Representations of Political Corruption in 18th-century Literature

Abstract

New forms of political corruption had apparently become an indispensable part of 18th-century constitutional practice in Britain – with the government (or ‘the crown’) buying the necessary parliamentary majorities and the City bribing court officials and members of the Commons. A passionate public debate, running all through the century, tried to make sense of this unacceptable situation. Literature became an important participant in this sense-making process – by developing imageries and exemplary emplotments, poets, satirists and playwrights made a disturbing phenomenon of everyday politics emotionally more plausible. As the ‘new’ political scientists have told us, the “division between the corrupt and the non-corrupt is exclusively on the level of perception” (Bratsis) – is, in other words, a construction. Accordingly, 18th-century authors offered various and very different constructs. While the traditionalists continued to interpret political corruption as an epidemic variety of moral decay, the more ‘modern’ texts saw it in structural terms: either as an invasion of private integrity by dirty politics, e. g. in the metaphoric terms of sexual seduction and defloration, or, conversely, as the contamination of the public sphere by cynically commercial interests (“‘tis the King and Country's bought and sold”, The Candidate).