Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics, and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne by Pat Rogers

Abstract

176 a political biography. Messrs. Furbank and Owens claim that their account gives ‘‘a clear picture of his political affiliations in 1717–18,’’ but it is only clear because it is too simple. On the contrary, it can be (and has been) argued that Defoe saved the Protestant succession by preventing Whiggish fanaticism from provoking a Jacobite counterrevolution in the years after 1715, which would more than make up for spreading a little misinformation around. Indeed, there is another explanation altogether for Defoe’s conduct in 1717–1718, which does not require one’s belief that Defoe adhered to, or betrayed, the political line of either party. As early as 1705, in the Consolidator, Defoe had created for himself the persona of the lunar traveler, who with the aid of a perspective glass viewed terrestrial political events from a great distance. This glass revealed the absurdity of human affairs, particularly in the political realm. The affectation of lunacy was as good a defense as any other for a journalist in Defoe’s day, in which freedom of the press did not yet exist. Defoe’s contemporaries may have regarded his independent stance as a journalist and his refusal to respect party lines as lunacy or mendacity , but we may now see them as precedent acts in the establishment of a free press. The tight focus of this book on Defoe’s role in the strife between parties prevents any more expansive definition of the politics of his time. Granted, questions of gender , class, and race were not then widely regarded as political, but Defoe was sharply aware of the imbalances of power among social groupings and of the necessity of palliating the grievances of the dispossessed. A chapter on his economic thought would have allowed Messrs. Furbank and Owens to address many questions now recognized as political, and would have laid a basis for looking at his novels as extensions of his earlier political writings. But then, one would have to believe that those earlier writings represented convictions profound enough to find expression in fiction, which is contrary to the slant of this book. Nevertheless, skepticism of truths that are not backed by evidence is good, and this short book sticks closely to facts. It would have been helpful to readers if Messrs. Furbank and Owens had clearly set out their disagreements with Novak—his name appears nowhere in the body of the work, nor in the index, and just twice in the notes, though Paula Backscheider’s biography is cited frequently. Instead of engaging Novak in controversy, they have chosen merely to set forth their account of Defoe’s political life as they understand it. Their biography presents a clear alternative to the established Whiggish reading of Defoe’s political career. Geoffrey Sill Rutgers University, Camden PAT ROGERS. Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics, and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne. Oxford: Oxford, 2005. Pp. xviii ⫹ 341. $90. Mr. Rogers long has held a deservedly high place in eighteenth-century scholarship . With The Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest (2004) and now Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts, he provides almost 630 pages of exemplary historical reclamation for Pope’s ‘‘last great Renaissance poem in English.’’ That reclamation offers 177 ‘‘rhetorical and intellectual coherence’’ as drawn from both immediate and earlier literary and broadly cultural sources. He seeks to ‘‘re-augustanize Pope,’’ to trace ‘‘his deep feelings of comfort within inherited idiom.’’ Mr. Rogers begins with Windsor-Forest’s composition, publication, and relationship to the Pope family’s later removal from the Windsor area, as well as Pope’s friendship with his nonce patron Sir William Trumbull. In Chapter 2, we then see the poem’s other biographical contexts, including Scriblerians and Pope’s dedicatee, Lord Lansdowne. The third chapter clarifies political contexts, including Pope’s concepts of British history and of the Stuarts, as well as the more immediate topical elements regarding the Peace of Utrecht, and ‘‘Pope’s relation to the Jacobite cause.’’ The fourth chapter concerns Queen Anne and her actions for peace, and the fifth explores Windsor’s associations with the Order of the Garter and with heraldry. Chapter 6 considers...