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Swift and Bolingbroke on Faction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Pat Rogers
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Extract

The text for this essay comes from Sir Lewis Namier. “One has to steep oneself in the political life of a period,” so the decree reads, “before one can safely speak, or be sure of understanding, its language.” This article is an attempt to supply, not a complete grammar of Augustan politics, but a minor lexicographical entry. Historians sometimes talk as though the most urgent need were for an advanced glossary. The assumption behind this essay is that a more elementary gradus is required. The two key words under review, “party” and “faction,” have always occupied neighbouring berths in the British synonymy. Unfortunately, in the eighteenth-century vocabulary of politics, they became overlapping concepts. Or rather — this is the trouble — they sometimes merged, partially or completely; sometimes they did not; and sometimes they were even employed as antonymous terms. Examples of all these contrary applications are found in the work of Swift and Bolingbroke. As with other lexicographical enquiries, then, usage and abusage must be considered, as well as the simple dictionary definition of these terms.

I

Edmund Burke is still, in some quarters, valued more highly as a prophet than as a political thinker. His forecasts of the likely course of the Revolution have brought him a reputation for the occult among those who hold his moral views in little esteem, even though he may be regarded, most unfairly, as a sorcerer's apprentice who was engulfed by his own charmed vision.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , May 1970 , pp. 71 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1970

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References

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2. In some respects this essay might be regarded as a minor appendix to Boulton, J. T., The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London, 1963)Google Scholar. I have, however, confined my attention to a number of verbal clues which illuminate certain political categories; I have not considered wider habits of language as an index of literary or rhetorical intention, as Boulton does.

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37. To take a single instance, the Whig author, John Oldmixon, makes scathing reference to Robert Harley's apostacy from the sound principles of his ancestors; in addition, Oldmixon presents Harley as socially ambitious and a pretender to taste. See the following works by Oldmixon, John: Memoirs of Wharton (London, 1715), pp. 10–11Google Scholar; Memoirs of North Britain (London, 1715), p. 25Google Scholar; False Steps of the Ministry (London, 1714), p. 25Google Scholar; The History of England (London, 1735), pp. 34, 122, 208, 219, 461Google Scholar; The Secret History of Europe (London, 1715), IV, 71Google Scholar. On Sir Richard Steele's exploitation of the same line of attack, see Winton, Calhoun, Captain Steele (Baltimore, 1964), p. 193Google Scholar.

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41. For an examination of the mutual relationship of the two journals, see Rogers, Pat, “The Whig Controversialist as Dunce” (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar.

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