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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeab Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 40106 77-2384 DAVIS, Edmond Christian, 1947- «AN IRONY NOT UNUSUAL1*: SWIFT, HIS CONTEMPORARIES, AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION OF SHORT IRONIC SATIRE. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1976 Literature, English Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48io6 @ Copyright by Edmond Christian Davis 1976 "AN IRONY NOT UNUSUAL": SWIFT, HIS CONTEMPORARIES, AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION OF SHORT IRONIC SATIRE DISSERTATION Presented In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Edmond Christian Davis, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1976 Reading Committee: Approved By Edward P. J. Corbett, Director Betty Sutton John Sena For My Grandmother ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Every scholar owes to his predecessors a debt larger than he can ever repay. The footnotes In this dissertation only begin to suggest my debt to those who have grappled with the complexities of irony, satire, and the works of the major figures discussed in the following pages. In particular, this dissertation could never have been written had It not been for the numerous editors, from anonymous seventeenth-century compilers to modern textual critics, from whose tedious efforts in col­ lecting, editing, and reprinting I have constantly profited. I owe even more to those at the Ohio State University who have aided me throughout this study. The staff of the University library has been friendly and helpful and its efforts are reflected throughout. The Department of English, which has provided me with financial and moral support for the past six years, deserves more thanks than any brief acknowledgment can bestow. Professors Betty Sutton and John Sena, who served on my reading committee, contributed innumerable comments that have helped refine this dissertation and have saved me from numerous errors of fact and opinion. My dissertation director, Professor Edward P. J. Corbett, not only com­ mented heavily on the text and worked to remove barbarisms from my style, but also offered a kindly smile during those years in which I felt this project would be unending. In addition, I am obliged both to Professor A. E. W. Maurer, whose graduate seminar on Augustan Satire led me to a consideration of this topic and whose probing questions iii forced me to look deeper Into It, and to Professor James Battersby, who read this study In rough draft and whose tough-minded criticisms Im­ proved almost every page. Most of the virtues In this study belong to others; the errors and weaknesses are my own. My largest debt, however, is owed to my family, without whose sup­ port and encouragement this task could have been neither begun nor finished, and to Jane Hascall, who not only read this dissertation In Its roughest drafts and discussed It with me, but who also has been more than a friend during the years I worked to complete It. lv VITA November 18, 1947 .......... Born— Medford, Oregon 196 9 .......................... B.A., University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. 1969-1970 .................... Teaching Assistant, English Department, University of Oregon. 197 0 .......................... M.A., University of Oregon. 1970-1972 .................... NDEA Fellow, The Ohio State University. 1972-1975 .................... Teaching Associate, English Department, The Ohio State University. 1976..........................Writing Consultant, The Ohio Agricul­ tural Research and Development Center. 1976.......................... Lecturer, English Department, The Ohio State University. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Literature before 1900 Studies in Medieval Literature. Professors Walter Scheps and Alan Brown. Studies in Renaissance Literature. Professors Joan Webber and Robert C. Jones. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Professor A. E. W. Maurer. Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Professors Ford Swetnam and Arnold Shapiro. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION.................................................... 11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................. Ill VITA .......................................................... v Chapter I. INTRODUCTION....................................... * . 1 Short Ironic Satire .............................. 6 II. THE ROOTS OF THE ENGLISH TRADITION.................... 18 Early English Pieces In V e r s e .................... 26 Verse-Sat ires of the 1640’s 43 Early English Pieces in P r o s e .................... 55 John Taylor and Short Ironic Satire .............. 71 III. THE METHODS OF SHORT IRONIC SATIRE, 1650-1730 86 Ironic Panegyric ................................ 89 Ironic Argument ................................ 102 Ironic Lampoon .................................. 120 Complex Short Ironic Satires .................... 139 IV. DANIEL DEFOE’S SHORT IRONIC SATIRES ................... 164 V. THE TATLER AND THE SPECTATOR.......................... 215 VI. JONATHAN SWIFT AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION .............. 239 Ironic Panegyric ................................ 243 Ironic Lampoon .................................. 255 Ironic Argument .................................. 264 Complex P i e c e s .................................. 285 VII. SCRIBLEKUS AND THE SCRIBLERIANS...................... 323 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued) Page APPENDIX AN INDEX TO THE SHORT IRONIC SATIRES IN ENGLISH .......... 347 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................... 352 VH Chapter One: Introduction This study began several years ago in a graduate seminar on Augustan satire. The original misreading by Defoe’s contemporaries of his Shortest Way with the Dissenters attracted my attention. While studies of Defoe's piece discuss how his irony differs from Swift's^ or why Defoe was severely punished for his offense,2 they make no effort to discover whether Defoe's piece operated within the conventions or traditions of short ironic satires. In general, critics seem to accept the judgment of the anonymous hack who wrote The Fox with his Fire- Brand Unkennel'd. "If our author," the hack alleges, "had been bred a Scholar Instead of a Hosier, he would have found another kind of Figure for making other Peoples thoughts speak in his words."^ In fact, Maximillian Novak, the scholar most concerned with Defoe's ironies, argues that Defoe's method was uncommon In early eighteenth-century England^ and speculates that Defoe learned his irony from a remark of ^Richard I. Cook, "Defoe and Swift: Contrasts in Satire," Dal- housle Review. 43 (1963), 28-39. 2 John Robert Moore, Defoe in the Pillory and Other Studies. Indiana Univ. Humanities Series, No. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1939), pp. 4-17. 3 Quoted in Maximillian E. Novak, The Uses of Irony: Papers on Defoe and Swift Read at ji Clark Library Seminar (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1966), pp. 22-23. A Maximillian E. Novak, "Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Hoax, Parody, Paradox, Fiction, Irony, and Satire," MLQ, 27 (1966), 415. Fablus, which Defoe would have encountered in Gerardus Vossius.^ In other words, in Novak's mind, Defoe is a pioneer, a man who introduced an ironic method, learned from a rhetorician, into the mainstream of English literature. Such a conclusion, that Defoe was a daring innovator, seemed to me, when I first began this study, to be somewhat unlikely, for Defoe himself asserts, in his Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet, En- tituled, the Shortest Way with the Dissenters, that his method in The Way was "an Irony not Unusual" (Defoe's emphasis)In addition, Defoe's piece is not the only short satiric irony of