Volume 9, No. 1

This essay offers an account of the range of Claude Rawson’s work as a literary scholar, critic, editor and reviewer. It considers Rawson’s particular importance for the study of Jonathan Swift, for our understanding of Swift’s irony and satire, and the recognition of Swift’s achievement and influence as a poet. Drawing upon Rawson’s insights into the character of Swift’s satire, and particularly of its proleptic quality, the essay observes Swift’s satiric anticipation of Artificial Intelligence and of the “Death of the Author.” The essay reports Swift’s significance for the American confessional poet Delmore Schwartz, indicates a polemical ancestry for Swift’s favourite trope of the satirist with a whip, and suggests an unnoticed contemporary model for the “Language Machine” in Part III of Gulliver’s Travels.

The essay offers a wide-ranging account of Claude Rawson’s printed writings over a period of sixty years. It charts the ways in which these writings reflect Rawson’s principles about the study of literature, his methodology, and his skills as a literary critic. It goes on describe the reception of Rawson’s work by other scholars and critics, and the immense influence it has exerted in the field of eighteenth-century literature and literary studies more widely. Separate attention is given to his monographs, notably God, Gulliver, and Genocide (2001), his essays and reviews, his editions of texts, and his role in bringing forward the work of others.

In God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination (2001) and Swift’s Angers (2014), Claude Rawson returns to a touchstone of his critical practice as first set forth in Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (1985): “my concern is as much with the ironic energies contained in the assertions of order as the assertion itself.” Nowhere are those energies more astringent than in Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729). Taking its cue from Chapter 3, “Killing the Poor: An Anglo-Irish Theme?” from God, Gulliver, and Genocide, this essay extends Rawson’s Swiftian genealogy of “unsocial socialism” in George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Bertolt Brecht and applies it to Anglo-Irishman Arthur Murphy’s The Orphan of China (1753), showing how Murphy’s transcultural adaptation, the first of its kind in English, shares a source in the great zaju dramas of Yuan Dynasty China with Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944). Like Swift in A Modest Proposal, both Murphy and Brecht foreground the social question posed by the unprovided young. By deploying the estrangement-effect of Asian and Caucasian settings and narratives, they defamiliarize the plight of the orphan as ground zero of social-contract theory in the Enlightenment, probing the Chinese originals to elucidate an increasingly urgent ethical dilemma of modernity: the necessity and yet the scarcity of intentional acts of sacrificial altruism on behalf of social unification.

This bibliographically informed comparison of Pope’s and Swift’s representation of themselves through their books draws on Claude Rawson’s investigation of Swift’s epitaph. Rawson compares the epitaph with Swift’s other self-representations and those of Yeats and Pope, valuing Swift’s rejection of the lofty style. The analysis of the books in this essay draws on Rawson’s evaluations. Pope designs his books directly. His first volume of Works (1717) in large formats, quarto and folio, declares him a classic at the age of twenty-nine. The engravings make him both a young gentleman and a son of Apollo. His second volume (1735) presents him as the friend of virtuous aristocrats. He reprints his works in octavo, as though they are Latin classics, but only after they have appeared as imposing volumes. Swift was also a consummate professional in his understanding of print, but always maintained his distance from production. His publications had to be seen to be done to him, rather than for him. He disowned his Miscellanies (1711), although he had been prepared to direct its contents, but this collection, an octavo, is an impressive book, generous in its use of space and honouring its author. The same is true of Gulliver’s Travels. In the 1730s Swift collaborated with George Faulkner on four volumes of Works, always expressing his reluctance and disapproval. Their engravings display their author much more heroically than do any of Pope’s, even though Faulkner’s octavo format falls short of the pomp of Pope’s Works.

This essay considers the implications for eighteenth-century studies of Claude Rawson’s God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945, as the book approaches the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication. In this wide-ranging monograph, several of Rawson’s key arguments turn on readings of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), A Modest Proposal (1729), and other works by Jonathan Swift, but they also have important consequences for Swift’s great contemporary and antagonist Daniel Defoe. Emphasizing Rawson’s approach to irony as unstable and double-edged and his confrontation with questions of genocide, we analyze the vexed case of Defoe’s controversial pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) and Defoe’s troubled revisiting of themes from Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the two continuations of 1719 and 1720, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

This essay revisits the vexed issue of race and racism in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels, as analyzed brilliantly in Claude Rawson’s God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination,1492-1945. Whereas Rawson both resisted charges that Swift’s presentation of the Yahoos is racist and cast doubt on defenses of Swift as anti-racist, I argue instead that the tale of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos marks the crossroads between the older, early modern vision of the human species with the modern ideology of racial science coalescing just at that moment in history. Swift draws on the one hand from older myths such as the “Wild Man” or bestial savage but also reflects contemporary debates on the definition of “man” provoked particularly by John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. Our difficulties in placing Swift in the history of race reflects emerging problems of definition and taxonomy that he deliberately exploited in order to perplex the reader.

The article examines the validity of the term “Scriblerian satire” as a concept in literary history. It attempts to dispute the views of Ashley Marshall, who has argued that the entity is a mythical construct, posthumously invented by scholars and critics. Marshall contends that the Scriblerus Club was a short-term phenomenon, while its members soon dispersed and wrote in very disparate styles. Apart from Jonathan Swift, others in the circle wrote no substantive works in satirical form prior to 1725. This article questions some fundamental aspects of Marshall’s case. It challenges her narrow definition of satire, as well as her assertion that a sharp break in practice took place between the first and second quarters of the century. Instead, the article considers a wider range of items produced under the aegis of the original Scriblerians. It proposes a much closer and more durable connection among the group; a far greater coherence in the methods, settings and targets of their work; a more extensive involvement in shared exercises; and it identifies a distinct mode of satire that can be meaningfully called Scriblerian. Neither the nature of this literary collaboration nor the character of its outcome in print was in any sense mythical.

Of the many critics who have tried to understand Johnson’s complex attitude to Swift, Rawson is surely the most insightful. This essay explores some Johnsonian responses to Swift in addition to those canvassed by Rawson and takes up anew the question of Swiftianism in Johnson’s writings and conversation. Operating within the framework established by Rawson, this essay finds, in sum, that the harshest sort of irony is slightly less exceptional than Rawson judged and slightly less confined to his early years as a writer. Later in life Johnson could be more Swiftian in conversation and in ex tempore writing than in his more considered and more public utterances. This suggests that he controlled his harshest tendencies when he was speaking on the record or, more importantly, making pronouncements that might reach a broader audience of impressionable readers. But the tendencies ran deep, just as Rawson says.