The Augustan Age2 Marks Questions with Answers · Authors & Works · 15 MCQs · Chronology Drill

Writers of the early 18th century consciously modelled themselves on the Roman poets of Emperor Augustus's reign — Virgil, Horace and Ovid — prizing order, decorum, wit and imitation of the classics. Hence the period's other names: the Neoclassical Age and the Age of Reason. Its perfect verse form was Pope's closed heroic couplet.

The Tatler (1709, thrice weekly) was founded by Richard Steele under the pseudonym 'Isaac Bickerstaff'; The Spectator (1711, daily) by Steele and Joseph Addison together. Their stated aim was 'to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality'. They perfected the periodical essay and created the first great fictional club, including the country squire Sir Roger de Coverley.

Pope's mock-epic — two cantos in 1712, expanded to five in 1714 with the 'machinery' of sylphs and gnomes borrowed from Rosicrucian lore. It transforms a real society quarrel — Lord Petre snipping a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair — into a miniature epic, complete with battle, voyage and apotheosis. It is universally called the most brilliant mock-heroic poem in English.

A mock-epic (mock-heroic) applies the grand conventions of epic — invocation, epic similes, supernatural machinery, battles — to a trivial subject, so the style itself becomes the satire. The English masterpieces are Dryden's Mac Flecknoe (1682), Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1712–14) and The Dunciad (1728–43).

Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) sends Lemuel Gulliver to Lilliput (tiny politicians — party and court satire), Brobdingnag (giants — human pettiness magnified), the flying island of Laputa (satire on abstract science and the Royal Society) and the land of the Houyhnhnms (rational horses versus the bestial Yahoos — the darkest verdict on mankind).

A Modest Proposal (1729) is Swift's pamphlet suggesting, in the calm voice of an economic projector, that Ireland's poverty be solved by selling year-old infants as food for the rich. It is the supreme example of sustained irony in English — the persona never breaks — and the model answer for any question on satire as moral protest.

The Battle of the Books (1704, published with A Tale of a Tub) is Swift's mock-heroic prose skirmish in the 'Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns'. In its fable of the spider and the bee, the bee (the Ancients) gives mankind 'sweetness and light' — the phrase Matthew Arnold later borrowed and made famous in Culture and Anarchy (1869). The origin is a guaranteed trap question.

An Essay on Criticism (1711) is Pope's verse treatise on taste and the critic's duties, written at about twenty-one. It is the most quotable poem in English: 'A little learning is a dang'rous thing', 'To err is human, to forgive divine', 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread', and 'True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd'.

An Essay on Man (1733–34) is Pope's philosophical poem in four epistles addressed to his friend Lord Bolingbroke, defending the cosmic order — the Great Chain of Being — with the conclusion 'Whatever is, is right'. Its second epistle opens with the age's motto: 'Know then thyself… The proper study of mankind is Man.'

The Dunciad is Pope's mock-epic on the empire of Dulness, crowning a 'King of Dunces' from among his literary enemies: the scholar Lewis Theobald in 1728, replaced by the actor-laureate Colley Cibber in the final four-book version of 1743. It ends with the apocalyptic triumph of Dulness: 'Universal darkness buries all.'

Defoe, a journalist, turned circumstantial realism into fiction: Robinson Crusoe (1719) — often called the first English novel — Moll Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), reportage so convincing it reads as eyewitness record. His plain, fact-laden prose created the realistic novel's basic claim: that it is a true account.

Matthew Arnold, in 'The Study of Poetry' (1880), delivered the famous verdict that the eighteenth century was 'an age of prose and reason', adding that 'Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose'. Quoting (and challenging) Arnold's judgement is a standard long-answer move.

The Scriblerus Club (founded 1714) was the brilliant Tory wits' circle — Pope, Swift, John Gay, Dr Arbuthnot and Thomas Parnell — who invented the pedant Martinus Scriblerus to satirise false learning. Its collaborative spirit seeded Gulliver's Travels, The Dunciad and The Beggar's Opera, making it the most productive club in literary history.

The Beggar's Opera (1728) is John Gay's ballad opera — spoken drama with songs set to popular tunes — in which highwaymen and thief-takers mirror Walpole's government, earning it the nickname 'a Newgate pastoral'. Its huge success was said to have made 'Gay rich, and Rich gay' (Rich being the theatre manager), and it later inspired Brecht's Threepenny Opera.

A Tale of a Tub (1704, composed c. 1696-98) is Swift's allegorical satire on religious corruption, tracing three brothers — Peter (Roman Catholicism), Martin (Anglicanism) and Jack (Dissent) — as they squabble over a father's coat bequeathed to them. Published alongside The Battle of the Books, it is Swift's most linguistically exuberant prose work, and its anti-Catholic satire was said to have cost him preferment in the English Church — Queen Anne reportedly found it blasphemous.

The heroic couplet is a pair of consecutive iambic pentameter lines rhyming together. Dryden had perfected it as a vehicle for argument and satire in the Restoration; Pope raised it to its supreme height, creating the closed couplet in which the second line clinches the first with epigrammatic force. Its balance, antithesis and wit made it the ideal form for the Augustan values of order, reason and decorum.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was the foremost woman of letters in the Augustan Age — aristocrat, poet and brilliant letter-writer whose Turkish Embassy Letters (composed 1716-18, published posthumously 1763) offer the first Western eyewitness account of the Ottoman harem. She introduced smallpox inoculation into England after observing the practice in Constantinople. Pope celebrated her extravagantly while they were friends, then lampooned her viciously after their friendship collapsed.

Windsor Forest (1713) is Pope's topographical poem in the tradition of Virgil's Georgics, celebrating the royal forest and the Peace of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession. A Tory poem addressed to Lord Lansdowne, it contrasts the pastoral harmony of Queen Anne's reign with the violence of Norman conquest, and its harmonious natural imagery served as Pope's public Tory manifesto before he retired to Twickenham.

Coffee-houses were the intellectual hubs of Augustan London: Will's was Dryden's court; Button's was Addison's Whig salon; White's became the leading Tory club. They provided neutral ground for literary debate, political argument and the circulation of periodicals such as The Tatler and The Spectator, which were designed to be read aloud and discussed over coffee. Without coffee-house culture, the periodical essay and the literary reviewing tradition it seeded could not have existed.

Pope's Iliad (1715-20, six volumes) and Odyssey (1725-26, with collaborators) earned him financial independence — the Iliad alone brought in over eight thousand pounds, enabling him to lease his famous Twickenham villa and garden. Dr Johnson called it a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal. The translations confirmed that the classical tradition and the modern heroic couplet were fully compatible.

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (originally the French Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes) was a debate over whether ancient or modern writers were superior. In England, Sir William Temple championed the Ancients in Of Ancient and Modern Learning (1690); William Wotton defended the Moderns. Swift mocked both sides in The Battle of the Books (1704), whose fable of the spider and the bee summarises the debate: the spider (Moderns) spins only from itself; the bee (Ancients) ranges freely and returns with sweetness and light.

Cato (1713) is Addison's five-act classical tragedy about Cato the Younger's resistance to Julius Caesar at Utica. Hugely popular at its premiere — Pope wrote the Prologue — it ran for thirty-five nights and was simultaneously claimed as partisan propaganda by both Whigs and Tories. Its influence extended to America: George Washington had it performed for his troops at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78.

Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) is Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel in which a fifteen-year-old servant-girl writes letters resisting her master's advances until his virtue is reformed and he marries her. It launched the sentimental domestic novel and established middle-class morality as fiction's proper subject. Henry Fielding immediately parodied it in Shamela (1741) and offered his counter-novel in Joseph Andrews (1742).

The Seasons is Thomson's blank-verse poem in four books — Winter (1726), Summer (1727), Spring (1728) and Autumn (1730), collected 1730. Written by a Scotsman trained in Edinburgh, it introduced Miltonic blank verse as an alternative to the dominant heroic couplet and celebrated the natural world through the cycle of the year. It anticipated the Romantic love of nature and established Thomson as the first great nature poet of the eighteenth century.

Decorum (Latin: what is fitting) was the supreme Augustan aesthetic rule — that style, diction and tone must be exactly appropriate to genre and subject. Epic demanded grandeur; pastoral demanded simplicity; satire could descend to coarseness if the target required it. Pope's mock-epic works by violating decorum deliberately: applying the grand epic style to a trivial society quarrel so that the disproportion between style and subject becomes the satirical weapon.

Dr John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), physician to Queen Anne and co-founder of the Scriblerus Club, created the character John Bull in The History of John Bull (1712) — a series of pamphlets satirising the War of the Spanish Succession in which England appears as a blunt, beef-eating tradesman. John Bull became the permanent British national stereotype, and Arbuthnot's wit was praised by Pope as the most able satirist of the age.

Gay's Fables (First Series 1727, Second Series 1738) are verse fables in rhyming couplets adapting Aesop's formula to satirise contemporary English society — courtiers, flatterers, politicians and social climbers. Dedicated to the young Duke of Cumberland, they were among the most reprinted works of the eighteenth century, widely used in schools, and they confirmed Gay's reputation as a moralist-satirist alongside his theatrical work.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), was Queen Anne's last Secretary of State, impeached after the Hanoverian succession and exiled to France. Returning to England by 1723, he became Pope's near-neighbour at Twickenham and the deist philosophical guide behind An Essay on Man (1733-34), whose four epistles are addressed to him. He embodied for Pope the ideal of the philosopher-statesman, and his influence explains the poem's Stoic-deist optimism — that the universe is rationally ordered and whatever is, is right.