The Life of the English Poet Leonard Welsted (1688–1747): The Culture and Politics of Britain's Eighteenth-Century Literary Wars by James Sambrook (review)

Correction:
On page 69, the last line of text was changed from "an undergraduate thesis" to "a graduate thesis". The online version has been corrected.

Readers who access this journal by digital means may not recall the image from the 1729 Dunciad Variorum that graces the cover of each issue: that of an intrepid ass, laboring under an overflowing pack of what Pope regarded as trashy literary ephemera. Even hard copy subscribers who are also dedicated readers of Pope, however, may need to stop and think when asked to identify the author whose collected Poems perches precariously atop this tower of printed waste. This dubious pride of place belongs not to Lewis Theobald, John Dennis, or any other dunce who cuts an imposingly grotesque figure in Pope's mock epic, but rather to the comparatively forgotten versifier and translator Leonard Welsted, whose successful pursuit of Whig patronage, printed tussles with Pope, and alleged bibulousness earn him a sole mention by name in the body of the poem. Now for the first time, apart from an unpublished dissertation in 1950, Welsted has his own book-length study, albeit a brief one that, in its general eschewal of controversial argument and its seriatim presentation of biographical facts (one unprepossessing chapter title promises "A place of his own, Epistles, Odes, &c., theatre work, and Horace: 1724–7") often reads like an expanded version of a listing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It should come as no surprise, then, that the author of this new volume is in fact responsible for the entry on Welsted in that work, which describes its subject as "best known today as a Pope dunce."

Welsted's current obscurity is despite his small but eclectic poetic corpus, which ranges from Ovidian translation to some attractive conversational verse, and his responsibility for a landmark version of Longinus. (It is arguably this translation, more than his brief appearance in The Dunciad, that makes Welsted's name vaguely recognizable to contemporary eighteenth-century scholars.) Welsted's life and career also intersected with those of notables other than Pope, including Richard Steele, for whose comedy The Conscious Lovers he provided a prologue and an epilogue, and Henry Purcell, whose daughter he married. The meager status of Welsted's current reputation is confirmed by his absence from the 2015 Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of British Literature, 1660–1789 (although he has some curiously distinguished company in this regard, including Edward Gibbon), as well as the fact that a recent article in a reputable journal, Carole Sargent's "How a Pie Fight Satirizes Whig-Tory Conflict in Delarivier Manley's The New Atalantis," ECS (2011), treats what Mr. Sambrook calls Welsted's "best-known work," the 1708 mock didactic "A Poem upon apple pye," as if it were of uncertain authorship.

How, we might ask, does Mr. Sambrook justify giving this kind of sustained attention to an author so far down the roster of Popean dunces that he barely warrants a mention in Pat Rogers's expansive Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture? Mr. Sambrook makes only modest claims for the interest of Welsted's verse, which he subjects to what can be frustratingly elliptical analysis, as when he notes an echo of Absalom and Achitophel in "apple pye" without explaining how we ought to interpret this allusion or situate it in the history of Dryden's posthumous reception. Nor has Mr. Sambrook uncovered any revelatory new information about Welsted's life and times, although he does make industrious use of unpublished manuscript writing by Welsted, which has survived at the University of Nottingham (Mr. Sambrook's undergraduate alma mater) among the papers of Robert Harley, whose favor Welsted courted before pledging a more lucrative allegiance to the Whigs. In fact, this dramatic volte...