'In Bawdy Policy Well-Gifted': Allan Ramsay, Bawdry and the Reformation of Manners

Allan Ramsay's bawdy sensibility informs some of his earliest and most popular works. Ramsay was also a poet with a profound interest in the eighteenth-century movement towards a 'Reformation of Manners', something that found expression through his involvement as a founding member of the Easy Club. This essay casts new light on these seemingly contradictory interests by contextualising Ramsay's bawdry within the more moderate approach to reform addressed in the eighteenth-century pamphlet and periodical press. It also examines the influence of previously unidentified textual sources upon Ramsay's 'Lucky Spence's Last Advice': The Whore's Rhetorick (1683), and a series of letters and essays published in The Spectator (1711-1712).