The Even Longer Restoration

Abstract

The Even Longer Restoration David A. Brewer There are good reasons to think of the Restoration as a limited, potentially quite limited period in politics. Arguably the political situation had altered in a significant way by the mid-1660s, as the regime change of 1660 failed to deliver on many of the hopes placed upon it. Certainly the years of the Exclusion Crisis and then those of the reign of James II took the relationship between governors and the governed in directions largely unthinkable in the preceding decades. And the Revolution of 1688-89 unquestionably changed things irrevocably. So as a political era, the Restoration is, at most, a scant three decades long. Similarly, it makes sense to think of the Restoration as a limited period in terms of some sorts of literary production. Heroic drama, stage comedies that revolve around the ostentatious cuckolding of cits, verse full of the rudest words imaginable just aren't a big part of new writing from the 1690s on, and the unacceptability of many Restoration texts to significant segments of the eighteenth-century public seems telling in terms of how we think about periodization. But it's not nearly as easy (or useful) to delimit the Restoration in some other realms, particularly the complex array of bookselling and reading practices we could call "literary culture." Put simply, the presumptions and habits that took hold in the years we generally term the Restoration (say, 1660-88) in some ways predate and in many ways outlast even the most expansive of our conventional definitions of the period: e.g., those that would rebrand it as "late Stuart," going all the way to 1714. That is, many of the things that seem most characteristic of Restoration literary culture can be found as early as 1650 and as late as the 1770s—hardly our standard way of defining the period, and even more chronologically expansive than the "long Restoration" recently claimed for Milton (Hoxby and Coiro). Today, I'd like to sketch out how I see Restoration literary culture perpetuating itself long after other aspects of the age had passed and to suggest why this may have been the case. In doing so, I'd like to at least passingly reflect upon what it might mean for periods not to be coterminous with themselves (e.g., for Restoration literary culture to last four times longer than Restoration politics). Probably the most efficient way of doing this would be to glance at a few of the phenomena I've been working on in my current book project as they manifest in what we would conventionally term the Restoration and then look at their counterparts from the 1760s. So three quick areas to consider: 1) One of the most fascinating developments of the later seventeenth century is the emergence of authorial names as the principal means through which authorship was imagined and negotiated and marked. These names typically amount to a set of tacit [End Page 96] instructions as to what to do with a text/what sort of attention to pay to it and the readers, writers, and booksellers who surround it. A wonderful example would be Samuel Pepys's copy of the 1680 Poems on Several Occasions by the Right Honorable the E. of R--- (the first collected edition of poems by or allegedly by Rochester, full of rude words, sodomized link boys, and other libertine provocation). However, when Pepys had it bound to match the other books in his library, he added a spine label that read "Rochesters Life" (see fig. 1). Read one way, this suggests that the volume at hand is not the naughty verse but Gilbert Burnet's pious account of Rochester's deathbed penitence: Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester.1 Read another way, the label suggests that the naughty verse is autobiographical and so is, in some important way, Rochester's life. Either way, though, the label orients you with respect to the text and it does so first and foremost through the use of what David Hume would later call "the very name of Rochester" (2:453). In passing, I should...