The Revenant Charles Churchill: A Haunting of Literary History

Abstract

LITERARY history has flattened out and moralized Charles Churchill into something like satirical prints that caricatured him in his own day. More symbol than substance, Churchill comes to us now in simplistic form, if he comes at all. He is vanity of misspent youth, dying ember of formal verse satire, the comet of a season, or, most often in current discussion, a mere political journalist. This last label is as misleading as it is convenient. To be sure, it accurately reflects part of Churchill's literary career, but it also neglects seriousness of some of his political commentary and blinds us to his ambitions as a poet and to his engagement with a range of contemporary philosophical and aesthetic problems. If we strip away accumulated assumptions from our understanding of Churchill, what do we find? I will address this question in three parts: (0) How did Churchill's contemporaries perceive him? (2) How have critics, anthologists and literary historians understood and represented him since his death? And (3) what kind of writer did Churchill strive to be? The answers to these questions will help us see how this once-popular poet has all but disappeared from story of English literary history. Situated in his own context, I argue, Churchill fits uneasily into categories that characterize confused period of British literature from Pope to Wordsworth: an Age of Johnson, Sensibility, Post-Augustanism, Pre-Romanticism. These categories focus attention on certain kinds of writing, and their focuses cause one