Restoration and 18th Century
What this domain covers
1660, the Restoration of Charles II, to about 1798. The exam asks about satire's modes, the heroic couplet, periodical prose, the emerging novel, and genre terms (mock epic, comedy of manners, elegy, ode), plus the period's arguments about wit, taste and moral correction.
Core rules and concepts
- Heroic couplet. Iambic pentameter rhymed aa, usually end-stopped and closed, with antithesis, balance and zeugma doing the argument's work. Dryden, then Pope; one couplet typically carries one complete thought.
- Satire's modes. Horatian satire is urbane and corrective; Juvenalian is savage invective. Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681) allegorizes the Exclusion Crisis in biblical terms (David = Charles II, Absalom = Monmouth, Achitophel = Shaftesbury). Pope's Rape of the Lock (1712/1714) is mock epic.
- Swift's personae. The proposer of A Modest Proposal is a projection, not Swift; Gulliver's Travels (1726) works by shifts of scale and the narrator's deterioration.
- Comedy of manners. Congreve's Way of the World (1700), Wycherley's Country Wife (1675): wit combat, the rake, marriage as contract.
- Periodical essay. The Tatler (1709) and The Spectator (1711) - Addison and Steele, the Spectator Club, Sir Roger de Coverley; the stated aim of tempering wit with morality.
- Rise of the novel. Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, 1719; Moll Flanders, 1722), Richardson (Pamela, 1740, epistolary), Fielding (Joseph Andrews, 1742, a 'comic epic-poem in prose'; Tom Jones, 1749), Sterne (Tristram Shandy, 1759–67), Burney.
- Late century. Gray's 'Elegy' (1751) in elegiac quatrains; sensibility; the Gothic (Walpole's Castle of Otranto, 1764; Radcliffe); Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Sheridan's School for Scandal (1777) as anti-sentimental comedy.
Worked example
In The Rape of the Lock, a card game is narrated as an epic battle and a stolen curl becomes a constellation. What does the epic machinery accomplish? List the epic conventions present in miniature - invocation, arming of the hero, single combat, apotheosis - then read the disproportion between the elevated form and the trivial subject. The mock epic does not mock epic; it uses epic scale to measure how small the characters' world has become, so the satire falls on vanity and triviality. Naming 'mock epic' without explaining that disproportion earns little credit.
Traps that cost marks
- Neoclassicism is not unemotional: Gray, Cowper, Burns, sensibility and the Gothic are all 18th-century.
- Mock epic is not a parody of one particular poem.
- Pamela is not the first novel; Defoe precedes Richardson, and 'first' is contestable.
- Keep satire's target straight: Pope often names individuals; Swift usually speaks through a mask.
- Not all 18th-century verse is in couplets - blank verse, odes and the elegiac quatrain all flourish.