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Literary Backgrounds to Book Four of the Dunciad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Aubrey Williams
Aubrey Williams*
Affiliation:
Yale University New Haven, Conn.
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Extract

Writing of the Dunciad in the year 1745, a rather obscure biographer and critic of Alexander Pope said: “As the Scenery of this Poem changes, and new Characters appear, the ingenious Author has follow'd the dramatick Rule, of shewing the Humour of each Character the stronger, by shewing a contrast Character to it.” Then, speaking more particularly of Dunciad Four, the same writer continues: “The last Scene of the Poem (to keep to my dramatick Parallel) which is to produce the Catastrophe, ends with great Propriety. The Stage is full of all the Goddess's [i.e., the Goddess of Dulness] Votaries, whom she receives with Pleasure. . . .”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1953 , pp. 806 - 813
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

1 William Ayre, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope (London, 1745), II' 241, 243-344.

2 “The Dunciad, Book IV,” Univ, of Texas, Stud, in English, XXIV (1944), 179-180.

3 See the discussion of the Tablet by Earl R. Wasserman, “The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification,” PMLA, LXV (1950), 437 ff.

4 See Tatler, No. 161 (20 April 1710),

5 See Characteristicks, 2nd ed. (London, 1714), II, 252-254. The passage it found in “Treatise V. The Moralists.”

6 London, 1742. See pp. 68 ff.

7 The Tablet of Cebes: or, a Picture of Human Life, a Poem copied from The Greek, of Cebes the Theban, by a Gentleman of Oxford (Oxford, 1759), pp. 7, 14.

8 See Cebelis Tabula, ed. by C. S. Jerram (Oxford, 1878), p. xxiv.

9 See Collier's The Emperor Marcus Antoninus, His Conversation with Himself ...To which is added the Mythological Picture of Cebes the Theban (London, 1701), p. 251.

10 There is a possibility that Fielding was indebted to Pope for the design of his plays, rather than the reverse. The author (Thomas Cooke?) of The Candidates for the Bays (London, 1730), a “session” poem, charged that Fielding's Queen Nonsense, in The Author's Farce, was an imitation of Pope's Goddess Dulness. Here is the pertinent passage:

He [Fielding] steals all his Beauties when they're in their Fulness,

As by (e) Luckless appears, and the Goddess of Dulness.

[e] Vide Author's Farce, the Scene between Luckless and his Landlady, pirated from L—in a B—, and the Goddess of Nonsense from the Goddess Dulness in the D[unciad].

11 See the Dunciad, Twickenham Ed. (New York, 1943), pp. xxxviii-xxxix, where James Sutherland states that “In the literary ancestry of the Dunciad one should perhaps include that favourite genre, The Sessions of the Poets,' in which Apollo was represented as selecting a candidate for the vacant laureateship.” Sutherland does not develop the idea, however, and so the information offered in this essay appears to me to be warrantable.

12 Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, I, xxiv, xxiii.

13 It perhaps should be noted that Pope uses the phrase “grand Sessions” with regard to his throne-room scene. See the note to 1. 45, Book Four.

14 Cf. these lines from the Dunciad:

There march'd the bard and blockhead, side by side,

Who rhym'd for hire, and patroniz'd for pride. . ..

There mov'd Montalto with superior air;

His stretch'd-out arm display'd a Volume fair;

Courtiers and Patriots in two ranks divide,

Thro' both he pass'd, and bow'd from side to side. (IV. 101-108)