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Opposition Politics in Gullivers Travels
Opposition Politics in Gullivers Travels
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BY
RONALD PAULSON
J. H. Plumb wrote that Gulliver's Travels was "one of the most remark-
able and virulent satires ever to be written against Walpole."' The only
made the point that anti-Walpole satire was only read into Gulliver's
Travels after the fact by the opposition; that Swift's general satire on
1726-27.1
was A Key, being Observations and Explanatory Notes, upon the Travels
connects Townshend and Walpole with Flimnap and Reldressal and the
purple, yellow, and white threads of the Lilliputians with the orders of
the Garter, Thistle, and Bath (13, 16).4 These references probably do, as
the author of the Key claims, reflect Swift's intention as he was finishing
Gulliver in 1725-26, in the year following the Drapier's Letters and the
could get out of the Tower. ... And the Severities threatned against poor
Lemuel," the author continues, "some have resembled to the late Earl of
Tower between 1715 and 1717. Two conclusions then are drawn by the
author of the Key from the "Voyage to Lilliput": "that the Emperor
himself is too much governed by Flimnap" and that the story of "the
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and had little directly to say about the Walpole regime of 1721-26.
Although the author of the Key identifies Gulliver with Oxford, Swift
Gulliver did. On the other hand, Irvin Ehrenpreis, in the final volume of
his biography of Swift (1983), notes of the "Voyage to Lilliput" that "The
imperial court evokes the enlightenment Swift suffered during the years
Swift himself.5
the "Voyage to Lilliput" meant to Swift and was made to mean by his first
that Hogarth's print was announced on the 3rd of December, two days
before the first issue of the Craftsman. The Key, also announced on the
Amhurst's earlier works. One could argue, perhaps, that Hogarth simply
took off from the poem prefixed to the Key-"Verses writ in the Blank
St. James's Palace, where we see "Magna Charta wave aloft in Air; / And
Judges see at Ombre with the Fair," and so on-bishops consorting with
clearly applies, more specifically than Swift's (with its primary reference
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-a /
/
Figure 1. Hogarth, The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver (first state); etching and
engraving; 7V/16 x 121/2 in.; December 1726; courtesy of the Trustees of the British
Museum, London.
shows a hypothetical scene, one very different from the actual punish-
his magnanimous attempt to put out the fire in the Empress of Lilliput's
Side of the Court, firmly resolved that those Buildings should never be
repaired for her Use; and, in the Presence of her chief Confidents, could
Ronald Paulson 81
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for which Hogarth has Gulliver punished-evokes Swift's own crime, the
argued, was the only way to extirpate not religion but "Corruptions in
He singles out one of Swift's central themes in the first voyage, Gulliver's
specifically on Walpole.
organ that designates his "liberty" in Lilliput (his spectacles were one
Hogarth could have taken the idea, itself a Swiftean commonplace, from
withdrawing for this purpose as far away as his chain will permit from the
scaled rats.
The focus on the church was timely. By 1726 Walpole's chief assistant
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years later in A Harlot's Progress (1732), where Gibson and Walpole are
Earlier, in his Codex Juris Ecclesiasticae (1713), which earned him the
nickname "Dr. Codex," Gibson had taken the position that ecclesiastical
Savage's Progress of a Divine (1735). And at this time the Old Whig,
Gulliver."
But there was a third party without whom it is difficult to imagine the
on 5 December. Hogarth and Amhurst, young men of the same age and
background, lived near each other and were acquainted. In June 1726
fact that the book and frontispiece were first announced in March 1722/
3, however, could suggest that they knew each other earlier.12 Up to 1724
James Thornhill, his artistic mentor (and later his father-in-law). Thornhill,
1724 Hogarth also published two prints that, while not specifically anti-
Ronald Paulson 83
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Royalty, Episcopacy, and Law. The emphasis of the satire in both prints,
for which he stood. He had attached his wagon to Stanhope's star, and
the death of this rival had paved the way for Walpole's ascendency. For
Amhurst, however, the two most significant facts were the Bangorian
Controversy of 1717 and his expulsion from Oxford in 1719, evidently for
and reprinted in 1719 and again in 1720 (all published by Curll). What
is a visible church of Christ, that is, that the church and its clergy carry
1719 and 1726, was the persecution of a young man for his Protestant
expulsion was the story by which Amhurst came to identify himself and
be identified.
expulsion) identifies it as "by Nich: Amerst [sic] late Fellow of St Johns &
Roman Catholic, but the latter stands in for all organized religion. He is
careful to distinguish between the New Testament Jesus and the figure
(13)
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(6)
His conclusion is that "Still in our Albion Popery remains; / The Name
fifth cantos depict the paper war waged by the contemporary Laudites
against Hoadly, whom by this time Amhurst has come to associate with
Jesus himself.
(1719), this time addressed to Stanhope, the chief minister. The poem
1726 were the South Sea Bubble, the disgrace and death of Stanhope,
the rise to power of Walpole and with him Bishop Gibson. The chief
which retains the portrait of Hoadly for its frontispiece, Amhurst makes
religion and revelation. He dedicates the book to the Rev. Dr. De Laune,
president of St. John's College, from which he had been expelled, and
admits that some of his poems "make a little free with your sacred Order;
but," he adds (the usual refrain, echoing Swift's own defense in his
"Apology" for A Tale of a Tub), "every candid reader will suppose that I
St. John's he "took Liberty for a real Blessing, and Religion for the real
took the sacrament--"but how much I am improved for the better since,
Ronald Paulson 85
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great Truth; namely, that Faith and a good Life are utterly independent
horse upon Reason, and gallop'd away in romantick search of a fair Lady,
levy upon their subjects "immense sums of Money for maintaining them
Scripture, and new points of Faith more difficult and abstruse than
man I could be, and how much I could outstrip even the Athanasian
Believers. (xii-xiii)
"I can scarce forgive my self for my childish Behaviour," "My Eyes are
now open," "I hope all young Men will take warning from me," and "I
have indeed been a very naughty Boy" (xiii-xiv, xxi). With heavy irony he
apologizes and accepts his "punishment" "for thinking like one in his
sentences, "Freethinking."20
nos. 14-18 on the subject of his expulsion. In the first issue he identifies
who exposes the lechery and hypocrisy of the Oxford clerics and
scholars.2 In the second issue he tells how the "truths of religion" have
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name, literally son of the earth, but usually translated bastard, reflected
the candidate B.A.s and M.A.s, those who, unlike Amhurst, received
court (fig. 2).22 Poor Amhurst, prevented from ascending the lecturn, is
Gulliver's sacrilege, dictated by one whose own case would have made
Behaviour," his apology for having been "a very naughty Boy," may have
bottom.
Given the coincidence of the first issue of The Craftsman and the
the aegis of church and state, with the church clearly predominating.
While in the "Voyage to Lilliput" the only allusion to the church is the
Ronald Paulson 87
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W 4ar/
x 31/16 in.; June 1724; courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.
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of learned Men ... was a new and unusual thing" (31). He concludes the
state and church, and is specified as the right to criticize their corrup-
satire in these first issues with a sort of coding that represents one thing
situation). Caleb D'Anvers talks about a bad servant (named Robin) and
about the king's chief minister Sir Robert Walpole. The "craft" of The
15). When Caleb discusses quackery in medicine, the readers see that he
theater and (with it) the fall of princes, and so the example of Shakespeare's
there was a front page essay on the 17th (also in The London Journal of
about hoaxes on the stage and in politics, would be read the same way
one read The Craftsman. But the image of the body, and the intrusion of
its nether parts, also relate the two prints. The rabbits fill the same space
Mary Toft; and the court physicians vouch for Toft's authenticity as the
Ronald Paulson 89
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AA-
IE 74;,r.
4i~~Ps&P/~4'Op~r/iir.A s_I _
f/,.#.,,../,Lov _
65/16 x 97/16 in.; December 1726; courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.
Gulliver. Both Gulliver and Toft are passive parties being exploited by
commissioned him to engrave the plate made from the Great Seal that
both the Harlot's and Rake's Progress (1732, 1735), while ostensibly
Gibson with Walpole, continuing to play with analogies of the sort set
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when he eloped with his daughter Jane, but in 1730 he collaborated with
worship. The most scandalous case was the play of 1737 called The
Golden Rump, which only survives in a satiric print titled The Festival of
Walpole.
himself as "pagod," bottom facing out, filling the gateway of St. James's
church. Yet another, at the time of Walpole's fall, Bro. Robert under his
with a clyster like the one employed in Hogarth's print.30 In the mid-
the ministry of his successor, Henry Pelham,31 and finally, in 1757, the
and retitled it The Political Clyster, which proposes that Lord Hardwick,
reversed: Gulliver (for which read, John Bull) should be purged of not by
parallel to the rabbit birth in Cunicularii. The latter is, one of the doctors
scene of Wise Men bearing gifts to the Christ Child, but in this case
"Nativity" like the one in which the birth, as the deists complained, had
Ronald Paulson 91
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KING IDOL
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the Birth of Christ with the "hoax" of Toft's litter of rabbits; in replacing
the three Wise Men with the three "Wise Men of Godlimen," who are
their Talents most Adroit / For any Mystical Exploit"); and in replacing
Mary the Mother with Mary Toft and Christ with the rabbits. The Mary-
evidence. The Latin title plays on the pun of cuniculus (rabbit) and
cunnus (vulva); and the foremost Wise Man is "An Occult Philosopher
searching into the Depth of Things." The rabbit birth is, of course (like,
always, among free-thinkers, the miracle that evoked the most mirth
(commonsense said the story of Mary's virgin conception was a hoax and
the aged Joseph a cuckold). He had sought to uncover "the plain drift
Nativity, remarking of the "Wisemen" that had they acted "as wise as well
as good Men," they would have brought gifts of not gold, frankincense,
and myrrh but soap, candles, and sugar. In the same passage he refers to
a whole new issue of whether Woolston was part of the group that
the uses of innuendo and irony. Amhurst was writing his first Craftsman
Ronald Paulson 93
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essays at the same time that Woolston was writing his First Discourse. It
wit to religious texts and doctrines; the crucial terms were coding, wit
reduces the Virgin Birth to a hoax concerning rabbits and the church
given Hogarth's choice of the enema, is that the portal of the church is
or as themselves excremental.40
Amhurst and Hogarth, it would seem, held a set of beliefs that were
spinoff of The Beggar's Opera which spells out its anti-Walpole satire, he
otherwise temperamentally one with the exiled Swift and the Roman
Catholic outsider Pope. For Amhurst and Hogarth the past was not a
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Bolingbroke, the figure who bridged the two groups, kept his deism to
himself, and both Amhurst and Hogarth kept theirs under the umbrella
drove one wing of the Whig party, and participated in opposition to the
priestcraft."45
religious matters. This was a rhetoric that began in the Restoration but
by the end of the century, in certain of its forms, had accrued traces of
deism along the way. In the context of the "Voyage to Lilliput," "liberty"
Both Amhurst and Hogarth would have been associated with the
did Hogarth cross the line into critical deism? There is no proving
whether Amhurst crossed the line; certainly his assertion and reassertion
was that he stood for a Protestant monarch and an Erastian church, and
Amhurst's Poems on Several Occasions with its apology for his hetero-
the Toft hoax was received by the credulous does not necessarily
Ronald Paulson 95
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presenting Mary Toft and her rabbit hoax in a composition that does on
the-face of it invoke the other Mary and the Wise Men--with, Hogarth's
pair of satires, The South Sea Scheme and The Lottery (1724), with
elements of Christian parody. The first replaced the soldiers casting lots
for Christ's robe at the foot of the cross with clergymen, and the second,
replaced the Host with a lottery, Christian choice with existential chance.
depicted an "Antichrist of wit" in The Dunciad a few years later), that is,
Christianity.
role of priests and their spiritual primacy, the nature of the Holy
Mother of Christ. Five years later, A Harlot's Progress takes off from, as
this scene, now numbered Plate 3, into the historicizing and demystifying
focuses on the miracle of the Virgin Birth and the doctrine of the
Church prelates like Gibson. But in the Harlot he signaled the cross-over
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he adds the religious coding of Wise Men as quack doctors and the
Virgin Mary as Mary Toft. Thus the Wise Men are now only Walpolean
quacks and Mary the Mother is only Mary Toft; or, a few years later,
Mary Hackabout, the Harlot. By the final plate the Harlot has become
the 1730s reality (in Mandeville's sense) beneath the fiction of the
gullibility (in a hoax) to truth and the reallegorizing of that truth as the
Harlot's "sacrifice" for the sins of the men who have bought, exploited,
If the miracles of the Nativity and the Eucharist were not normative
in Hogarth's satires (as they were in Swift's and Pope's), what was? There
was little that was positive in his works from the Harlot onward: primarily
aesthetic ideal that survives for him in a world that is bankrupt in terms
breaking the Egg (fig. 5a), he adapts the composition of a Last Supper,
abundance in the human female figure. In this case he uses the Last
in the Last Supper with two serpentine eels, which form "Lines of
Beauty," and two eggs.49 In the story of Columbus's jest at the expense of
his detractors who said anyone could have made his discovery (a story
egg on end. When they cannot, he does so by breaking the egg and
Ronald Paulson 97
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VARIETY
63
Joy ful
PLEA SED
70
Chan yeabe
AN GRY
Wrcia ful
c
d
Figure 5. a. Hogarth, Columbus breaking the Egg; April 1752 (detail); courtesy of the
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world. In the text of the Analysis, Hogarth asserts that the perfect oval of
hair.50
Opposite the frontispiece of the Analysis is the title page, whose logo
the Tetragrammaton (the four Hebrew letters that form the name of
God) with the Line of Beauty, once again naturalized with the head of a
serpent (fig. 5b, c).51 Indeed, in the margin of the second illustrative
plate a small figure (no. 70, fig. 5d) juxtaposes two Latin crosses. In the
text (92-93) Hogarth discusses them together with a Greek cross (no. 69)
Beauty. The Latin cross is of course the Christian crucifix, which he has
by Pope in Belinda's "sparkling Cross ... Which Jews might kiss, and
religious symbol (a lost ideal) into mere decoration. Hogarth may have
a very different thing. What for Swift and Pope was a negative process,
and a face that Hogarth has in fact beautified beyond that of the real
contains the principle of natural beauty, which was excluded from the
of ridiculous doctrines such as the Trinity and the Eucharist) and Nature,
This aesthetic formula is the final stage of a process that began with
that the critical deists destroy but cannot rebuild); belief can be
Ronald Paulson 99
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and Amhurst.
recent scholars assumes the internalizing of the former by the latter; the
and indeed supported, the rule of the Whig oligarchy. Amhurst and
position on religion, in part because it revealed what was wrong with the
simply (like Walpole the "pagod") taking on the sacral aura of the
religious.
NOTES
1 J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King's Minister (London: Cresset Press, 1960),
104. This paper was originally delivered at a symposium, "Jonathan Swift 1667-1745," at
2 The suppressed passages were added in MS. to Ford's interleaved copy. There is
3 Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature,
4 Casual responses had appeared earlier in pro-government journals that saw nothing
seditious. The Weekly Journal: Or, the British Gazetteer of 26 November 1726 printed a
letter from Ephraim Gulliver, Lemuel's brother, retailing stories of Englishmen who are
afraid they will find Brobdingnagians hiding under their beds; of women delivered of
marks in the London Journal (12 Nov., 26 Nov.) were also neutral.
5 Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: the Man, His Works, and the Age, Vol. 3: Dean Swift
6 The overlooking of this piece of evidence is all the more surprising because I had
dated Hogarth's print as early as 1965 in Hogarth's Graphic Works and again in 1971 in
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Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Tinmes. On the other hand, I wrote that "The 'Voyage to
Lilliput' was, of course, full of particular and general reflections on the government, and
Hogarth's purpose in his print was apparently to point them out as clearly as possible." I
princes and ministers-and Hogarth's print applied these to the current situation, the
Craftsrnun's campaign against the Walpole Ministry in 1726." See Paulson, Hogarth's
Graphic Works (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), No. 108; 3d ed. (London: The Print
Room, 1989), No. 107; Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1971), 1:173; and again in the revised 3 volume version, Hogarth, Vol. 1: The
"Modern Moral Subject," 1697-1752 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1991), 166.
For the previous dating by Hogarth scholars of' 1727 or 1728, see John Nichols and
George Steevens, The Genuine Works of William Hogarth, 3 vols. (London, 1808-17),
2:200.
7 The "Verses" opened the Key in its collected edition, titled Lemuel Gulliver's Travels
for Hogarth's Harlot, Plate 1, that the series ends seeing "Ch[arteri]s triumph with his
8 The Craftsnum itself does not mention Gulliver's Travels until No. 14 (16-20 Jan.
1726/7), and then only as an example in an ironic history of ridicule in England. No. 25 (27
relates a satire on Great Men and Prime Ministers with the announcement of a third
volume of Gulliver's Travels. But the spinoff volume 3 in fact proves to be quite innocent
of political intent-as were Menwirs of the Court of Lilliput and Gulliver Decypher'd, also
advertised in The Craftsmnum in 1727. In Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput, Gulliver tells
adventures he had omitted from the "Voyage to Lilliput"-all of a romantic sort, with love
the theme and no trace of political innuendo. Gulliver Decypher'd is merely a secret
history. There is a connection to Walpole on page viii ("Sir R-----" and "Great Men"), but
for its key it focuses on the last years of the Queen, and Walpole enters only as another
9 Plumb, Walpole, 95. See Harlot's Progress, plates 1 and 3 (in Hogarth's Graphic
Works, Nos. 121, 123; Hogarth, Vol. 1, 2, 249, 253, 288-90, 389, 328-29). For Gibson, see
Practice during the Ancien Regime (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 277-315.
'0 The author of the pamphlet The Devil to Pay at St. Janmes's, published a few months
later (June 1727) at the time of the fracas involving the opera divas Cuzzoni and Bordoni
at the Royal Academy of Music, may recall The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver. It calls on
Hogarth to illustrate other scenes in Gulliver. Referring to the animals Gulliver brought
back with him: "But Hogarth the Engraver is making a Print after them, which will give a
juster Idea of them than I can" (13). The quotation is cited by Jeanne K. Welcher, "Swift-
Hogarth Give and Take," Ventures in Research, ed. Richard R. Griffith (C. W. Post
" Earlier Hogarth had adapted the clothes worship of chapter 1 of the Tale in Royalty,
Episcopacy, and Law (1725)-and later he drew upon the Tale and Mechanical Operation
(1759-62). For that matter, he reinterpreted Swift's "Baucis and Philemon" in The
Sleeping Congregation (1736) and The Battle of the Books in his Battle of the Pictures
(1745). The one point of explicit contact was Faulkner's letter to Hogarth of 15 November
1740: "I have often the Favour of drinking your Health with Dr. Swift, who is a great
Admirer of yours, ... and desired me to thank you for your kind Present, and to accept of
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his Service" (BM. Add MS. 27995, 4). In this letter Faulkner ordered fifty sets of the
Distrest Poet, Enraged Musician, and the projected companion "on Painting" for his shop.
This corrects Paulson, Hogarth, Vol. 2: High Art and Low, 1732-50 (New Brunswick:
12 See Hogarth's Graphic Works, No. 100. Amhurst first announced that the collected
will not be printed"-alluding to the supposedly scandalous nature of the essays), with "a
curious Frontispiece," in the London Journal of 9 March 1722/3 (and 13 March in his own
journal Pasquin). The book did not, however, appear until 1726, announced in the Daily
Post of 15 June. The style of Hogarth's print could suggest that it was executed as early as
1722; such announcements were, however, often mere advertising (in this case to keep
the public interested between the end of the periodical and the appearance of the book).
Amhurst's Craftsman No. 20 (10-13 Feb. 1726/7), distinguished from the first by the
addition of a dedication to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford and "Remarks upon a late Book
13 For Thornhill, see Hogarth, Vol. 1, 96-101. As to Gibson: There was a persistent but
unproved story that Hogarth's father came down from Westmoreland as a young man with
the young Edmund Gibson. The fact that his father was not Church of England (whatever
else he may have been is not certain) and was as unsuccessful as Gibson was successful,
might have had some influence on Hogarth's political orientation at this time and could
explain his later allusions to Gibson in A Harlot's Progress. See note 9 above.
14 See Hogarth's Graphic Works, Nos. 43, 53, 56. The South Sea Scheme has been
traditionally dated c. 1721 on the basis of its referent, the South Sea Bubble, and its style;
but the first known publication was with The Lottery in 1724 (Hogarth, Vol. 1, 72-73). For
'5 The common veneration of Hoadly raises another question about the Hogarth-
Hoadlys, the bishop and his two sons, until the 1730s (perhaps through Sarah Curtis
Hoadly, the bishop's first wife, a portrait painter). It is possible that he first met the bishop
through his great admirer Amhurst. See Paulson, Hogarth, Vol. 2, 166.
16 In the preface to Terrae-Filius (1726) Amhurst says that he went to Oxford in 1716
and remained until June 1719. Michael Erben has researched a biography of Amhurst but
has concluded that "there is just not sufficient information available. . . . My research has
led me to think that the DNB article on him is substantially accurate and that there is
probably not a great deal of additional information to be found" (correspondence with the
17 Hogarth's portrait of Hoadly (engraved by Bernard Baron after the painting in 1743)
was the only portrait of an ecclesiastic, the only portrait not engraved by himself, or of
himself, that Hogarth included in the folios of his prints (the only other portrait was his
own engraving of his painting of Martin Folkes, a freethinker of the same mold as
Amhurst). In at least one case he used the Hoadly engraving as frontispiece of the folio, in
place of his own portrait (this is now in the Richard Greenberg Collection, New York).
18 Forty years later Hogarth would reiterate, or illustrate, this image of "Protestant
Disguise" in the Anglican priest whose wig flies off revealing a tonsure in Enthusiasm
Delineated (in its later version, Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, he is Methodist).
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20 Another volume, also called Poems on Several Occasions, also published in 1720, and
also with the Hoadly frontispiece, signed "By a Student of' Oxford," is a collection of'
Amhurst's Bangorian poems (with their original title pages) ending with an ironic prose
attack on William Law, Hoadly's most skillful responder, with a separate title page signed
"By a Free-Thinker at Oxford" and at the end signed "Philalethes Oxoniensis." The climax
of this piece is "A Catalogue of Synonimous Appellations, for the Use of young Preachers
and Orators in both Universities," which rises to a crescendo linking "Scoffers, ... Free-
This Poems on Several Occasions (which I shall call Poems [2]) follows, with additions,
Political Poems of 1719 (both published by Curll). Political Poems contained Protestant
Popery, An Epistle from the Pope to Dr. Snape, An Epistle to the Chevalier, and An Epistle
to Mr. Addison. The 1720 Poems on Several Occasions (2) adds the Letter to Mr. Law as
well as An Epistle from the Princess Sobieski to the Chevalier de St. George and The
Protestant Session. This volume was published by Curll, who had published the pamphlets
of which it consists; Poems (1) was published by Richard Francklin, who would also
publish The Craftsanm. If the second is incendiary, the first is presented apologetically as
penance for the indiscretions of Poems (2): although including epigrams on Oxford
figures, they are not overtly political and simulate repentance. Poems (1) opens with two
Old Testament poems--one on the creation (possibly a deist poem in that once the
creation takes place God withdraws) and the other on Pharaoh's pride, the tyrant swept
away by the Red Sea. But there is clearly an ironic edge on many of the poems: "The Free-
Thinker Converted" shows not a serious attack on free-thinkers but only on a libertine fop
("Sir Fopling") who is converted by a dream of punishment (48-49). Again, "Upon the
Same [Mrs. Centlivre's 'desiring me to read and correct a Poem']" ends by focusing on the
uselessness of a clergyman (48-49). It is possible that the repetition of the title was an
ironic gesture on Amhurst's part; but it is also possible that Curll published Poems (2)
21 Terrae-Filius (1726), 1.
22 The location is probably the Sheldonian Theatre. Hogarth may identify himself with
the Terrae-Filius as he had identified himself two years earlier with Apuleius and Charles
Gildon (the latter another deist) in his frontispiece for Gildon's Metamorphoses (1724; see
23 In Terrae-Filius No. 19 Amhurst turns to the women (their effect on Oxford boys-
"Ladies! It may be play to you, but 'tis death to them" [103], and again, No. 28). Hogarth
is illustrating an incident in No. 33, Wednesday, 8 May 1721: "Have a particular regard
how you speak of those gaudy things which flutter about Oxford in prodigious numbers,
in summer time, called TOASTS; take care how you reflect on their parentage, their
condition, their Virtue, or their beauty. .. ." He goes on to refer to his lampoon and
explain that one of the toasts "(more enraged than the rest) was heard to declare, that,
right or wrong, that impudent scoundrel," i.e., Amhurst, "should be expelled, by G-d; and
that SHE had interest enough with the PRESIDENT and SENIOR FELLOWS of his
college to get his business done. Accordingly, within a year after this, he was (almost
unanimously) expelled from his Fellowship, in the presence of some of the persons
injured, who came thither to see the execution" (177-82). (I wonder if Amhurst
24 My text is The Craftsman, 1st collected ed. (2nd ed., 1727), which runs from No. 1, 5
December, to No. 9, 2 January 1726/7. No. 13 (13-16 Jan.), in its original publication,
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announced publication of the first nine numbers (and separately No. 11, on the East India
Company). On the publication history of The Craftsman, see Michael Harris, "Figures
Relating to the Printing and Distribution of the Craftsman 1726 to 1730," Bulletin of the
Institute of Historical Research 43 (1970): 233-42; and Simon Varey, Introduction, Lord
25 The "punishers" here are the Stuart monarchs (whom Caleb D'Anvers compares by
analogy to Augustus and Tiberius) and the royalists of church and state of the 1640s.
27 For Hogarth's other anti-government satires, see Masquerade Ticket (1727), Henry
VIII and Anne Boleyn (1728/9), and the paintings of' The Beggar's Opera and Falstaff
Examining his Recruits in 1728 (Hogarth's Graphic Works, Nos. 108, 113; Hogarth, Vol.
1, 159-87).
29 British Museum Catalogue of Satiric Prints, No. 2327; repro. Paul Langford, The
English Satirical Print 1600-1832: Walpole and the Robinocracy (Cambridge: Chadwyck-
Healey, 1986), No. 48. George II's rump was the namesake of the Rump-Steak Club; the
club was formed in 1734 to commemorate the king's turning his "Royal Rump" on
30 BM Sat. 2447; Langford, No. 67; BM Sat. 2533; Langford, No. 99.
31 For the mid-1740s use, see the "broad bottom" of the central figure in Hogarth's
Stage Coach; or a Country Inn Yard at Election Time of 1747, made to celebrate the
32 Hogarth's Graphic Works, No. 107, p. 70. Langford reproduces The Political Clyster
(No. 8) but dates it 1726, apparently unaware that this is the 1757 version.
33 Collins, Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724), 41-
42, 53.
35 Amhurst advertised the First Discourse in Craftsnum No. 41 (24-28 Ap. 1727), and
again in No. 43 (1-5 May), in the latter case followed by Nunnery Tales and some
imitations of Gulliver's Travels. Woolston's Second Discourse was advertised in No. 68 (21
the Bible, including the works of Toland (No. 28, 10-13 Mar.). As to the facts of
Woolston's life, William H. Trapnell's researches have not produced any record for his
movements during the years in question (Thonmas Woolston: Madman and Deist [Bristol:
36 For John Toland's terms for two levels of reading, "esoteric-exoteric," see "Clidophorus;
or of the Exoteric and Esoteric Philosophy," in Tetradymus (1720); for Collins's "irony"
and the more precise and blunt term for deistic discourse, "theological lying," see David
Berman, "Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying," in Deism, Masonry, and
the Enlightenment, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1987), 61-78.
On the controversy over wit applied to religion, focused on Woolston, see Roger D. Lund,
"Irony as Subversion: Thomas Woolston and the Crime of Wit," in The Margins of
Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writings and Cultural Response, 1660-1750, ed. Lund (Cam-
37 The case of Woolston also raises the issue of the relationship between graphic to
written wit as blasphemous discourse. The case for written wit as blasphemy had been
judged proved in the Woolston trial of' 1729. There was no precedent for the case of
graphic materials, unless we go back to the Sacheverell Trial (see State Trials, vol. 15
[1710]; for which my thanks to Roger Lund). One can almost imagine Hogarth
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announcing in the Harlot's Progress (especially in its subscription ticket, which represents
the unveiling of allegory): Woolston proved that written innuendo is prosecutable; let's
see whether anyone can prosecute graphic innuendo. But then, when publication day
approached, he removed the red flag of Woolston's name from Plate 2 (though retaining
38 We might also recall that, on his arrival in the temple, Gulliver is so "extremely
pressed by the Necessities of Nature" (28) that he goes into the temple to the length of his
chain and relieves himself. Since he is chained at the door, the spot must be at the altar
itself. In terms of the allegory of Swift and the Church of England, this could be
interpreted as a profanation along the lines of Juvenal's difficile est saturam non scribere
[it's impossible not to write satire], of which Swift has done his best to avoid a repetition.
There is no avoiding the connection of Gulliver's profanation of a church with his later
profanation of a palace.
39 For this story, recorded in Hogarth's "Seven Days' Peregrination," see Hogarth, Vol.
1, 322-23; quoting the Peregrination itself (ed. Charles Mitchell [Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1952]): "Hogarth having a Motion; untruss'd upon a Grave Rail in an unseemly
Bunch of Netles, this occasion'd an Engagement which Ended happily without Bloodshed
and Hogarth Finish'd his Business against the Church Door" (7).
40 Given the fact that Hogarth's father was a Latin scholar and Hogarth, who grew up in
his father's Latin-speaking coffee house, liked (as in cuniculus-cunnus) to play with Latin
tags, we might note that his phrase in the caption of The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver
is Gulliver's "Urinal Profanation of the Royal Pallace." Latin profanum is the place in front
J. Roberts; whereas most Craftsman offshoots signed Caleb D'Anvers were published by
advertised Lewis Theobald's attack on Pope, Shakespeare Restored, in 1727; on the other
hand, he thrice advertised the Swift-Pope Miscellanies (Nos. 50, 51, 52).
42 For Hogarth and Fielding, see Hogarth, Vol. 2, 119-22; for Cooke, see, e.g., his Bays
43 On the diversity of opposition writing and outlook, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot
Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725-1742 (Oxford: Clarendon
44 Gerrard, 24; Mark Goldie, "Priestcraft and the Birth of' Whiggism," in Political
Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 214. For a valuable overview, see Richard Ashcraft,
45 Gerrard, 24-25.
46 In these terms, Fielding could be called an anticlerical Whig who never crossed the
line, as Hogarth often did; though in other ways, he was a Shaftesburian deist (see
Paulson, The Beautfidl, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy [Baltimore: The
from discussion at the conference referred to in note 1 (the words in the preceding
48 The identification of the portrait in Plate 2 as Woolston was first included (in a proof
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state recorded by Nichols and Steevens), then suppressed in the published state, and then
reinstated in the cheap popular copies by Giles King, which were authorized by Hogarth.
Significant also in the Harlot was the deletion of images of God, which could be read as
signs of a secularized Walpole world or, more simply, as a cross-over from the Protestant
49 Eggs appear in theological writings as a natural symbol for the Host (while the egg
remains the same on the outside, it is being transformed inside into a whole chicken). An
example is the ostrich egg suspended above Piero della Francesca's Sacra Converzatione
in the Brera, Milan (drawn to my attention by Charles Dempsey). This is also perhaps one
implication of Swift's use of eggs in the Big and Little Endians in the '"Voyage to Lilliput."
Given our knowledge of Hogarth, I would not want to rule out the possibility that the
number of the eggs reflects a reference to the reproductive function of the human male.
My thanks to Professor Barbeau Gardiner for first drawing my attention to the egg and to
Christ en l'eucharistie: ou elle est provec par pres de trois cens Argumens, dont toutes les
50 "A lock of hair falling thus cross the temples, and by that means breaking the
regularity of the oval, has an effect too alluring to be strictly decent, as is very well known
to the loose and lowest class of women." This is the association of the "living woman,"
sexual "allure," the lower orders, and blemish which, rather than Shaftesburian geometry,
defines Hogarth's aesthetics. (See Analysis of Beauty, ed. Joseph Burke [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955], 52. For the context of Hogarth's aesthetics, see Paulson,
51 The epigraph from Paradise Lost, printed just above the serpent, argues for a
connection with Satan, or a translation of his negativity into an image of Beauty related to
the broken oval, erotic pleasure, and the other elements associated with the Beautiful in
the Analysis.
52 Cf. a few pages later (152): "A man must have a good deal of practice to mimic such
very straight or round motions, which being incompatible with the human form, are
53 Pope, Rape of the Lock (1714), Canto 2, 11. 7-8. From Pope's point of view, the cross
is Christian; but from the point of view of a Daniel Defoe it is Roman Catholic, and
Belinda's wearing it indicates either her popery or her Protestant vanity. As Defoe writes
in his Review: "For a Protestant to wear a cross about her Neck is a Ridiculous, Scandalous
piece of Vanity;" "to wear that which in all Countries is the Badge and Signal of a Roman
Catholick, and which for that Reason has been left off by all the Protestant Ladies in the
they were asham'd of being Distinguish'd [i.e., as Protestants]." Hogarth's view, of course,
would be closer to Defoe's than Pope's and he could have justified his modification of the
cross in Analysis, Plate 1, as of the Trinity on the title page and the Host in Columbus
breaking the Egg, as a correction of Roman Catholic idolatry-a sort of iconoclasm. See
Defoe, Review, 18 July 1704; ed. Arthur Secord, 9 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
54 In another essay I shall discuss the pivotal figure between political satire (of the sort
Addison, in his essays on comedy (Spectator Nos. 47, 249) and the "Pleasures of the
Imagination" (Nos. 411-21), offers parallel aesthetics of comedy (out of satire) and of
beauty, novelty, and greatness (out of' the pejorative concept of "imagination," as in
religious "enthusiasm").
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55 Cf. the pudgy body and round, unprepossessing face of Toft in John Laguerre's
portrait, engraved in mezzotint by John Faber, Mary "Tofts of Godelman the pretended
Rabbit Breeder (announced 21 Jan. 1726/7, Mist's Weekly Journal, BM Sat. 1783).
56 The woman-the Mary Toft, M. Hackabout, and the women who dominate his
works-will be the bridging metaphor for Hogarth between satire and comedy, religion
and aesthetics.
57 See, e.g., Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Terry
Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); and Peter de Bolla, The
Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics, & the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
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