms. Williams argues, the chief consolidators of the dominant literary culture. This distinctly ‘‘Whig’’ culture sought to remodel English literary culture alongside the contemporary transformations of political and social life in the post-Revolution era by celebrating the values of patriotism , Protestantism, and political liberty. Ms. Williams’s lucid and solidly argued book follows the themes and aesthetics of Whig poetry from the early radical Whig politics of the Exclusion era, through the Revolution of 1688/ 1689 and reign of William III, to the Augustan age and triumph of the Whig oligarchy . She is particularly adept at reading Whig writers alongside their Tory critics; her story is about their constant dialogue which shaped and reshaped their concerns about art, politics, and society . She points out the deeply politicized nature of works like The Dunciad, which we might be more prone to evaluate in terms of aesthetics, and ably shows the critical and commercial success of Whig writers. While today Pope’s Windsor-Forest (1713) is the most read Peace of Utrecht poem, it was Thomas Tickell’s The Prospect of Peace (1712) that met with far greater acclaim and went into five London editions (while Pope’s poem went into a mere two). Whig poets repeatedly outdid their Tory competitors, tapping into a mainstream sense of optimism about the future following the Revolution and the Act of Succession (1701). Ms. Williams debunks two Tory myths. The first concerns the so-called splendor and bounty of the Stuart court. Often we imagine the splendiferous court of Charles II as a time of milk and honey for artists in contrast to Dutch William’s barren court. ‘‘This idea of William III as anti-cultural, neglectful of the arts, is one which has been perpetuated up to the present day. Yet it was not always so.’’ The Williamite patronage system led to regular salaried positions for many poets; in fact, poet and statesman (such as in the case of Charles Montagu , John Somers, and Charles Sackville , earl of Dorset) were often the same. Images of Stuart magnificence and generosity were born of the nostalgic Tory pens in the early eighteenth century. After all, Dryden himself admitted that he was encouraged by Charles II only by ‘‘fair words . . . my little Sallary ill paid.’’ Behn, who lauded love and devotion on James II in her public poetry, never saw any monetary gratitude. Second, Ms. Williams reminds us that the Whigs of 65 the Augustan age were certainly not the desperadoes of the Exclusion era. Still Pope depicts them in their 1680s form as crowd-pleasing urban fanatics and, like Dryden, links them to Dissent, populism, ‘‘republicanism, madness, chaos, and bad writing.’’ In this fine study Ms. Williams occasionally stumbles. She reports that Behn ‘‘grew up in Surinam’’ when she was only there for a few months in 1663. Her reading of Behn’s last public poems is also problematic, particularly when she groups Behn with ‘‘Williamite Tories.’’ Behn’s poems on Mary II and Gilbert Burnet written in March of 1689 speak to just how unhappy she was about the demise of James II’s administration. She was, if anything, a full-blown Jacobite on the eve of her death (April 1689). This brings up the problem of labels. Everyone in this book is a Whig or Tory. This...