Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T20:13:07.228Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

19 - Augustan England and British America

from PART III - LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
William Dowling
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

In Boswell's Life of Johnson, under the year 1778, a reader comes across one of those Johnsonian outbursts that caused Boswell to compare his hero's temper to a warm West Indian climate. The context is entirely benign. Johnson has been discussing with the Quaker Mrs Knowles the nature of Christian friendship. Then, without warning, comes the explosion. ‘From this pleasing subject,’ reports Boswell, ‘he, I know not how or why, made a sudden transition to one upon which he was a violent aggressor; for he said, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American:” and his inflammable corruption bursting into horrid fire, he “breathed out threatenings and slaughter;” calling them, “Rascals – Robbers – Pirates;” and exclaiming he'd “burn and destroy them.”’ When another lady present, Anna Seward, gently reproves his vehemence, the result is another explosion: ‘He was irritated still more by this delicate and keen reproach; and roared out another tremendous volley, which one might fancy could be heard across the Atlantick.’

Yet to any one who had read Johnson's Taxation No Tyranny, the most searching analysis of American claims produced by anyone writing on the side of George III and his ministers, the explosion would have come as no surprise. For by 1778 Johnson had honestly concluded that the American colonists were simply Englishmen long permitted by mere geographical accident to escape their normal civic responsibilities. They were now, in his view, hypocrites who were trying to make that advantage permanent by mobilising an exploded vocabulary of Whig principles left over from the previous reign.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 498 - 524
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967),Google Scholar
Beverley, Robert, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Wright, Louis B., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947.Google Scholar
Bolingbroke, [Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke]. The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols., London, 1879, rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966.Google Scholar
Boswell, James, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, George Birkbeck, rev. Powell, L. F.. 6 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–64.Google Scholar
Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bridgenbaugh, Carl, ed., Gentleman's Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr Alexander Hamilton (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1948), p..Google Scholar
Brown, Laura, The Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Elofson, W. M. and Woods, John A.. 9 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–96.Google Scholar
Byrd, William, The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712, ed. Wright, Louis B. and Richmond, Marion Tinling, VA: The Dietz Press, 1941.Google Scholar
Defoe, Daniel, A Plan of the English Commerce, London, 1728.Google Scholar
Dowling, William C., ‘Ideology and the Flight from History in Eighteenth-Century Poetry’, in Damrosch, Leo (ed.), The Profession of English Literature, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Dowling, William C., Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Dowling, William C., The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, ed. Carretta, Vincent, London: Penguin, 1955.Google Scholar
Feingold, Richard, Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of Georgic, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Feingold, Richard, Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic, Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978.Google Scholar
French, David P., ed., Minor English Poets, 1660–1780: A Selection from Alexander Chalmers' ‘The English Poets’, 10 vols., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967.Google Scholar
Fuller, Randall, ‘Theaters of the American Revolution: The Valley Forge Cato and the Meschianza in their Transcultural Contexts’, Early American Literature 34.2 (1999.Google Scholar
Gould, Eliga H., The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.Google Scholar
HamiltonAlexander, Dr, Gentleman's Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr Alexander Hamilton, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1948.Google Scholar
Jenyns, Soame, The Works of Soame Jenys, Esq. 2nd edn, 4 vols., London, 1793.Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel, Political Writings, ed. Greene, Donald J., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
KamesLord, Henry Home, The Elements of Criticism, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1762.Google Scholar
Kaul, Suvir, ‘Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal’, PMLA 105.1 (1990.Google Scholar
Kaul, Suvir, Thomas Gray and Literary Authority, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Kramnick, Isaac, Bolingbroke and his Circle, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, David S., The Glorious Revolution in America, New York: Harper and Row, 1972.Google Scholar
Lustig, Irma, and Pottle, Frederick A. (eds.), Boswell: The English Experiment, London: Heinemann, 1986.Google Scholar
Mackie, Erin, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Marshall, P. J., ‘Burke and Empire’, in TaylorConnors, Stephen Richard and Jones, Clyve(eds.), Hanoverian Britain and Empire, Woodbridge, Suffolk Boydell Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Mickle, William Julius, The Lusiad: or, the Discovery of India. Translated from the Original Portuguese of Luis de Camöens, 2nd edn, Oxford, 1778.Google Scholar
Olson, Alison Gilbert, Anglo-American Politics 1660–1775, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Paine, Thomas, Common Sense, Mount Vernon, NY: A. Colish, 1976.Google Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, Commerce, and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pope, Alexander, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt, John et al., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Shields, David S., Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Speck, W. A., Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760, London: Edward Arnold, 1984.Google Scholar
Warton, Joseph, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols., London, 1762–82.Google Scholar
Warton, Joseph, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols., London, 1782.Google Scholar
Wood, Gordon, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×