English Versions of Roman Satire in the Earlier Eighteenth Century by William Kupersmith

Abstract

77 complacent with the suggestion that the novel may allow a potentially edifying view of our own mad selves, we are shown Sterne and, particularly, his various portrayals of Maria, and asked to contemplate whether we look on madness in art only to shore up our individual delusions. In the fifth cell we see madness on stage by way of King Lear, or more accurately Tate’s Lear, and Garrick ’s Lear, and an apparently growing cultural interest in what passes for authenticity in the representation of madness . All on a sudden Ms. Faubert steps in as guide, usefully showing us Wollstonecraft ’s split sentimental and antisentimental self, but repetitively insisting on a tendentious syllogism by which eighteenth-century women are (socially constructed) passive, madness is passive , therefore madness is feminine. Evidently on break while Ms. Faubert leads the tour, Mr. Ingram makes no attempt to explain how her rather strict formulations fit within his constantly protean readings of madness, nor does he speak up for poor old Bacon when she reminds us that ‘‘Foucault has famously asserted’’ that ‘‘knowledge is power.’’ But our primary guide does return refreshed to lead us through a truly captivating reading of prints by Hogarth, Rowlandson, Woodward, Wilson, Fuseli , and Gillray, as well as a discussion of the architecture of Bethlem Hospital. Calling the final cell ‘‘Madness itself,’’ Mr. Ingram comes rather too close to delivering on what he promises. The method here, never clearly articulated, appears to involve a focus on works by those who, restored to their wits after having been insane, try to describe and /or explain the experience. But when this fascinating material proves no less vexing than artistic representations of madness—such authors need to construct their own narratives, usually religious , to ‘‘make sense’’ of their own insanity —Mr. Ingram jettisons the approach . Nor will he consider texts he acknowledges might take us to something like the thing itself: works by authors like Christopher Smart. Such works are by the ‘‘innocently insane,’’ meaning, not morally or legally innocent, but written by those without an awareness of being insane. In a line worthy of Swift’s Hack, Mr. Ingram observes, ‘‘It is not that such writing is itself unproblematic .’’ And so, presumably because such writing is problematic, he decides to return to madness as literary representation —two poems by George Crabbe—to get to the subtitle of his final chapter, ‘‘the real story.’’ Perhaps every scholarly monograph is at some point in its composition a work of madness. If an editor had advised the author to lose the first and last chapters and to move Ms. Faubert’s essay to a journal or edited volume, Mr. Ingram would still have had more than enough engaging scholarly content to fill a richly fascinating book. By virtue of its collection of historical detail and close readings of individual texts and prints, this work will reward anyone interested in the topic. But like the texts Mr. Ingram is drawn to consider, his own text cannot be said to be unproblematic. Frank Boyle Fordham University WILLIAM KUPERSMITH. English Versions of Roman Satire in the Earlier Eighteenth Century. Newark: Delaware, 2007. Pp. 271. $54.50. This book examines Imitations of Juvenal and Horace in the heyday of this popular genre from 1708 to 1750. In addition to the usual suspects (Swift, 78 Pope, Fielding, Johnson, Smart), Mr. Kupersmith attends on the efforts of forgotten or neglected writers (such as William Diaper, James Roberts, James Miller , George Ogle, William Hamilton, Joseph Turner, Edward Walpole, Thomas Gilbert, Soame Jenyns), who took pleasure in modernizing ancient Roman poetry . It was Dryden who defined the rules of this game: ‘‘I take imitation of an author to be an endeavor of a later poet to write like one who has written before him, on the same subject: that is, not to translate his words, or to be confined to his sense, but only to set him as a pattern, and to write as he supposes that author would have done, had he lived in our age, and in our country’’ (Preface to Ovid’s Epistles). In careful detail, Mr. Kupersmith assesses what is going on—poetically, politically, culturally —when someone...