ISSUE OF BAD WRITING IN

JONATHAN SWIFT AND ALEXANDER POPE

With the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 there was a marked
growth in the publishing business . There was a increase in journalism and new
magazines like ‘The Spectator’ ‘The Tatler’ ‘The Guardian’ came up . There was a
new tone in the writing and Addison puts the new fashion in his own admirable
way – ‘I Shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit , and to temper wit with
morality’

It was at this time that a great controversy raged on ancient and

modern writing . Fontenelle , the French philosopher , spoke of how reason and
science ruled in the works of the moderns rather than the superstitions of the
ancient Greeks and Romans . In England , Sir William Temple , Swift’s patron and
relative , entered the controversy with his essay ‘The Ancient and Modern
writing’(1690) . But Rev. William Wotton and Richard Bentley tore Temple’s argument
threadbare. Swift saw this as an insult to his patron and defended him . In the
fifth section of the ‘A Tale of tub’ Swift ridicules the practices of his
contemporaries , both writers and critics . He speaks of the authors writing prefaces
which becomes mere ornamentation as it hardly contain any subject-matter of the
text . Critics , on the other hand , gather their knowledge by reading these prefaces .
In the digression concerning critics Swift suggests that the real function of the
critic is to wander through the world of literature and collects all the faults and
hidden errors. As a result , the essence of everything bad get infused in their
writings.

In the section concerning the digression in praise of digressions

Swift speaks of how the modern writer feel that Knowledge lies exhausted and
thus take recourse to digression . Their works lack any method , style , grammar
and their content lacking originality dwell on topics like a rainy day , a fit of
spleen , bad luck at dice , a tailor’s bill , a beggar’s purse . Swift refers to these
hacks of Grub Street as ‘Grubaean sages’ and their works containing the ‘most
finished and refined Systems of all Science and Arts’ because to force impressive
revelations from trivialities require much industry !

‘The Battle of the Books’ published along with the ‘A Tale of tub’
(1704) speaks of how a battle was fought between the ‘Antients and the Modern
Books in St. James’s Library’ . Loosely based on Boileau's ‘Le Lutrin’ , the satire
contains an excellent interpolated allegory of the spider and the bee . The bee
symbolises the ancients who used to draw inspiration from the nature while the
spider is like the modern hack-writing who can only criticise and build its web
(books of criticism) from the taint of its own body digesting the viscera.

The growth in journalism also saw the rise of the ‘professional’

writer who were employed by publishers like Edmund Curll , Jacob Tonson and
John Dunton to produce translations , adaptations and political pamphlets . These
hack-writers who existed on the scanty bounty of such men were venomously
attacked by the more established writers and especially by the Sribblerian Club
consisting of Jonathan Swift , John Arbuthnot , John Gay , Thomas Parnell ,
Alexander Pope . Swift in ‘On Poetry: A Rhapsody’ proves how hack-poetry as
nothing but merely a set of brittle physiological and typographical tricks.

Alexander Pope’s animiosity towards the hack-writers of Grub street

is more intensely personal . In ‘The Dunciad’ Pope serves himself as a kind of
counterweight to the lurid Grubaean chaos and shows his concern for the integrity
of the art for which he lived . Pope derides the mercenary author who perform
poetry for pay alone . As Pope puts it –

“He (a patron) chinks his purse, and takes his seat of state…
And (among the poets) instant, fancy feels th' imputed sense"

The dunce booksellers trick and counterfeit their way to wealth , and his dunce
poets wheedle and flatter anyone for enough money to keep the bills paid .

Dustin H. Griffin points out that Pope did not view dullness with
unequivocal disgust . just after the publication of the first Dunciad , Pope wrote in
a letter to swift “…every stick you plant , and every stone you lay , is to some
purpose; but the business of such lives as theirs [the scribblers] is but to die
daily , to labour , and raise nothing”

Pope’s famous ‘Prologue to the Satires’ , better known as the ‘Epistle

to Dr. Arbuthnot’ , opens with the evident frustratation of the poet where the poet’s
home is invaded by a horde of Juvenalian bad poets who disrupt the hitherto
stable personal and literary tradition .No place is safe from them –
“ no place is sacred , not the Church is free,”
Pope complains that all types of person indulge in writing verses without having
any poetic talent and they try to absorb him into their world by pleas , violent
restraints , flattery and even bribes .

In the section concerning Midas’s ears , Pope speaks of how Midas

had wrongly judged that Pan was a better poet than Apollo . Through this he
shows how the offence to the Gods and to Good Taste was being replayed by the
British Court’s selection of Colley Cibber as the poet laureaute along with the
patronage of Stephen Duck by the Queen and Walpole’s patronage of numerous
liuterary hacks for political purposes .Thus , the court becomes the centre of all
literary corruption.

In his ‘Essay on Criticism’ Pope professes to set forth the gospel of

‘wit’ and ‘nature’ as it applies to the literature of the age . Like a true Scriblerian
Pope sought to restate the code of the ancients -
“A little learning is a dangerous thing! ...
True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d”

Tathagata Dutta
(M.A., English Literature,
University Of Delhi)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. The Writing of Jonathan Swift, Ed. By Robert A. Greenberg and William

Bowman Piper.
2. Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire, Dr. Howard D.
Weinbrot.
3. Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems, Dustin H. Griffin.
4. Scriblerian Self-Fashioning, Brean S. Hammond.
5. History of English Literature, Edward Albert.
6. A Critical History Of English Literature(vol. 2), David Daiches
7. Literary Encyclopedia.