Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay by John Richardson

Abstract

MLR, IOI.2, 2006 521 within a tradition of 'impossible locations and imaginary geography' (p. I96). The fact that 'real' locations in Shakespeare's plays are often, as Laroque points out, paired with an imaginary twin-such as Athens and the wood in the Dream, or the Court and the Forest of Arden in As You Like It-reminds us that we should not be too literal-minded in our attempts to pin down Shakespeare's geography. In this way, one could argue that the tensions at play in this volume stem from Shakespeare himself, and perhaps the book would have been yet more successful had this been acknowledged more fully. Nevertheless, this is an informative and scholarly study that is admirably open and exploratory in its approach, and which takes the reader on a thought-provoking tour of the literary and political worlds of early modern Europe. UNIVERSITYOFREADING RICHARD MEEK Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay. By JOHNRICHARDSON. (Rout ledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature, 2) London and New York: Routledge. 2004. Xi+ 187 PP. ?58. ISBN 0-415-31286-8. When patriotic Britons sang in the 1740S that they never would be slaves, they were thinking less of Africans working on plantations than of subservience to a despotic France. John Richardson begins his study by outlining the several literal and meta phorical senses of theword 'slave', including the one most familiar from Pope's usage: a political lackey, a corrupt, abject tool of power. Richardson argues that the Treaty of Utrecht, and its adjunct clause granting Britain the right to trade inAfrican slaves to the New World (the Asiento de negros), had far-reaching consequences for the Scrib lerians, who were closely associated with Robert Harley and Henry St John, Tory architects of the peace. He establishes that knowledge of the realities of the slave trade was available, that it was possible to express resistance to it, and that many literary texts displayed a conflicted awareness of it-abhorrence of the idea tempered by euphemistic avoidance of the subject, or a compensatory sense that slavery was somehow an internal condition. He gives interesting detail on the compromised po sitions of Scriblerian authors during peace negotiations and the subsequent defences of it in Swift's History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne and Pope's Windsor Forest, indeed a troubled text in this reading. There follow individual chapters on the three main authors which suggest a link between Utrecht and later satirical positions. Pope's conception of personal identity (to be a 'slave' is to lack internal consistency of character) is tracked through the Horatian poems; Gay's plays reveal aspects of both sympathy and contempt for slaves; Swift's treatment of the starving Irish and the bestial Yahoos derives in part from his powerfully riven awareness of slavery. Finally, Richardson argues that despite the complexity of imaginative manceuvre in these Scriblerian texts, we have amoral duty tomark down these authors as complicit in the abomination that was transatlantic slavery. Richardson's close readings are carefully focused and subtly thought out. But he underestimates the extent to which a 'manageable' attitude towards slavery was already established inEnglish literature (at least as early as Behn's Oroonoko), not to mention the classical literature on which 'Augustan' values depend. The link between Utrecht and later Scriblerian satire is certainly not as foundational as Richardson appears towant it to be. For satirists, the South Sea Company was more important for its spectacular crash in 1720, with the attendant rise ofWalpole's regime, than for its character as a slave-trading operation. Richardson cannot cite much about slavery from either version of The Dunciad, preferring instead to insist, sometimes with insufficient cogency, that the references to slavery in the Essay onMan are coloured by the specific presence of African slavery, despite their ostensibly 'political' import. 522 Reviews He concentrates on Gay's Polly, set in theWest Indies, at the expense of the more Scriblerian Beggar's Opera, though he does attempt to readMacheath's collection of 'doxies', via orientalist conceptions of the harem, as slave-related, a process far too attenuated to command assent. There is simply too much else...