Charlatanism and Resentment in London’s Eighteenth-Century Literary Marketplace

Abstract

It is a commonplace that British literary production became increasingly commercialised across the eighteenth century, and that shifts in literary genre, address and mood over the period need to be considered in that light. In this chapter, I want to address two quite specific structures within this process, concentrating on the mid-century period. The first is the close relationship between writing and forms of quackery or charlatanism. The second structure, which I will attend to more briefly, is the slow emergence among writers of what will later come to be called ressentiment from out of that old Satanic vice, envy. Setting these very different events side by side may seem perverse, but, by focussing on a cluster of commercial book-trade participants — John Newbery, Oliver Goldsmith and Christopher Smart — I want to make the case that, in the narrow period between about 1750 and 1780, they are in fact linked and in ways that help us make sense of the romanticism to come.KeywordsEighteenth CenturyBook TradePatent MedicineMedicine RetailerPharmaceutical BusinessThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.