Translation, Reputation, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Britain

by

Catherine Fleming

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

© Copyright by Catherine Fleming 2018

ii

Translation, Reputation, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century

Britain

Catherine Fleming

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This thesis explores the reputation-building strategies which shaped eighteenth-century

translation practices by examining authors of both translations and original works whose lives

and writing span the long eighteenth century. Recent studies in translation have often focused on

the way in which adaptation shapes the reception of a foreign work, questioning the assumptions

and cultural influences which become visible in the process of transformation. My research adds

a new dimension to the emerging scholarship on translation by examining how foreign texts

empower their English translators, offering opportunities for authors to establish themselves

within a literary community. Translation, adaptation, and revision allow writers to set up

advantageous comparisons to other authors, times, and literary milieux and to create a product

which benefits from the cachet of foreignness and the authority implied by a pre-existing

audience, successful reception history, and the standing of the original author. I argue that John

Dryden, Alexander Pope, Eliza Haywood, and Elizabeth Carter integrate this legitimizing

process into their conscious attempts at self-fashioning as they work with existing texts to

demonstrate creative and compositional skills, establish kinship to canonical authors, and both

iii

construct and insert themselves within a literary canon, exercising a unique form of control over

their contemporary reputation.

By examining the classical translations of Dryden and Pope alongside Haywood’s

popular French translations and Carter’s scholarly and philosophical translations from Greek,

Italian, and French, I show how each of these authors use conventions of classical translation,

following similar strategies to build reputations. Both Pope and Dryden ask readers to compare

them to a classical source, but Dryden promotes his writing by praising the authors he translates

while Pope’s relationship to his originals is often adversarial. Haywood refuses to follow the

topos of modesty, demanding equality with her authors, while Carter caters to current fashions

by displaying her faults while praising her original. Although they wrote for different audiences

and in different genres, I argue that these writers and their contemporaries saw translation as a

central part of their public identity and I call for increased scholarly attention to this dimension

of self-fashioning in eighteenth-century literature.

iv

Acknowledgments

This study could never have been completed without the generous advice and support I

have received. My work is immeasurably better for the input of my supervisor, Thomas Keymer,

my committee members Carol Percy and Simon Stern, and my friend Abigail Lochtefeld, who

has read this almost as often as I have. My time as a fellow at Chawton House Library was also

invaluable. I have been truly blessed by the time, patience, and support of my colleagues, family,

and friends.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Adaptive Translation ................................................................................................................... 4 Narrowing Definitions ................................................................................................................ 9 Authorial Property .................................................................................................................... 24 The History of Translation ........................................................................................................ 28

Translation and the Spread of Ideas .......................................................................................... 32 Translation and Reputation ....................................................................................................... 36

Chapter 1 Dryden: Laureate, Theorist, and Translator ................................................................. 44

A Classical History: Translation and the Classics .................................................................... 47 The Empowered Translator: Dryden’s Translation Theory ...................................................... 62 Creating the Ideal Reader .......................................................................................................... 78 A Poetic Father ......................................................................................................................... 87

Chapter 2 Pope, His Homer, and Himself..................................................................................... 96 Judgement and Invention, Derivation and Debts ...................................................................... 98

The Value of an Original ........................................................................................................ 108 Manliness and Morality .......................................................................................................... 115 Horace ..................................................................................................................................... 130

Pope’s Audience ..................................................................................................................... 140 After Life of Pope’s Translations ........................................................................................... 149

Chapter 3 Haywood: Consistency of Purpose ............................................................................ 152

Who Wrote That? Reputation and Anonymity ....................................................................... 158

Establishing a Reputation ....................................................................................................... 174 Translation as Intervention ..................................................................................................... 188

Establishing a Career: Haywood’s Respectability .................................................................. 197 Chapter 4 Elizabeth Carter: Hidden Fame, Subtle Teaching ...................................................... 213

Contesting Beliefs ................................................................................................................... 221

Social Acceptance ................................................................................................................... 238 Divinely Reasoned Education ................................................................................................. 251

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 272

Works Cited and Consulted ........................................................................................................ 287

1

Introduction

If you asked an eighteenth-century Londoner what a translator looked like, you would be

offered a variety of different images: the schoolboy laboriously parsing his first paragraph out of

Caesar, the starving hack writing to order in his publisher’s garret, and the gentleman of leisure

or of letters whiling away an hour by inventing a new phrase to express the meaning of a favorite

author. Central to each of these images is the question of agency and the challenge of

demonstrating creative freedom in a restrictive medium. Despite the challenges of working with

another author’s text, translations make up an astonishing 15-35 percent of eighteenth-century

prose fiction, as recent scholarly estimates by James Raven, Mary Helen McMurran, and others

show.1 When Biblical, philosophical, and poetic translations are factored in, the number of

translations rises even further, yet their writers are often discussed as subordinate to their

publishers or to their source rather than as authors making their own interpretative decisions. The

fear of being merely derivative frightened some writers away from translation, but others sought

the respect given to authors who displayed the depth of scholarship and the nuance of

interpretation which good translation required. These authors saw translation as a necessary part

of their self-creation, offering unique opportunities to establish themselves in a multinational and

multigenerational community of writers.

1 James Raven, introduction to The English Novel 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published

in the British Isles, ed. James Raven and Antonia Forster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), I.58; Mary

Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton:

Princeton University Press. 2010), 46, 55.

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Translation allowed authors to connect themselves to other authors, places, and classes

while setting up advantageous comparisons. When Alexander Pope declares his intention to tame

Homer’s “wild paradise,” for example, he is both asserting that he is like Homer and declaring

his own superiority to the classical author.2 Translation, as André Lefevere recognizes, is about

“authority and legitimacy.”3 Even in its least respectable iterations, adaptations of French

pornography or crib sheets for schoolboys, translation participates in the process of legitimizing

a work by accepting and integrating it into a second culture, and the product benefits from the

cachet of foreignness and the authority implied by a supposed pre-existing audience and

successful history.

While translation could be either a respectable, interpretative enterprise or a hurried,

slapdash venture, it created assumptions about the worth of the work being translated. The status

that the label of translation gave to a work led many authors to create pseudo-translations,

original pieces labelled as translations. James Macpherson published Fingal and other “Ossian”

poems as translations in an attempt to give Scotland an epic history and to create a figure

equivalent to the Grecian Homer. Horace Walpole similarly claimed that his Castle of Otranto

was a translation, using an invented history to introduce his new genre, gothic romance, as part

of a respected tradition. This strategy worked, but only temporarily, and in both cases outrage

greeted the revelation of authorship in a public response which demonstrates translation’s status

and respectability in comparison to original work.4 While not all translations were viewed as

respectable, the process of translation acted, and still acts, as a legitimizing force. I argue that

2 Alexander Pope, Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, Maynard Mack, et al. (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1939-67), VII.3. 3 André Lefevere, introduction to Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 1992), 2.

4 Robert Miles, “Europhobia: The Catholic Other in Horace Walpole and Charles Maturin,” in European Gothic: A

Spirited Exchange 1760-1960, ed. Avril Horner (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 92-3.

3

Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Eliza Haywood, and Elizabeth Carter used translation to create

connections and comparisons in various forms of self-promotion. By establishing their kinship to

canonical authors, these writers could exercise a unique form of control over their contemporary

reputation.

For these writers and their contemporaries, I suggest, translation was not just a lucrative

venture but a central part of their public identity. In fact, eighteenth-century audiences often

judged writers as much or more by their translations as by their original work. As an adaptive

medium, translation encouraged a focus on artistry and style in an arena in which plot and theme

were predetermined.5 Retranslations offered particular opportunities to stand out, as Dryden says,

“amongst the Crowd of Sutors” showing off their poetic skill.6 Dryden’s Homeric image, which I

explore in greater detail in Chapter 1, emphasizes the competitive nature of translation and its

attraction. By portraying a foreign text as a virtuous, wealthy, and beautiful lady surrounded by

men eager to win both her name and her money, Dryden demonstrates the form’s appeal. By

examining the erudite, classical translations of Dryden and Pope along with Haywood’s popular

romantic adaptations and Carter’s scholarly and moralistic works, I will show how all of these

writers used translation centrally in their self-fashioning. Although writing for different

audiences and in different genres, these authors all used strategies of connection, comparison,

and stylistic alteration to build their reputations in ways that would have been impossible to

authors who published only original work.

5 André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (New York:

Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1998), 2. 6 John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, H. T. Swedenburg, Alan Roper, et al. (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956-90), XII.10.

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Adaptive Translation

The adaptive nature of eighteenth-century translation allowed these authors to make it a

central part of their self-fashioning strategies. Manuals, reviews, and paratexts encouraged

authors to make changes both on the local level, to clarify foreign words and ideas, and on the

ideological level, to make the message and the action suit contemporary sensibilities. This

permissive attitude encouraged Pope to remove references to types of flour from his Odyssey and

Haywood to rearrange the internal structure of The Virtuous Villager, creating a situation in

which readers expected translators to take ownership of the contents as well as the style of their

work. The notion of faithfulness to the original, as recent studies demonstrate, was complicated

by uncertainty over whether an author’s style, ideas, or structure were more important and by

questions about how much it was permissible for translators to change. Scholars like Jennifer

Birkett examine translation as a more difficult version of authorship in which the translator must

overcome and control the original piece. Indeed, Birkett’s declaration, in her article on

translation in fiction, that “Seven pages in, [Behn’s Lycidas] finally reaches a recognizable

phrase from the first page of the source text” is a triumphant celebration of the difference

between source and translation.7

Scholarly examination of the faithfulness or lack of faithfulness to the words, ideas, and

ideals of the original is an important part of translation studies, as Paul Hammond suggests in his

essay on Dryden’s Lucretius.8 Hammond’s argument demonstrates the translator’s struggle

7 Jennifer Birkett, “Prose Fiction: Courtly and Popular Romance,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in

English, ed. Gordon Braden, Roger Ellis, Peter France, Kenneth Haynes, David Hopkins, and Stuart Gillespie

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005-11), III.343. 8 Paul Hammond, “The Integrity of Dryden’s Lucretius,” Modern Language Review 78.1 (1983): 1-23.

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between literal and ideological faithfulness and the ways in which mediation of the text can

occur outside the context of the translated text, impacting authorial reception and acceptance.

Although some scholars, particularly those examining texts from minority cultures, wish to find

evidence of faithfulness, most current scholarship focuses on what Sarah Annes Brown calls the

“authority to alter and improve the original.” Both of these methods examine translations largely

in terms of the closeness of their reproduction of an original text, eliding the form’s

fundamentally interpretative nature.9

Accuracy is an inherently problematic idea. As Edith Grossman warns, even if a writer’s

goal is “fidelity to the effect and impact of the original . . . what should never be forgotten or

overlooked is the obvious fact that what we read in a translation is the translator’s writing,” and

that this is inevitably different from the foreign-language original.10

Even the most strenuous

attempt at exactitude is predetermined to fail, because there are many factors which affect the

reading process. The most accurate form of translation, word-for-word rendition, is almost

universally rejected, because differences in grammar and normative phrasing between languages

make word-for-word translation not only awkward but often unintelligible.

Abraham Cowley’s oft-cited declaration that if “a man should undertake to translate

Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one Madman had translated another” is one of

many examples of revolt against word-for-word translation. While Cowley carried his rebellion

to the extreme of rejecting “the Name Translator,” his general sentiments were widely shared

among Restoration- and eighteenth-century translators.11

Indeed, the word-for-word translation

he disparages was never commonly accepted among literary translators, and Cowley uses it as a

9 Sarah Annes Brown, “Women Translators,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, II.114.

10 Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 31.

11 Abraham Cowley, “Preface to Pindarique Odes,” in Abraham Cowley: Poetry & Prose, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1949), 73, 74.

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straw-man argument to support his deviation from the more common form of sense-for-sense

translation, which called for authors to translate the sense of each phrase, sentence, or idea in its

original order. Even this more forgiving form of sense-for-sense translation, as Cowley’s

movement toward a looser imitative style reveals, creates difficulties when style and implication

are important factors. In translating poetry, as do Dryden and Pope, the process becomes

especially difficult. Although eighteenth-century writers did not attempt to maintain the metre of

foreign poetry, they debated the best form of translation. Some felt that only prose could properly

convey the sense of the original. Others argued that, while verse forms inevitably force deviation

from a strict sense-for-sense translation, prose loses the impact of arranged metre and sound and

destroys the power of the original. Writers debated the impact of heroic couplets, blank verse,

and prose forms, but they all recognized the impossibility of precisely reproducing the poetic

impact of a foreign metre.

Rejecting close translation allowed eighteenth-century writers to emphasize their

relationship to their source in an early example of resistance to the secondary position of

adaptive writing. Lawrence Venuti’s book on the invisibility of the translator has encouraged a

similar focus on the translator in modern scholarship, highlighting the importance of

foregrounding the presence of multiple authors in an adapted work by making readers aware of

the translation’s distance from the original text.12

Increased attention to interpretation has led to a

revival in translation studies led by figures like Peter France, who claims that translation studies

are in a “ghetto” and that scholars are still working to move them into mainstream scholarly and

cultural narratives.13

Thanks to these scholars, translation studies are a rapidly growing field,

12

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 2008). 13

Peter France, “Introduction: Poetry, Culture, and Translation,” Translation and Literature 6 (1997): 7; Stuart

Gillespie, English Translation and Classical Reception (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 7; Richard B. Sher,

7

supported by debates over the meaning of originality in different social, legal, and literary

climates.

From its rise in the mid eighteenth century, originality has become a central marker of

quality in both literary and academic writing. While earlier writers had celebrated creativity in all

of its forms, this new idea of literary creation demanded originality of plot and even of genre and

form, rejecting the existing tradition of revisionary recreation. Robert Macfarlane argues that the

idea of originality ex nihilo stems from a movement that began in the late 1750s and reached its

zenith during the Romantic Period.14

Writers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

century created what Walter Bate calls “a precedent with which the intellectual has since been

condemned to live,” by emphasizing originality over craftsmanship.15

In fact, while insisting on a

strict ex nihilo originality would exclude much great literature from the canon, Christopher Lee

identifies originality as one of the four “critical topoi of canonisation” in his argument for the

inclusion of colonial writers in the English canon, demonstrating the continuing influence of late

eighteenth-century ideas of originality on modern critical thought.16

When originality is viewed not as an absolute but as a continuum, however, the

importance of adaptive translation becomes apparent. While eighteenth-century and Romantic

theorists such as Shaftesbury, Rowe, Young, Coleridge, and Keats, all of whom Macfarlane

examines in his work on originality, often claimed absolute originality for authors later proven to

have derived their plots and ideas from existing works or historical sources, today the question of

“Patrons, Publishers, and Places,” in The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in

Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 195-208; James

Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850 (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 2007), 119-153. 14

Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007), 18-50. 15

Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), 105. 16

Christopher Lee, “Literary Adaptation and Market Value: Encounters with the Public in the Early Career of Roger

McDonald,” Queensland Review 21.1 (2014): 39.

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originality is much more nuanced, and demonstrations of influence are no longer considered as

oppositional to creative work.17

Translation can be seen as a source of influence on the writer

which must be both incorporated and overcome. Reflecting on his time as a young teacher, from

1957 to 1967, Harold Bloom expressed surprise that “nearly every critic I encountered assumed

idealistically that influence was a benign process,” an assumption that his work on influence

theory has nearly reversed.18

As he himself demonstrates, however, the influence of foreign

writers, and especially of dead foreign writers, was less threatening than that of an author’s

immediate precursors, a fact which may have encouraged writers to acknowledge and celebrate

the influence of their work as translators on their original writing.19

Richard Jones examines one

example of a clear trail of influence in Tobias Smollett’s movement from translating Gil Blas of

Santilane to his original picaresque novel, Roderick Random, published later the same year and

exhibiting many of the same features.20

A more immediate form of influence appears within individual works, complicated by

authorial claims to be writing literal translation, which authors used to ameliorate unpopular or

even illegal religious or political statements. Dryden uses Juvenal’s sixteenth satire to attack the

government, insisting that Juvenal “intended an Invective against a standing Army,” a complaint

that is nowhere in his source but was a major source of popular grievance against king William.21

By claiming faithfulness to a celebrated original, authors like Dryden could avoid responsibility

for the statements they popularized while accepting public acclaim for their style and abilities.

17

Macfarlane, Original Copy, 19-20. 18

Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011),

4. 19

Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 137-8. 20

Richard J. Jones, Tobias Smollett in the Enlightenment: Travels Through France, Italy, and Scotland (Lewisburg:

Bucknell University Press, 2011), 9. 21

Dryden, Works, IV.245.

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While this type of disclaimer offered some safety from political accusations, the free translation

such authors used and their willingness to alter the original in ways that were often even more

radical than their source suggests the translator’s complicity in the ideas that their translations

helped to spread. While claiming to be slaves to their original, these authors created a

relationship of sympathy and equality.

These examples demonstrate the importance of adaptive translation, but they also

demonstrate the questions that troubled eighteenth-century translators: How much latitude is

enough, and how much is too much? Where is the line between a translator’s duty to his author

and his own authorial instinct? Who is the author of a translated work, and how much authority

can a translator claim? How does a translator deal with an audience composed of both readers

familiar with the source text and readers who are not, and is it possible to please both? These

questions reverberate through the writings of translators, especially those translators who were

also authors of original work, and are still contested in scholarship today.22

Narrowing Definitions

Understanding the loose, adaptive nature of eighteenth-century translation necessitates an

examination of translation as a term. Etymologically, translation comes from the Latin active

noun translātiōnem, a carrying across, referring to the transfer of items, ideas, and language from

one place to another, and this etymological history is reflected in the current understanding of the

22

Paul Hammond, “Is Dryden a Classic?” in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and David

Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6; William Frost, Dryden and the Art of Translation (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1955).

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word.23

Modern translation theory, following the model created by Lefevere, understands

translation to include adaptation, cultural transfer, and even interpersonal communication. All of

these understandings are useful, and it is important to keep in mind the wide range of adaptive

practices in use during the eighteenth century, but in order to fruitfully study the methodology by

which authors used adaptive practices to establish themselves within literary society, a narrow

definition of translation must be determined.

Pseudo-translations, imitative practices, unacknowledged translations, and the pitfalls of

historical record-keeping make it impossible to make definitive statements about the number and

growth of such works in the marketplace prior to the mid-1850s. Although both the Copyright

Act of 1709/10 and the Act of 1842 required publishers to submit copies of new books for

deposit in government-approved libraries, these laws were not strictly followed until the British

Museum Library’s head librarian, Antonio Panizzi, began to threaten publishers with

prosecution.24

Despite the lack of consistent and standardized record-keeping in the eighteenth

century, some estimates of publication can be made by extrapolating from the number of

acknowledged translations which survive in libraries today or which appear in published book

lists from the eighteenth century.

There is no consensus about what percentage of the books sold in England during the

long eighteenth century were translations. Raven, examining only first publications of novels,

identifies 531 novels published between 1750 and 1769, 18 percent of which were translations, a

number that, by his calculations, drops to 15 percent by the end of the century.25

McMurran uses

23

“translation, n,” OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. 24

Simon Eliot, “Very Necessary but Not Quite Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book

History,” Book History 5 (2002): 289. 25

James Raven, “Cheap and Cheerless: English Novels in German Translation and German Novels in English

Translation 1770-1799,” in The Corvey Library and Anglo-German Cultural Exchanges, 1770-1837, ed. Werner

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lists of prose fiction to determine that from 30 to 35 percent of eighteenth-century prose fiction

was composed of translations.26

The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, although

avowedly selective and focusing on “early or unusual developments in fictional technique,”

offers a list of minor works of prose fiction of which nearly 30 percent are translations.27

Robert

Day and William McBurney estimate that between 25 and 30 percent of all published fiction

between 1700 and 1740 was translation.28

Stuart Gillespie, in his statistical analysis of classical

translation, does not offer an overarching percentage, but notes that 40 percent of the classical

translations he examines were reprinted within the century, a number which should serve as a

warning to scholars using only first editions to determine the prevalence of translations on the

market.29

None of these numbers includes either non-fiction translation or poetic or biblical

translation. Despite the uncertainty of these numbers and the constant revisions being made to

their components, the estimate that between 15 and 35 percent of published fiction was made up

of translation gives an indication of the flood of such works onto the British market during the

century.

The uncertainty over the number of translations published during the eighteenth century

is intensified by uncertainties over the definition of translation itself. In its current use,

translation is usually viewed as a form of rewriting, and Lefevere claims that any movement

from one culture to another or any interaction between cultures is a translation of meaning which

intentionally adapts an original for aesthetic and/or political effect. He claims that translation is

Huber (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlaug, 2004), 10; Raven, The English Novel 1770-1829, 58.

26 McMurran, Spread of Novels, 46, 55.

27 George Watson, ed., The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1971), II.975-1014. 28

Robert Day, Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1966), 29; William McBurney, A Check List of English Prose Fiction 1700-1739 (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1960), viii. 29

Stuart Gillespie, “The Developing Corpus of Literary Translation,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation,

III.144.

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“manipulation, undertaken in the service of power,” and that every translation manipulates

“literature to function in a given society,” in a way that undermines its function in its source

language and culture.30

This theoretical framework allows for a multifaceted image of cultural

understanding and brings the labour of the translator to the attention of the reader, but involves

either a level of intentionality or an internalized belief in hegemonic cultural mores that is not

always demonstrable.

Highlighting places where no direct translation is possible reveals the culturally based

worldviews of reader and translator, where cultural relationships influence and overlay the final

product in an acculturation of the text which is central to post-colonial thought. Susan Bassnet

examines the ways translations both subjugate the text and liberate the original culture by

creating a place for foreign ideas. Bassnet claims that this is “part of an ongoing process of

intercultural transfer,” that reifies the process of colonialization while simultaneously offering

the colonialized culture influence and a place in international discussion.31

It is impossible to

adapt a work without revealing, and sometimes discovering the ways “we view the foreign,” as

Katherine Faull declares in her summing up of modern translation practice.32

Post-colonial

theorists support this model and its awareness of inherent biases, encouraging sympathetic

treatments of cultural difference which attempt to undo the cultural simplifications and

misunderstandings created by unsympathetic translation. Even translations which attempt to be

sympathetic to the original culture risk lauding or vilifying the original based on contemporary

mores, as the eighteenth-century conflations of contemporary morals with their Latin or Grecian

30

Lefevere, Translation/History/Culture, xi. 31

Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, introduction to Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (New York:

Routledge, 1999), 2. 32

Katherine Faull, introduction to Translation and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 18.

13

counterparts often did, overlooking cultural differences or attempting to hide these differences in

order to present either their own or their source culture in a more acceptable light.

Translation thus becomes the point of mediation between foreign and domestic culture,

and travel narratives, spy stories, or tales of foreign visitors can be read as translations and must

be understood within the context of the writer’s often fumbling and inarticulate attempts to

understand and portray the foreign within a recognizable framework. This broad definition drives

Mirella Agorni’s Translating Italy, which argues that eighteenth-century English writers saw

Italy as a place of intellectual freedom for women, misunderstanding the desire of Italian writers

for increased freedom as a declaration that they are already free.33

The recent collection of essays

by Lyse Hebert uses a similarly broad definition in examining the relations between diverse

fields and cultures, and the artificial divisions and superficial agreements between cultures that

lead to deeper misunderstandings.34

The idea of translation as mediation brings into focus the

socio-cultural implications of transference and the adaptive nature of international movement

and conversation, but its inclusive nature complicates the creation of formal designations,

problematizing key terms.

Viewing translation as adaptive mediation assumes that any translation will naturalize its

source and in fact must do so in order to convey meaning. Intercultural dialogue involves not

only information but also, as Daniel Weissbort and Ástráður Eysteinsson explain, the “cultural

heritage” and “historical depth” of both cultures.35

This modern view follows Friedrich

Schleiermacher’s 1813 lectures, in which he defines translation by contrasting it with

33

Mirella Agorni, Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: Women, Translation, and Travel Writing (1739-

1797) (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2002), 67, 86. 34

Lyse Hebert, Beyond Mediation? Exploring Translation and Interpretation in the Current Globalized Landscape

(Toronto: York University Press, 2014). 35

Daniel Weissbort and Ástráður Eysteinsson, eds., Translation–Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2006), 3-4.

14

interpretation, claiming that interpretation prioritizes the communication of facts but that

translation is a literary product of subjectivities, filtering the writer’s subjective perspective

through the translator’s equally individual viewpoint to create a work that is then interpreted

according to the biases of the reader. At the same time, Schleiermacher reacts against the idea

that the foreign must be naturalized. Instead, he argues that the best translations struggle to retain

a sense of otherness in order to convey to the reader the cultural difference of the source.36

Following his method, writers attempt to retain markers of the foreign as an intrusive declaration

to readers of the ownership of these ideas.

When Venuti popularized Schleiermacher’s ideas among modern English translators, he

focused on reversing the Anglicization of foreign personal and place names and using

intentionally archaic language to highlight the distance between modern readers and the text.

Venuti’s attempt to highlight the foreign has many problems. He has been criticized for the

vagueness of his suggestions, the impossibility of fully realizing his aims, and the difficulty

involved in determining what translating decisions will create the desired ethical result.

Archaism, for instance, creates distance between readers and texts but also encourage readers to

view the original in light of their preconceived ideas about their own past. Despite the problems

with Venuti’s theories, however, his revitalization of the foreign/domestic paradox created a new

movement in translation that is focused on the ethics of cultural appropriation and

understanding.37

This movement has its roots in post-colonial theory, but its practice leads to many of the

same results as the colonializing translations of the nineteenth century. While nineteenth-century

36

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Sämmtliche Werke, Dritte Abtheilung: Zur Philosophie

(Berlin: Reimer, 1938), II.207-45. 37

Outi Paloposki, “Domestication and Foreignization,” in Handbook of Translation Studies Volume 2, ed. Yves

Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Co., 2011), 40-42.

15

translations intentionally invoked the exotic to celebrate the imperial scope of England’s

language, literature, and dominion, post-colonial translations use exoticism to shock the reader

out of a complacently Westernized perspective, always struggling to find new realms of the

foreign that can be simultaneously understood as part of a shared human experience and as

foreign but which have not been appropriated into the comfortably exotic framework of

nineteenth-century orientalism.

A natural effect of this modern method of highlighting the foreign in translated texts is

the recognition that, as Antoine Berman argues, translation is both necessary and diametrically

opposed to the desire of a culture to remain vital but unadulterated.38

Berman’s vision of

translation as simultaneously desirable and destructive is part of a tendency in modern translation

theory to expand the definition of translation, encouraging readers to view translated texts not as

literary endeavours but as socio-cultural phenomena that reflect cultural notions of the other. The

goals of modern translation theory, which responds to and in turn creates worries about

colonialism, identity, and assimilation, is very far from the eighteenth-century desire to, as Julie

Hayes puts it, make “the author ‘speak’ like a compatriot,” eliminating traces of the other and

working as far as possible to create the assimilation which modern theories often strive to

prevent.39

While notions of the foreign are at the centre of modern translation discourse, eighteenth-

century translators took for granted both the innate worth of their original and their own right to

assimilate that original. For some writers, their translations were not only seen as their own

creative output, but as eclipsing their source text in status and importance. This is seen most

38

Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S.

Heyvaert (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 53-69. 39

Julie Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800 (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2008), 220.

16

clearly in the high-status translations of Dryden and Pope, but also appears in the many

retranslations of Haywood’s works back into their original French.40

These were marketed as

new works by an English author, a confusion which reflects the perennial struggle of translators

to make their works understandable and admirable by contemporary standards while retaining

the spirit of the original. The inherently problematic nature of translation is captured by Jorge

Luis Borges, whose story of a translator who, in a desperate attempt to create a modernized

translation of Don Quixote that carries the spirit of the original, wakes from an inspired dream to

frantically write, as his translation, the exact text that Cervantes wrote.41

Borges’ text

demonstrates the inevitable failure of art to replicate nature – and the inevitable artistic failure of

anything that does. A translation must change its source in order to claim the status of a work of

art in its own right or even to be a translation at all.

Eighteenth-century translators recognized this both implicitly, in their worries over

whether the English language was fit to translate the great works of art, and explicitly in their

declarations of a translator’s necessary qualities. In 1648, the poet and translator Sir John

Denham praised another translator for not being “fetter’d to [the original’s] numbers and his

times.” Denham’s ideal poet recognizes when the original’s poetry is “low” and “Let’st in [his]

own to make it rise and flow,” being “true to his sense, but truer to his fame.” 42

This praise

demonstrates an ideal which continues throughout the eighteenth century. In 1752, Thomas

Franklin declared that the ideal translator must “hide his [original’s] faults . . . Soften each

blemish, and each grace improve,” in order to create a translation “Such as in Pope’s extensive

40

Patrick Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 22, 777-82. 41

Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote,” Ficciones (1997): 41-55. 42

John Denham, “To Richard Fanshawe, Upon his Translation of Pastor Fido,” in The Routledge Anthology of Poets

on Poets: Poetic Responses to English Poetry from Chaucer to Yeats, ed. David Hopkins (New York: Routledge,

2016), 138.

17

genius shone, / And made immortal Homer all our own.”43

Although the power dynamics vary,

the desire to claim ownership over foreign texts through Anglicization and alteration, which

appears in the colonializing trend that theorists like Venuti and Bassnet react against, is the basis

for most translation in the eighteenth century, which attempted to incorporate and naturalize

foreign ideas and texts. At the same time as they asserted their ownership over translated texts,

however, these translators saw themselves working “To vindicate the Greek and Roman”

originals they translated and to “pay the debt of gratitude” they owed to these by spreading their

fame to the English language.44

The differing responses of eighteenth-century translators to the inevitable struggle

between source and translation inform my examination of these translators. At the same time,

theoretical examinations of the nature of translation risk abandoning the realm of literary studies.

By following the idea of translation as mediation or movement between two mediums to its

natural conclusion, any form of mediation becomes a moment of translation, including the

mediation of sensory input to the mind. Indeed, Octavio Paz sees translation as central to our

understanding of the world, arguing that literary translation is only the final step in a process that

begins with the translation of external input into a form understandable by the human brain.45

While this view of translation reveals the psychological roots of interpretation, it is too broad to

be easily applied to a literary text. As a tool for the exploration of individual or cultural mindsets

and understandings, this is an important theoretical model, but it also creates a dangerously

unstable definition of translation.

It is important to recognize the theoretical framework of historical, cultural, and linguistic

43

Thomas Franklin, Translation: A Poem (London, 1752), 9-10, 11. 44

Franklin, Translation: A Poem, 13. 45

Octavio Paz, “Translations of Literature and Letters,” trans. Irene del Corral, in Theories of Translation from

Dryden to Derrida, ed. R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 154.

18

interactions but it is imperative to also retain a definition of translation that is sufficiently

focused to be of use to a literary scholar. In this work, translation is examined solely in relation

to literary texts and their transmission from one language to another. Even this narrowed

definition, however, entails many complications, especially in separating ideas of textual

ownership and originality. The question of whether a translation is an original work in its own

right is one with a long and complex history, as Lorna Hardwick examines in Translating Words,

Translating Cultures, showing how classical translations have helped to refigure poetic and

political awareness throughout English history.46

Several important trends in eighteenth-century translation affect my use of the term. In

some cases, especially in popular fiction, no source is given for a work that scholars now know

to be a translation or adaptation of a popular foreign work. Even in translations which credit the

original author, many works, like those of Haywood, fail to provide the original title. This can

encourage the retranslation of a text into its source language to create a new work. The

phenomenon of retranslation was surprisingly popular both in literary circles, where works like

Aphra Behn’s 1688 History of Agnes de Castro, translated from J. B. de Brilhac’s Agnés de

Castro, nouvelle portugaise, was translated back into French by Marie Thiroux d’Arconville in

her 1761 Romans traduits de l’anglais, and in academic circles where James St.André argues

that it serves “as a form of argument” and discussion with peers and predecessors.47

This practice

shows the transferability of ideas and the fluidity of eighteenth-century plots, genres, and

characters across cultural borders, a trend which is especially evident in the French fiction that,

Carolyn Dever and Margaret Cohen’s recent essay collection explores, “flooded the British

46

Lorna Hardwick, Translating Words, Translating Cultures (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000). 47

McMurran, Spread of Novels, 4-5; James St.André, “Retranslation as Argument: Canon Formation,

Professionalization, and International Rivalry in 19th Century Sinological Translation,” Cadernos de Tradução

11.1 (2003): 60.

19

marketplace throughout the 1720s and 1730s” and provided English writers with new exemplars,

sources, and ideas.48

While some writers failed to acknowledge their source, other writers invented spurious

sources. Delarivier Manley is one of many writers who published scandal chronicles and political

exposés under the name of a foreign author, a model which Haywood also follows and which

makes it difficult to determine which works are translations, which claim to be when they are

not, and which claim not to be when they are. Because this project focuses on the use of

translation to establish and maintain a literary reputation, pieces which are not publicly

acknowledged as translations are not closely examined, although they make useful material for

future study. Pseudo-translations are an important source of information on the reception-history

of translation, but it is difficult to quantify the extent to which their claims were believed or

whether the authors intended that they be believed. Because of this uncertainty, this study

focuses on works that both claim to be translations and have a recognizable source text.

Original is the term which eighteenth-century authors most often use for their sources,

and in this study it has become a shorthand for an author’s source text. This word encourages

pejorative implications, in creating a binary between original/unoriginal, that are important to

maintain when considering the way that writers during the later eighteenth century, as well as

modern scholars, view translations. By dividing texts into original and derivative works, an

implied hierarchy is created which places the original works in a superior position to derived

works, adaptations, and translations. At the same time, there are few other words available for

the source text of a translation, so original is used as a neutral term within this study, and should

48

Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, eds., The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15.

20

not be taken to mean that translators have given up their claim to authorial ownership or that

their creations are not also original. In fact, it is difficult to discern a lack of originality in

anything but outright plagiarism as even abridgment requires authorial creativity in choosing

what to remove and how to hide the loss of material to create a new product. Translation, which

involves a much higher level of interpretative decision-making, must be viewed as original work,

even as its separation from its original, or source text, is emphasized. This is even more true of

the fraught terms of imitation and formal imitation.

Imitation was used both as a formal description and a pejorative. Within this study,

formal imitation is used to mean the style of adapting a translated text formalized during the

eighteenth century and used most famously in Johnson’s London, where he translated,

modernized, and updated Juvenal’s Third Satire to refer to his own time and place. The

distinction between formal imitation and imitative translation is especially important because

imitation was an accepted, if not fully respectable, style of translation and one of the styles that

that Dryden identifies in the essay on translation which he prefixed to his translation of Ovid’s

Epistles, while formal imitation was being simultaneously codified into its own genre.

In his “Life of Pope,” Johnson called formal imitation “a kind of middle composition

between translation and original design” in which “the ancients are familiarized by adapting their

sentiments to modern topicks” rather than by adapting their language, as a translator would, to

modern taste.49

One of the characteristic differences between formal imitation and translation is

that while translations allowed readers to discover how well the translator has massaged the

original into a more acceptable shape, formal imitation explicitly demanded that readers compare

49

Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

2006), IV.45.

21

not only the words but also the cultures in which the texts were created. Indeed, Johnson

declared that “such imitations cannot give pleasure to common readers” because the enjoyment

of an imitation is based on delighted recognition of “an unexpected parallel,” which unlearned

readers could not be expected to recognize.50

In Johnson’s formulation, formal imitation is easier than translation, but “what is easy is

seldom excellent,” and although he wrote several formal imitations of his own, he claimed to be

unimpressed by the practice. He felt that because of its derivative nature, “the comparison

requires knowledge of the original” and its cultural context that readers should not be expected to

possess. At the same time, he believed that English and Roman cultures were not similar enough

for formal imitation to flourish.51

For Johnson, formal imitation is a recognition rather than a

creation of similarity. But of course, many authors disagree about where parallels can be found,

and sometimes formal imitations, as will be seen in my chapter on Pope, attempted to draw

parallels from very dissimilar situations.

Because of their emphasis on topicality, formal imitations are intrinsically political, and

focus much more clearly on immediately contemporary issues than faithful translations. When

translators are not concerned with faithfulness to the ideas of their sources, or when they

interpret their source in the light of contemporary concerns, however, there is spillover from one

type of writing to the other, and imitation and translation can co-exist in one text. The different

types of translation and different ways in which translators highlight their inventiveness are

examined in more detail in the chapter on Dryden, whose lengthy discussions of translation

theory shows how originality and translation were uncertain terms even during the eighteenth

50

Johnson, “Life of Pope,” IV.45. 51

Johnson, “Life of Pope,” IV.78.

22

century, creating tensions between translators’ attempts to create a new text and their desire to

maintain the ideas and reputation of their original.

For the purposes of this study, the translations examined can include any work which is

clearly taken from an original work in another language and repurposed in such a way that the

author acknowledges a reliance on that text. This is not a definition of translation, and indeed the

group of texts which this umbrella covers will include several texts that strain the limits of

categorization, including formal imitations, rewritings, and adaptations. As Linda Hutcheon

recognizes, the difference between reinterpretation, transposition, and translation is part of a

“debate over proximity to the ‘original’” which recognizes a text’s “overt relationship to another

work or works” and which attempts to formalize that relationship by definition and

categorization.52

My argument challenges her assumption that “in most concepts of translation,

the source text is granted an axiomatic primacy,” arguing that, for the eighteenth-century authors

I study, translation creates a relationship of equality rather than a subordination.53

Redefining

translation in this way problematizes a straightforward categorization of works into translations,

adaptations, and rewritings and encourages closer attention to authorial statements of attribution

or of ownership.

While not excluding works which make broad-based changes to their source text, this

study does not closely examine translations which adapt a work to another form, such as the

many adaptations of foreign works for the stage. Although such adaptations are an important part

of translating culture, they do not invite the same kind of close stylistic attention that translations

within a genre inspire, and they invite a more critical, less equal response from the translator or

52

Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6-7. 53

Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 16.

23

adaptor. By reading a text as a prototype for a different form, the translator is forced into the

position of critic and judge and encouraged from the first reading to view the text not as a

holistic document but as a collection of ideas, events, or phrases. This study invites speculation

on the process by which broad adaptations and revisions to a text are carried out both within the

scope of a single genre and between forms and genres, especially in shifts from poetry to prose

or from one prosodic form to another, but focuses on the narrower field of self-defined

translation.

By including only acknowledged translations, this group of texts necessarily excludes a

large number of unattributed translations. Attribution is a difficult concept within the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries, when anonymity was often a publicity stunt rather than a true attempt

to conceal authorship. Carter’s early works were published under the pseudonym ‘Eliza,’ a name

of which she was as jealous as her own. A similar case can be seen in John Mullan’s recent work

on anonymity, which outlines the authorial claims of one of Carter’s literary heroes, Mrs. Rowe,

who wrote under the name “Philomela,” or “nightingale.” This name uses existing associations to

create a poetic rather than a personal identity, but her pseudonym, like Carter’s, was as

recognizable as her name. 54

Indeed, Carter’s poem “On the Death of Mrs. Rowe” addresses

Rowe as Philomela throughout. This confusion around anonymity, pseudonymity, and

acknowledged authorship creates uncertainty for students of eighteenth-century reputation, but

for the purposes of this study, an unattributed translation is any translation which was not

publicly attributed to its author during that author’s lifetime. Such translations are often

important to the history of literature and culture, but do not impact the reputation-building

function of translations.

54

John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 52.

24

In practice, therefore, this study largely follows the conventions of the authors it

examines in labelling pieces translations or originals, with the exception of pseudo-translations.

Although close examination of pseudo-translations would shed light on eighteenth-century

strategies of self-creation, I exclude pseudo-translations because they raise questions about the

invention of historical antecedents and creation of false canons that distract attention from my

focus on translation as a connecting point between authors and cultures. Such false histories

create a sense of shared fame, reputation, and connection, but lack the reciprocity and the

common ownership which bind the reputation of both original author and translator.

Authorial Property

In light of the allusive and imitative practices of the eighteenth-century translation culture

that flourished during the rise of copyright, my study challenges the current view that originality

is the primary determinant of ownership. In fact, I argue that eighteenth-century authors used

adaptive processes to create shared ownership of texts. A public claim of ownership, my study

suggests, is as important to authorial reputation as originality of plot or style or even of

publication and copyright. Pope’s clandestine publication of his letters demonstrates his

awareness of the complexities which surrounded ownership, law, and public perception. By

creating public links between himself and his text, Pope established his public authorship

regardless of his legal title to the texts.

As copyright law came into existence, however, questions of ownership and authorial

property became increasingly complex. The rise of the professional author and an increasing

25

reliance on publishers and book sales in place of traditional patronage encouraged concerns

about the ownership of texts. As authors turned to the middling classes, with their new

purchasing power, Joseph Loewenstein argues that a new concept of authorship emerged,

creating the professional author reliant on legal ownership of copyright for sustenance.55

Mark

Rose was among the first scholars to connect this focus on literary property and the rise of

copyright legislation in the eighteenth century with originality. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s

notion of authorship as individualization, Rose argues that “the principal institutional

embodiment of the author-work relation is copyright,” which gives “legal reality” to the notion

of intellectual property and affirms the identity and rights of the creator.56

If, as Rose argues, “the

discourse of original genius coincided with that of authorial property,” then the idea of

authorship can be clearly traced to the early eighteenth century with the 1709/10 Statute of Anne

establishing governmentally regulated copyright.57

This correlation, as Clare Pettitt

demonstrates, was certainly established by the nineteenth century, when notions of intellectual

property were based entirely on a demonstrable originality.58

In the eighteenth century, however, despite Locke’s theories of property leading to a

popular conception of originality as a mark of ownership, originality was not yet central to legal

authorship. Debates around ownership of texts centred not around property concerns, although

these were certainly important, but as Jody Greene demonstrates, around responsibility, libel

55

Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2002). 56

Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Beckett and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” in Of

Authors and Origins, ed. Brad Sherman and Alain Strowel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 27. 57

Mark Rose, Authors and Owners (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 115. 58

Clare Pettitt, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

2002).

26

laws, and punishment.59

Copyright, as Simon Stern explains, did not prevent the reprinting of

extracts, borrowing of characters, or even publication of abridgements.60

It took, as Ronan

Deazley points out in his response to Rose, until 1737 for the English government to pass laws

against immediate abridgement, and these were based, not on the notion of literary property, but

on a worry that fast and careless versions would “sink the Reputation of the original

Composition.”61

Indeed, as Deazley points out elsewhere, although “policy makers, lawyers,

judges and academics” have been using notions of intellectual property for decades, there is still

no “consensus as to its fundamental nature or justification.”62

William St. Clair, in his

examination of the metaphors used to describe literary property, traces the concept back to the

early 1500s, where books and authors were viewed as part of a “commonwealth” of learning and

required to “contribute to the well-being – the common weal – of the whole” both by social

convention and by a series of laws establishing price controls and means of redress.63

Intellectual property, then, is not the fixed notion, beginning in the eighteenth century

with the development of copyright law, that Rose first posited. Nor can early ideas of intellectual

property and copyright be understood without taking into account the intrinsically derivative

nature of any literary text that uses an existing language, structure, and socially determined form.

Concerns about plagiarism did arise in the eighteenth century, but these must be addressed in

connection with the increasing concerns about legal ownership and not viewed strictly as a

59

Jody Greene, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660-1730

(Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 25-62. 60

Simon Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Originality and.

Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New York: Routledge,

2008), 72-80. 61

Ronan Deazley, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth

Century Britain (1695-1775) (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004), 106. 62

Ronan Deazley, Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2006), 137. 63

William St. Clair, “Metaphors of Intellectual Property,” in Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of

Copyright, ed. Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer, and Lionel Bently (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers,

2010), 374-5.

27

matter of originality and derivation.

Ownership of translations is necessarily predicated on what Trevor Ross calls “creativity

in expression” rather than “creativity in ideas.”64

While originality was redefined over the course

of the eighteenth-century in response to the creation and codification of copyright law, the

translator’s creativity of expression found itself in conflict with the idea of respect toward one’s

source. Altering the style of your source, as Cowley did in his imitations of Pindar, created an

original work but failed to honor the distinctive expression of the source. Dryden, Ross argues,

was among the first to develop “prescient gestures of resistance” to innovation for the sake of

ownership, developing an idea of individual style inherent in an author.65

This style, Dryden

argued, must be preserved in order to translate the “particular turn of Thoughts and of

Expression” and to fulfill the author’s duty to his source text.66

Indeed, during this period the idea that a translator had a duty to his source became

increasingly stressed. Louis Kelly argues that due to “a mid-century redefinition of originality,

the source author was increasingly respected, and translators sought to capture their author’s tone

with the minimum of linguistic and rhetorical intervention.”67

By the end of the eighteenth

century, Alexander Fraser Tytler declared that it was “the duty of a poetical translator” to follow

his source text. At the same time, he ordered translators “never to suffer [their] original to fall”

but to improve source texts if necessary to maintain the reputation of their author.68

Dryden, too,

insists that translation is “the payment of a Debt” to the original, an insistence which rejects the

64

Trevor Ross, “The Fate of Style in an Age of Intellectual Property,” ELH 80.3 (2013): 748. 65

Ross, “The Fate of Style,” 753. 66

Dryden, Works, I.117. 67

Louis Kelly, “The Eighteenth Century to Tytler,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, III.67. 68

Alexander Fraser Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation (London, 1797), 81.

28

individual ownership on which copyright claims are predicated.69

The insistence that translations could improve or damage the reputation of their source

and that writers had a duty to their original occurred alongside a culture of allusion in which

“imitative practices were the norm.” 70

The eighteenth-century culture of allusion made it

difficult for scholars to differentiate between original works that contain allusions to or even

direct translations from older works, loose paraphrases including ideas, phrases and verses found

nowhere in the original work, and formal imitations which altered as much as they imitated,

further complicating the relationship between originality and ownership. These practices created

a culture in which authorship was not only, as Pope famously described it in his “Essay on

Criticism,” the ability to revitalize an old idea with new expression, but a matter of shared

publicity.71

Far from viewing translation as an individual occupation, these authors saw it as a

form of joint authorship. By sharing ideas between languages, cultures, and texts, translation

connected writers to important figures in a literary and linguistic bond that was separate from

and simultaneous with legal copyright, helping to explain the exponential growth of the form at

the same time as the question of ownership and authorial identity was becoming fraught.

The History of Translation

Today, scholars view the temporary “breakdown of the British censorship and licensing

system” during the English Civil War in 1642-6 and the increase in printed works that followed

69

Dryden, Works, I.117. 70

Paul Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646-1726 (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2008), 6. 71

Pope, Poems, I.263.

29

as the beginning of the boom that led to translation becoming one of the most marketable forms

of writing in eighteenth-century England.72

Recent studies in the early modern period parallel

that of the eighteenth century in structure, content, and history. The recognition of the

importance of translation in recent decades has led to a number of single-author studies,

following Victoria Moul’s argument that even the “closest of translation styles can nevertheless

include interpretation and even contention.”73

Studies of multiple adaptations and revisions based

on a single text or a single author are often used, as Jessica Winston says of Senecan tragedies, to

provide “a vehicle” for politically dangerous “anxieties about the nature of kingship” or moral

truth.74

Donna Hamilton argues that translation can also be a way to hide a dangerous religious

affiliation, claiming that the adaptations of Anthony Munday reveal covert Catholic

sympathies.75

Translations could also be propaganda, as Alastair Blanchard and Tracey Sowerby

demonstrate in their article on Thomas Wilson’s reworking of Demosthenes, examining how

Wilson hid “his authorial voice behind the mask of classical authority” in order to urge his

English countrymen to take aggressive action against Spain.76

It wasn’t only men who used translation for their own ends. Roger Ellis, in his work on

Queen Elizabeth, argues that translation was one of the few areas where women received as

much or more praise than their male counterparts, offering space for female voices to enter

masculine discourse.77

Anne Coldiron examines texts about women’s issues in English Printing,

Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, but the standard narrative focuses on female

72

Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

2003), 118. 73

Victoria Moul, “Translation As Commentary? The Case of Ben Jonson’s Ars Poetica,” Palimpsests 20 (2007): 63. 74

Jessica Winston, “Seneca in Early Elizabethan England,” Renaissance Quarterly 59.1 (2006): 58. 75

Donna Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 76

Alastair Blanchard and Tracey Sowerby, “Thomas Wilson’s Demosthenes and the Politics of Tudor Translation,”

International Journal of the Classical Tradition 12.1 (2005): 47. 77

Roger Ellis, “The Juvenile Translations of Elizabeth Tudor,” Translation and Literature 18 (2009): 158, 172.

30

translators of religious, romantic, or classical texts.78

Mary Sidney’s version of the Psalms is one

example of a religious translation that has, as Gillian Wright explains, “benefited from the

growth of interest” in women’s writing and “the history of translation.” Sidney’s text, formerly

“dismissed as feminine ‘tinkering,’” is now recognized as part of a growing number of works by

female writers who used adaptation to create a public voice.79

Although translations did not offer

as much freedom of expression as original writing, they were a culturally acceptable way of

entering a wider field of discourse and offered writers an opportunity to create a literary

reputation.

England’s literary culture encouraged both women and men to use translation to make

their ideas appear more reputable, taking original sources and altering their meaning or their

political implications. One example of this bowdlerizing approach appears in the many versions

of Erasmus’ Funus. English writers changed the denominations of his positive and negative

exemplars depending on their religious affiliation, creating versions of the text which appear to

argue in favor of opposite sides in the religious debates.80

Many examples of pseudo-translations

exist which follow the same pattern of propaganda, using famous names or places to support

contested ideas. Greg Walker examines the literary subterfuge of Thomas Elyot, among others,

in Writing under Tyranny, showing how authors used “carefully chosen selection[s] of material”

78

A. E. Coldiron, English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476-1557 (Aldershot: Ashgate

Press, 2009). 79

Gillian Wright, “Mary Sidney Pembroke,” in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter

France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79. 80

Louis Kelly, “Translation and Religious Belief,” in Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, 26.

31

to create politicized translations.81

Some of these strayed so far from their source text that, as

Valerie Worth-Stylianou demonstrates, they blurred the line between imitation and translation.82

The difficulty of determining a consistent translation strategy in a period where authors

claimed fidelity while making changes that often radically altered the meaning of a text leads

Warren Boutcher to suggest that scholars “read Renaissance translations as ‘original’ works by

authors who happen to be translating.”83

While this may be a useful strategy for some works, it

risks oversimplification, ignoring translation’s connectivity as well as its position within the

debates on translation in vogue on the continent during the Tudor period. At the same time, as

Massimiliano Morini’s Tudor Translation demonstrates, there was comparatively little

theoretical discussion of the subject in England during the early Tudor period.84

Theoretical

arguments about the level of faithfulness required and the means by which translations ought to

be created became both more frequent and more heated, as Gordon Braden explains, in the later

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but these debates had yet to reach concrete agreement by the

eighteenth century.85

Yehudi Lindeman reacts to this view by claiming that scholars need to stop looking for a

consensus in early modern authors. According to Lindeman, early modern translators

demonstrate a simultaneous acceptance of two “diametrically opposed” views. Early modern

writers believed, or at least claimed, both that the translator was a traitor to his original, stealing

thoughts and credit and producing something that could never live up to nor reproduce their

81

Grey Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2005), 242. 82

Valerie Worth-Stylianou, “Translatio and Translation in the Renaissance: from Italy to France,” in The

Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999), 127–35. 83

Warren Boutcher, “The Renaissance,” in Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, 46. 84

Massimiliano Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 85

Gordon Braden, “Translating Procedures in Theory and Practice,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, II.98.

32

source, and that the translator was a conquering hero, rescuing stories, ideas, and phrases from

the dust of their original and disseminating these stories in a new and potentially better form than

their source offered. Lindeman claims that these views, which are clearly evident to any scholar

of early modern or eighteenth-century translation, cannot be reconciled by reason, only by an

emotional reaction to the texts.86

My own examination of translations and paratexts shows how

Dryden manipulates these emotional reactions to create a form of authorial voice within his

translations, using this to compare himself to his source texts.

Translation and the Spread of Ideas

A. E. Coldiron takes a different approach to early modern translation theory, using book-

historical methods to examine the changes that the intercontinental market drove in both

derivative and original work.87

This study of how market forces shape transnational identity is

part of an increasing focus on the internationality of translation that recognizes the impossibility

of transmitting texts without cultural exchange. While some authors, like Douglas Robinson,

follow modern post-colonial theories about translation in arguing that translation is a conquest of

the translated text wherein the text acts as a signifier for its originating nation, the recent

collection Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe focuses on the way that

translation fostered comparison, identification, and assimilation of foreign cultures.88

86

Yehudi Lindeman, “Translation in the Renaissance: A Context and a Map,” Canadian Review of Comparative

Literature (1981): 205. 87

A. E. Coldiron, Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2015). 88

Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing,

1997), 55; José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee, eds., Translation and the Book Trade in Early

Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

33

This view of translation as not only a literary but also a cultural experience is one that is

gaining traction in eighteenth-century studies as well as early modern studies. In fact, as Early

Modern Exchanges: Dialogues Between Nations and Cultures, 1550-1800, shows, sometimes

these two periods can be conflated by scholars who examine translation as a dialogue between

cultures and languages.89

Christa Knellwolf argues that many eighteenth-century translators saw

themselves as mediating “between the scientific and cultural achievements” of foreign countries

and those of their own, positioning themselves as gatekeepers of knowledge and accessibility.90

While few translators made such grandiose claims, their work does, as Margaret Cohen and

Carolyn Dever’s collection explores, spread ideas between nations, creating strong cultural

bonds that offset the increasing nationalism of European countries.91

McMurran is part of a

growing body of scholars working to rewrite the history of the English novel to include the

influence of French texts. This idea is governed by a recognition of the widespread translation

culture that fostered the spread of ideas between France and England.92

McMurran’s image of

English authors imitating and altering the shape of the late-seventeenth-century French romance,

adding depth of character and taking part in the slow modernization of a form that hearkened

back to the medieval romances of knights in armour, challenges Ian Watt’s narrative of the rise

of the novel.93

89

Helen Hackett, ed. Early Modern Exchanges: Dialogues Between Nations and Cultures, 1550-1800 (Burlington:

Ashgate, 2015). 90

Christa Knellwolf, “Women Translators, Gender and the Cultural Context of the Scientific Revolution,” in

Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown

(New York: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2001), 115. 91

Cohen and Dever, The Literary Channel. 92

McMurran, Spread of Novels, 27-43. 93

McMurran, Spread of Novels; Frost, Dryden and the Art of Translation, 75-7; Steven Zwicker, Dryden’s Political

Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation (Providence: Brown University Press, 1972).

34

A series of studies by Terry Hale question the origins of the Gothic novel, resituating this

eighteenth and early nineteenth-century phenomenon within its continental roots.94

According to

their research, early Gothic fiction was stimulated by a new form of French romance, enhanced

by elements drawn from Burke’s theory of the sublime. While these introduced elements created

a newly British genre, the genre continually drew from continental sources, reaching, as Hale

claims, its final stages by assimilating the popular German genre of the Schauerroman which had

reached England in translation.95

This movement is, as scholars are beginning to recognize,

typical of the interactions between cultures fostered by translation, especially in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries.

The nineteenth-century culture of translation was heavily influenced by the Romantic

poets, including Coleridge, whose hostility toward translation and desire for poetry that is

“perfectly unborrowed,” helped to create our modern understanding of the field.96

Despite the

growing cult of originality in the Romantic period, translations remained as popular as ever.

Recent studies in the nineteenth-century often examine translation as canon-formation, watching

the British canon of great literature grow to include not only classical and British authors but

also, as Peter France, Kenneth Haynes, and Haruo Shirane demonstrate, ancient writings from

India and the east as well as an increasing number of contemporary German titles.97

94

Terry Hale, “Translation, Adaptation, Appropriation: The Origins of the European Gothic Novel,” Angelistica 55

(2001): 145-71; Terry Hale, “French and German Gothic: The Beginnings,” in The Cambridge Companion to

Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63-84. 95

Terry Hale, “Translation in Distress: Cultural Misappropriation and the Construction of the Gothic,” in European

Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960, ed. Avril Horder (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 18-

21. 96

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), II.124. 97

Peter France and Kenneth Haynes, “The Publication of Literary Translation,” in Oxford History of Literary

Translation, IV.136; Haruo Shirane, “Issues in Canon Formation,” in Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National

Identity, and Japanese Literature, ed. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuku (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2000), 1-27.

35

Translations from Icelandic, Celtic, and old German form an important part of the

scholarly narrative of nineteenth-century translations.98

These Germanic stories were

manipulated to valorize upward social mobility and popular authority and played an important

role in the unification of Prussia in the early twentieth century. As Robert Cook examines,

translators often used intentional archaisms to enhance the historicism of the works they

translated, a movement which dovetailed with the century’s reclamation of Anglo-Saxon and

medieval literature and the revitalizing of literary historicism.99

Writers also looked farther afield

for inspiration. Eva Sallis examines the complicated history behind the English struggle with

difficult, foreign, and erotic Arabic texts, while Lauren Pfister examines the problems with

translation from Chinese.100

Norman Girardot’s recent and comprehensive biography of James

Legge, the primary translator from Chinese during the nineteenth century, offers a new

perspective on the simultaneous valorization of works offering new perspectives on foreign and

exotic places and denigration of translation as mechanical labour which took place during the

great era of nineteenth-century linguistic exploration.101

The influx of new texts did not completely displace classical literature, which continued

to be used for political and polemical purposes. Nineteenth-century writers, despite the

prevalence of the classics in education and political debate, slowly lost their reverence for

98

Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 117-41. 99

Robert Cook, “On Translating Sagas,” Gripla 13 (2002): 107-45; J. R. Hall, “Anglo-Saxon Studies in the

Nineteenth-Century: England, Denmark, America,” in A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Phillip

Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 434-54. 100

Eva Sallis, Sheharazade through the Looking Glass: The Metamorphosis of the Thousand and One Nights (New

York: Routledge, 1999), 54; Lauren F. Pfister, “Chinese, Translation of Theological Terms Into,” in Concise

Encyclopedia of Language and Religion, ed. J. Simpson and J. Sawyer (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), 118-22;

Lauren F. Pfister, “Translation and its Problems,” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Antonia S. Cua

(New York: Routledge, 2001), 734-9. 101

Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 250.

36

classical texts, and, as Duncan Bell argues, turned to new inspirations to form the basis of their

new empires.102

Norman Vance shows how translation from the classics became increasingly

experimental, bringing new aspects of classical works to light and eschewing older models.103

This new focus on experimental translation encouraged scholars to attempt authors who had

never been translated in their entirety before, most famously, Dante Alighieri. Edoardo Crisafulli

claims that “if one measured Dante’s fortunes by considering the number of complete

translations of the Comedy, one would have to conclude that the Florentine poet was totally

neglected” until the nineteenth century, when he finally joined the ranks of Italian poets that

found their way into British literature.104

At the same time, nineteenth-century translation was

more conscribed in other ways than its predecessor. Women’s right to publish in many fields had

regressed since the early eighteenth century, as is evident in Susanne Stark’s work on female

translators, who once again faced criticism for attempting to break into the field of translation, a

field which had been open to them for more than a hundred years.105

Translation and Reputation

One of the most important concerns for eighteenth-century writers wishing to establish

their reputation was the perceived morality of both writer and text. Even popular writers could be

condemned for immoral behaviour and suffer losses both to their reputation and their sales.

102

Duncan Bell, “From Ancient to Modern in Victorian Imperial Thought,” The Historical Journal 49.3 (2006): 735-

759. 103

Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 105. 104

Edoardo Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante: Cary’s Translation of The Divine Comedy (Leicester: Troubadour

Publishing, 2003), 5. 105

Susanne Stark, ‘Behind Inverted Commas’: Translation and Anglo-German Cultural Relation in the Nineteenth

Century (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, Ltd, 1999), 37.

37

While some authors, such as John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, rose to posthumous popularity

due to a reputation for scandal others, like John Hawkesworth and, in later years, Mary

Wollstonecraft, lost their audience and their reputation when accusations of immorality were

brought against them.106

For these authors, then, it was crucial to establish and maintain a

consistent stance in relation to the moral standards of their society, but the moral and religious

positions they took could be very different. Although most eighteenth-century writers practiced

some form of Christianity, accepting the existence of a universal moral constant that David

Norton and Manfred Kuehn argue was understood by “ordinary individuals, as much as moral

theorists,” this apparent agreement concealed “substantial differences of opinion.”107

Eighteenth

century theologians supported a number of denominations and creeds, each of which emphasized

subtly different moral boundaries and codes of behavior.

Although an individual’s moral standing was a vital part of his or her authorial

reputation, the definition and practice of proper behavior was erratic, leading writers to maintain

individualized standards of personal and public behaviour. Each of the authors in this study

chooses a different form of social behaviour, but each author attempts to use their consistent

support of a single form of conduct as a demonstration of their right to claim a positive moral

standing. Haywood’s disregard of conventional and restrictive social and sexual norms offers a

stark contrast to Carter’s horror at any form of sexual contact outside a Church-blessed, family

sanctioned marriage, but each writer saw her position as an acceptable stance within the limits of

106

Public Advertiser (London, England), July 17, 1773; Issue 11938. 17th-18th Century Burney Collection

Newspapers; “Hawkesworth, John (bap. 1720, d. 1773),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed H. C.

G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); Lucy Peltz, “‘A Revolution in Female Manners’: Women,

Politics and Reputation in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Brilliant Women:18th

-Century Bluestockings, ed.

Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008), 111-3. 107

David Norton and Manfred Kuehn, “The Foundations of Morality,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-

Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 944.

38

their society, and each used her adherence to a code of ethics to make public claims of moral

respectability. For the male authors in this study, sexual morality was a less imperative concern

than it was for eighteenth-century women, but both Pope and Dryden foreground their

participation in a socially constructed system of virtuous behaviour as an inextricable part of

their attempts to create an authorial self-representation.

This project explores the many ways in which translation was used to build and support

reputations in the eighteenth century, focusing on the careers of the two foremost male poets of

their day: John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and two less conventional female authors: Eliza

Haywood and Elizabeth Carter. While only Pope began his career with a translation, each of

these authors used that medium as an important part of their self-fashioning. Translation allowed

these writers to connect themselves to other authors, places, and classes and to compare

themselves favourably to their contemporaries and to famous authors of the past. In doing so,

these writers found a socially acceptable form of self-promotion which allowed them to pursue

their societal and literary goals.

John Dryden, the subject of my first chapter, is well known for using both translation and

original poetry to define himself through the creation of a literary genealogy. “Strong were our

sires,” he declares in a laudatory poem addressed to Congreve, and he depicts himself as using

that strength to support his own writing.108

Indeed, his original poetry prefigures the debate

between “ancients and moderns” in its apparent tendency to exalt the classical poets by

devaluing not only Dryden’s contemporaries but his own poetry. His poetry clearly establishes

his place in a line of descent that stretched back to the ancient Roman and Greek authors. In

moving from the medieval poems of Chaucer to the works of his immediate predecessors, Jonson

108

Dryden, Works, IV.432.

39

and Fletcher, he claimed that modern poetry had refined the “rough diamond” of early English

poetry, but despite this assertion of modern superiority over his English ancestors, his original

poetry appears to situate his position as inferior to his classical forbears.109

My chapter argues that Dryden uses his translations to reverse this image, and

demonstrate his equality, if not superiority, to the classical writers he admired. In his translations,

Dryden explicitly compares himself to these authors without the accusations of hubris which he

would have garnered if he had compared himself to them in his original works. In his preface to

All for Love, Dryden describes translation and adaptation of famous stories as the literary

equivalent of the “Bowe of Ulysses.” In this comparison, only the best authors have the strength

even to attempt a translation or an adaptation of a famous story, and his success at reaching “the

Mark” set by his predecessors serves as a public demonstration of his ability.110

Further, I argue

that Dryden used his translations to create a position for himself within literary history. By

positioning his translations as exemplars for future authors and by working with Jacob Tonson,

the publisher of his Miscellany volumes, to set up a new literary form for the encouragement of

young writers, Dryden uses his translations to position himself as an ancestor for future authors

in the same way that he himself was the literary descendant of the classical greats he praised.

For Alexander Pope, I argue, the ancient writers were not figures of emulation he hoped

to join. Instead, Pope viewed the ancient writers in a far more Bloomian way, as antagonists that

he needed to overcome even as he used them to support his writing career. Working during the

debate between ancients and moderns, and writing in the teeth of an emerging emphasis on the

importance of originality to literary value, Pope uses his translations to defend his superiority

109

Dryden, Works, VII.40. 110

Dryden, Works, XIII.10.

40

over both his contemporaries and the classical authors he used as exemplars. His preface to his

Homeric translations demonstrates his attempt to capitalize on the Greek author’s fame, not only

by praising him, as Dryden does, but by subtly disparaging Homer’s abilities. Pope insists that

while Homer is justly praised for his invention, his writing is disordered and lacks unity.

Although the Odyssey is justly famous, Pope argues, its original author was unable to bring his

famous poem to either “perfection or maturity.”111

Pope’s translation, he suggests, improves on

Homer’s poem, creating something that is both mature and perfect.

Promising to improve on Homer shows Pope’s hubris but also, as I will explore further in

chapter two, Pope’s insecurities. While Pope believed that originality was one of the hallmarks

of a great writer, he was aware that his greatest strength lay not in the compositional genius later

praised by the Romantics but in alteration and improvement. This became clear to him early in

his career, when he acted as an editor and adaptor for the aging poet William Wycherley, and his

adaptive genius becomes more apparent throughout his career. My chapter portrays Pope’s

struggle between the need to use translation to assert himself in the traditional field of

eighteenth-century literature, the longing to vindicate his editorial judgement, and the desire to

create himself as an author who did not need an original or inspiration but could rely on his

native genius.

The pre-eminent position for which Pope strove was never in reach for Haywood. She

struggled to maintain a literary reputation against constant scandals and accusations from

compatriots, including Pope himself. As my chapter argues, Haywood saw her translations as a

way of associating herself with already accepted authors. When she attempted to establish her

name with a high-class translation that was circulated among potential subscribers, she was

111

Pope, Poems, VII.3.

41

following the tradition established by writers like Pope and Dryden of using subscription

publication of translations for support and publicity. In order to realize her publication, Haywood

and her publisher created an advertising campaign based around translation that she hoped would

propel her work into the upper-class circles where she situated the majority of her adventures.

My chapter examines the ways in which Haywood used translation to connect herself to English

authors such as Pope as well as to the French authors whom she translated and whom, she

insisted, belonged “at the Court of France,” the French equivalent of the audience she sought for

her writing.112

While she never attained Pope’s popularity or Carter’s level of social acceptance,

I argue that Haywood used translations, from her racy 1725 The Lady's Philosopher's Stone to

her didactic 1742 The Virtuous Villager, to create a consistently practical, woman-centric model

of proper social behaviour.

Taking a stance against the early trend in Haywood studies which sees Haywood’s

writing as forming two distinct moral and stylistic groups, I argue that Haywood maintained a

consistent position throughout her career. Her moral focus, as I demonstrate, rests on a legalistic

claim that the most important part of sexual morality is the fulfillment of verbal as well as

written promises, and this focus is continuous throughout her writings in both her original works

and the alterations that she makes to her translated texts. Her complaint in the essay she attaches

to her first translation, the 1721 Letters to a Lady of Quality, that “Men, in their days of

Courtship, promise a thousand times more than they ever mean” is echoed in her heroine’s

exclamation in her 1753 moral tale, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, that no one “that

sees a man a husband would ever think he had been a lover” and that few husbands fulfil the

112

Champion, or Evening Advertiser (London), March 18, 1742; Issue 367.

42

promises they make as lovers.113

These texts demonstrate both her attempts to establish a

publicly acceptable moral position and her stubborn refusal to be relegated to the lower classes

of society. By choosing authors who were part of the courts of France, Haywood was able to

consistently link her name to the courtly circles through the advertising and content of her

translations. Like Pope, Haywood never fully attained her goals, but her translations helped her

to create a stable self-representation, to attract an audience, and to take part in the wider literary

community despite her chequered reputation.

While Haywood’s works were never fully accepted by the court, Carter’s successful

presentation of moral womanhood resulted in several solicitations to join the court, including one

hastily declined invitation to become a tutor to the Princess of Wales’s children.114

Through her

translations, she depicted learning as a part of pious behaviour, and this helped to create and

promote a model of femininity that included classical education. Although she was the most

faithful translator this study examines, following a strict sense-for-sense form in the majority of

her translations, I argue that Carter used this apparently neutral position to make a case for the

usefulness of all learning. Her poems accept that there are many “diff’rent Ways” to pursue God,

but insist that “The one eternal End of Heav’n / Is universal Good,” and that this goal should be

the centre of every man’s existence.115

By combining these clear declarations of pious intent with

extremely faithful translations of heathen philosophy, Carter demonstrates her belief in the

importance of retaining the teachings of the classical philosophers. Her faithful translations join

with her didactic, moralizing poetry to insist that her practice of retaining pagan teachings and

philosophy is an improvement over the Christianizing impulse of previous translators.

113

Eliza Haywood, “A Discourse Concerning Writings of this Nature,” in Letters to a Lady of Quality (London,

1721), 20; Eliza Haywood, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (London, 1753), I.75-6. 114

Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 91. 115

Carter, “Written at MIDNIGHT in a THUNDER STORM,” Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1772), 37.

43

Although Carter’s principles and her ideas of acceptable writing and behaviour were rigid

even by the standards of her cultural milieu, she was firmly consistent in her opinion that non-

Christian writers had important lessons to teach about philosophy, morality, and even religion,

and she combined this with strong support for female students and writers. While Pope overtly

states his goals in revising the texts he translated, Carter hid her desire for a radical reformulation

of the way that the classical authors were studied under the guise of a reclusive, pious woman

who addressed her writings to likeminded women. Thanks both to her own self-representation

and that of her nephew and biographer, Matthew Pennington, Carter successfully established and

maintained a reputation for exemplary morality and scholarship even in the strict milieu of late

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century society.

For each of these authors, translation created opportunities to develop a shared literary

property within an international community. In their own time, each of these writers successfully

used translation as an important strategy in the process of self-creation. It offered an ability to

disguise radical intentions behind an apparently neutral position alongside connections to

established writers and comparisons between authors. Unlike original work, translation is

innately comparative, forcing writers to respond to both their original source and to past

translations. Eighteenth-century translators used this comparative nature as a vital part of their

self-fashioning, demonstrating their creative and compositional skills by attempting to improve

upon their original even as they took advantage of the connections of their source author to

establish themselves and their translations as part of an existing canon.

44

Chapter 1 Dryden: Laureate, Theorist, and Translator

John Dryden is known as a political animal with a strong interest in his own reputation,

but except for his politicized translations of Virgil’s works, his translations are rarely considered

an important part of his reputation-building strategy.116

In this chapter, I argue against the

perception that Dryden’s translations are secondary works or that they were written primarily for

financial reasons. Far from being secondary works, I suggest that his translations, especially his

Miscellanies, were of primary importance both to Dryden’s own self-fashioning and his plan for

his posterity. Not content with being the product of great literary ancestors, Dryden wanted to be

the father of the next generation of writers. Recognising how Dryden works to create a school of

followers by whom posterity would remember him reveals the centrality of Dryden’s

Miscellanies to a project based not on politics or even immediate fame but on a new way of

looking at English literature and the creation of a new focus on translation and a new following

for Dryden’s style.

Dryden used his poetry, and particularly his translations, to shape his reputation and to

encourage younger poets to imitate him. Dryden’s desire to situate himself in a line of poets

descended from classical ancestry is well known. As Paul Hammond’s excellent book Dryden

and the Traces of Ancient Rome shows, Dryden saw his connection to a classical literary history

as central to his self-identity as a writer.117

But his idea of hereditage extended beyond the past

and into the future. His translations of important classical works, his theoretical discussions

highlighting comparisons between himself and his sources, and his addresses to an educated,

116

Steven Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 41-2. 117

Paul Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

45

classically-trained readership all helped to position Dryden as a literary father to the next

generation of poets.

Dryden saw translation as the best and most accessible means of building his literary

persona. Far from the now prevalent image of Dryden as an occasional poet and playwright who

turned reluctantly to translation as a means of earning money when he lost his royal patronage

after the Glorious Revolution, this chapter shows Dryden’s consistent preference for the work of

the translator. Even his first royalist poem, the 1660 Astraea Redux, praises the editorial work of

artistic restoration, declaring that “pencils can by one slight touch” bring “Smiles to that changed

face that wept before.”118

More immediately, Dryden’s defence of contemporary English writing

in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy rests not on the originality of his fellow authors but on the

English antecedents which “we endeavour therein to follow.” He proudly itemizes modern

borrowings from older English authors, declaring, in praise of Ben Jonson’s adaptive drama that

“He invades Authours like a Monarch, and what would be theft in other Poets, is onely victory in

him.” Comparing Johnson’s translations to a war, he declares that “the spoils of these Writers”

are revitalized in Johnson so “that if one of their Poets had written either of his Tragedies, we

had seen less of it then in him” (XVII.57). While Dryden used less antagonist language to

describe his own writing, this image of the conquering translator who proved his worth by

beating the classical authors at their own game established a pattern that Dryden followed

throughout his career, establishing a reputation as a translator which he used to shape his public

image, to claim the reputation he desired, and to set a precedent that he encouraged other poets to

follow.

118

John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, H. T. Swedenburg, Alan Roper, et al. (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956-90), I.26. Cited with parenthetical volume and page

references.

46

In his own lifetime, Dryden’s connections to classical texts gave him a polite excuse for

taking open pride in his creations. Rather than risk accusations of boastfulness by openly

claiming fame and honour for himself, Dryden instead ascribed it to others. While consistently

foregrounding his relationship to his classical forebears, Dryden allowed English writers praise

only in connection with classical writers. He used translation to compare himself to the great

classical authors, making himself, like them, a figure of emulation for other poets. Dryden’s

Miscellanies, as I have argued elsewhere, serve the double purpose of promoting his project to

improve the English language through translation and giving him a platform he could use to

support younger authors.119

Thanks in part to Dryden and Tonson, translations, already a

profitable form, became increasingly lucrative and increasingly popular with both the booksellers

who produced and disseminated publications and the reading public. After Dryden’s death,

Tonson continued to produce and support translations, publishing, among other productions, a

1717 multiple-hands edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that included poems by Dryden, Addison,

Congreve, Maynwaring, Rowe, Garth, Tate, Harvey, and Pope.120

Together, Dryden and Tonson

popularized the miscellany volume, a form that included between five and fifteen hundred

different titles between 1700 and 1780. Aspiring poets, like both Alexander Pope and Elizabeth

Carter, launched their careers in miscellany volumes that included mixed short poems,

translations, and other media.121

119

Catherine Fleming, “Improvised Patronage: Jacob Tonson and Dryden’s Linguistic Project,” Lumen 36 (2017):

95-111. 120

Charles Tomlinson, “Why Dryden’s Translations Matter,” Translation and Literature 10.1 (2001): 18. 121

Michael F. Suarez SJ, “The Production and Consumption of the Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellany,” in Books

and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (London: Continuum, 2001),

217.

47

A Classical History: Translation and the Classics

During the Restoration and Enlightenment, only one of Dryden’s original poems vied

with his translations for popularity, and despite the praise for his Ode on Saint Cecilia’s Day, he

was best known by his contemporaries for his translations.122

Only a few years after Dryden’s

death, Pope declared that “his fire, like the Sun’s, shin’d clearest towards its setting,” in the

translations which composed the bulk of Dryden’s late works.123

This was by no means an

unusual view, and Jabez Hughes, in his 1706 poem “Upon Reading Mr Dryden’s Fables,” also

claims that the translations in the Fables show Dryden’s “fire [was] not less,” at the end of his

life, and “he more correctly writ, / With ripen’d Judgment and digested Wit.”124

Congreve,

Dryden’s protege, insisted that “his Ode of St. Cecilia’s Day and his Fables” demonstrate his

improvement in “Fire and Imagination, as well as in Judgement.”125

This shared image of

Dryden’s literary and creative vitality demonstrates his success in conflating his life and works.

Moreover, the image of creativity as a consistent vital fire becoming brighter at the end of his life

demonstrates singularity and constant activity, offering a counterpoint to later conceptions that

Dryden’s adaptive output under William was mercenary or inferior.

Even near the end of the century, Warton could write that “It is to his fables,” translated

from Latin, Italian, and Middle English, “that Dryden will owe his immortality.”126

In fact, in

1785, Clara Reeve wrote that “Dryden’s elegant, rich, and harmonious numbers, have preserved

122

Tom Mason and Adam Rounce, “Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music: The Poem and its Readers,” in John

Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, 140-173. 123

Alexander Pope, “Letter to Wycherly, Dec. 26, 1704,” in Correspondence, ed. G. Sherburn (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1956), I.2. 124

Jabez Hughes, “Verses Occasion’d by Reading Mr. Dryden’s Fables,” in John Dryden: The Critical Heritage, ed.

James and Helen Kinsley (New York: Routledge, 1971), 246. 125

William Congreve, “Epistle Dedicatory,” in John Dryden: The Critical Heritage, 265. 126

Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London, 1782), II.12.

48

this, and many other of Chaucer’s works, from sinking into oblivion, and he has given the old

Bard a share of his own immortality.”127

This claim establishes the continuity of Dryden’s fame,

forecasting the decade-long literary debate that took place in The Gentleman’s Magazine

between 1788 and 1799 on the relative merits of Pope and Dryden in an attempt to establish a

poetic standard for the following century. Though condemned by many Romantic critics and

largely ignored during the following century, the prestige and centrality of Dryden’s translations

to his career and throughout the eighteenth century must be remembered when considering

Dryden’s reputation-building strategies.

The classical connections that Dryden stressed throughout his literary life, and especially

in his later translations, formed the foundation for his contemporary reputation. Understanding

the contemporary tradition of reading in Latin and Greek and looking at Augustan Rome as the

Golden Age of civilization, is an essential part of understanding Dryden’s writing practices. His

writing demonstrates a desire for a literary kinship that he felt was intrinsically necessary to

contemporary writing. He took up the Roman view that translation was both “the preeminent act

of literary creation,” and a form which allowed competition with ancient authors.128

Dryden’s

claim of kinship with these writers, whom he referred to as “our sires,” appears most clearly in

the prefaces to his adapted plays and translations, in which he invites readers to compare his

translations to the original and stress the prestige awarded to a translator who successfully

navigated between his own style and that of a classical author (IV.432). These works show that

he saw translation as empowering writers, offering opportunities for literary sons like himself to

claim the privilege and position of their sires.

127

Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance Through Times, Countries, and Manners (Colchester, 1785), I.86. 128

Elizabeth Marie Young, Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2015), 2.

49

Although plagiarism was a worrying accusation, and one that was difficult to refute, as

Alexander Lindey and Richard Terry argue, Restoration and early eighteenth-century audiences

viewed imitation of both ancient and contemporary models as laudatory.129

Writers were

encouraged to begin their careers by imitating their Latin and Greek counterparts, both in style,

form, and content, copying from Cicero’s letters to create missives to prospective patrons,

families, and friends, and the movement toward formal imitation in the mid-seventeenth century

shows a willingness to adapt texts to contemporary needs.130

Dryden’s idea of imitation, which

echoes that of Abraham Cowley, sees imitation as a median between translation and original

work, using the source text as a “Pattern” or blueprint for new ideas (I.116-9). This encouraged

repeated imitations of the same work by allowing more variation between different imitated

versions of the same text, just as his preferred favourite form of translation with latitude does.

Although formal imitation as it develops during the period is a distinct subset of translation,

Dryden views both this and adaptive verse as forms of loose translation, explaining the liberties

which writers can take in imitations in his discussion of the three forms of translation in his

introduction to Ovid’s Epistles.

In this paratext, Dryden separates translation into metaphrase, imitation, and translation

with latitude, which he considers to be a happy medium. Metaphrase, the first of these forms, is

the art of “turning an Author Word by Word, and Line by Line, from one Language into another.”

129

Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1952), 79; Richard

Terry, The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature From Butler to Sterne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2010), 53-6. 130

Sarah Haggarty, “‘The Ceremonial of Letter for Letter’: William Cowper and the Tempo of Epistolary

Exchange,” Eighteenth-Century Life 35 (2011): 149-67; Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British

Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 1985), 18-20; Harold F. Brooks, “The ‘Imitation’ in English Poetry, Especially in

Formal Satire, before the Age of Pope,” The Review of English Studies 25.48 (1949): 124-140; Thomas Sprat,

“An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Abraham Cowley,” in The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (London,

1668), c1.

50

(I.117) Dryden rejects metaphrase completely, declaring that it is impossible to create beautiful

poetry this way and that “no sober man would put himself into a danger for the Applause of

scaping without breaking his Neck.” (I.117) Comparing poetic failure to death, Dryden stakes his

claim in the arena, demonstrating vividly the importance of grace and freedom in the display of

literary talent.

Imitation offers poets the freedom to showcase their abilities and invites comparison with

the texts they imitate, but even in this introduction, his statements about imitation are conflicted.

This form is, he claims, more graceful than metaphrase, which “is incumber’d with so many

difficulties at once,” that it is “like dancing on Ropes with fetter’d Legs” (I.117). Imitation

allows the translator to have the power in the relationship, but this very power is problematic.

The resulting translation may be “more Excellent” than the original, but he believes that a

translator must be prepared to display both his own prowess and his “Authors [sic] thoughts” and

even something of his words (I.117). This introduction shows Dryden’s conflicted relationship

with his sources. He first writes, then rejects, then accepts imitations. He calls for faithfulness to

his author, then insists on “Translation with latitude,” and finally admits that he has “taken more

liberty” than even the “just Translation” which he describes will allow (I.118-9). In his

introductions, and especially here in his definition of translation, he struggles between his duty to

his author and his desire for personal fame and recognition.

Although Dryden did not write formal imitations in verse, he enjoyed revising, updating,

and reworking older works, and many of his plays fall into the realm of formal imitation. Dryden

also encouraged other authors in their translating and imitating ventures. When asked to polish

William Soames’ translation of the Art of Poetry, he chose to replace French authors with

English, creating an effect very close to formal imitation which was, as Tonson’s Advertisement

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demonstrates, Dryden’s primary contribution to the volume:

I saw the Manuscript lye in Mr. Dryden’s Hands for above Six Months, who made

very considerable Alterations in it, particularly, the beginning of the 4th

Canto; and

it being his Opinion that it would be better to apply the Poem to English Writers,

than keep to the French Names, as it was first Translated, Sir William desired he

wou’d take the Pains to make that Alteration, and accordingly that was entirely done

by Mr. Dryden (II.368).

Altering the French manuscript to praise English authors shows Dryden’s political loyalties and

his willingness to adapt his style, blurring the lines between translation, imitation, and original

work as he worked to showcase his own skill and that of his collaborator.

Putting himself first is hardly a new step for Dryden, who is consistently immodest about

his abilities, even as he hides under a claim of modesty. “No man is capable of Translating

Poetry, who besides a Genius to that Art, is not a Master both of his Authours Language, and of

his own” (I.117), he says, and again “to be a thorow Translatour, he must be a thorow Poet”

(III.5), claiming for himself both genius and mastery. Closely resembling “the endowments

necessary for an epic poet” that he describes in his Discourse of Satire, these “exacting

requirements for a translator” show how Dryden uses his homage to older masters as a

springboard for his own claims to greatness (II.268). Dryden claims that translators must

look into our selves, to conform our Genius to his, to give his thought either the

same turn if our tongue will bear it, or if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or

destroy the substance. The like Care must be taken of the more outward

Ornaments, the Words: when they appear (which is but seldom) litterally graceful,

it were an injury to the Authour that they should be chang’d. (I.118)

52

As he often does, Dryden begins with a statement of humility, but “conforming” to his author is

quickly subordinated to his desire for beauty. Translators are only to copy their originals “if our

tongue will bear it.” Dryden briefly retrenches, claiming that he will not allow his fellow

translators to change “the substance” of his author’s meaning, but immediately returns to offer an

even clearer statement of the translator’s power over their author. The words of the source author

become mere “outward Ornaments” to the sense or the inspiration he calls translators to retain,

and moments later Dryden dismisses even their capacity to adorn. Although he offers his authors

some small subservience, he expands the rights and work of a translator by belittling his original.

If his author’s words “seldom” appear graceful in English, then the translator has not only the

right but the duty to insert his own.

Dryden’s defence of his Amphitryon, where he claims that the play is “worth your

Patronage” because of its connection to both Plautus, its original author, and Molière, who wrote

its recent French adaptation, provides a typical example of the way that Dryden bolstered his

authority by connecting himself to established authors . His apparent modesty is undermined,

here and elsewhere, by his invitation to his readers to compare his work to the original. By

explicitly asking his audience “not to compare him too strictly with Molière’s” (XII.224-5),

Dryden calls attention to the ease with which his audience could do so, declaring that “more than

half of it is mine” in a phrase which both encourages readers to make exactly the comparison

between his and Molière’s work that he is apparently trying to avert (XII.224). By making this

claim of ownership at the same time as he emphasizes Molière’s part in the play, Dryden creates

a shared ownership and asserts his kinship to the French author.

The loose imitation which Dryden used in adapting Molière’s play is different from the

close rendering that he used for works like his Virgil, which hides political and ideological

53

alterations by using strongly inflected synonyms. But Restoration and eighteenth-century

audiences anticipated a broad range of translation practices, and Dryden showcased his poetic

abilities using many different adaptive practices throughout his career.131

Translators, as Dryden

and his contemporary theorists insisted, needed to convey the words, thoughts, and manner of

their authors, but, following the “free imitations by Horace” and his injunction “Nec verbum

verbo curabis reddere fidus / Interpres” (not render faithfully word for word, but interpret),

completely slavish renderings were considered just as problematic as translations that were too

loose.132

Dryden’s discussion of metaphrase in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles, claims that word-

for-word renditions are often stilted and without poetic fire. This attack emphasized the

differences in his own, more liberal, translation, and helped to fend off accusations that he was

imitating previous translations rather than working directly with his source.

Liberal translation was a major factor in gaining literary status and reputation. Although

translators made many changes to their source, they, as McMurran explains, “appear to have

instinctively refused the moniker ‘imitators’ and rarely called their works ‘imitations’ or

‘adaptations’ even though such license was closer to imitation than translation.”133

The cachet of

translation encouraged writers to align themselves with translators rather than imitators. Writing

in this milieu, Dryden’s sense of himself as a writer was intimately connected to his sense of

himself as a part of a long classical tradition, a tradition that he hoped would continue after his

death. Very aware of the ways in which a translator can alter his author’s sense, style, and

131

Louis Kelly, “The Eighteenth Century to Tytler,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed.

Gordon Braden, Peter France, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005-11), III.67-78; Mary

Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2010), 73-97; Julie Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and

England, 1600-1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 220. 132

John Draper, “The Theory of Translation in the Eighteenth Century,” Neophilologus 6.1 (1921): 242. 133

McMurran, Spread of Novels, 73.

54

meaning, Dryden viewed himself as both a conveyer of ancient thoughts and a poet capable of

improving on those writers and serving as a classical forebear himself. Dryden’s poems about

literature show him using the typology of the classics in order to discuss contemporary writers,

just as his political poems use biblical typology to discuss contemporary figures. Perhaps the best

example of Dryden’s use of classical figures to enhance his own status as a writer capable of

inspiring imitation is in his 1694 poem, “To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve on his Comedy

Call’d the Double Dealer.”

Dryden opens this poem in a prophetic mode that foretells the future by examining the

past, demonstrating that even in fulfilling their promise and surpassing the ancients in wit,

modern writers must still acknowledge their inferiority to the ancients. Though surpassing their

predecessors in wit, moderns have failed in “genius” and “what we gained in skill we lost in

strength,” Dryden declares (IV.432-3). Dryden’s goal in separating classical genius from modern

grace and skill is not to withhold praise from Congreve, but to use modesty strategically and so

claim the more desirable and more concrete praise. While in his political writing, Dryden

assumes a topos of modesty as a form of protection, here his modest position relative to the

classical authors seems less a form of protection than a backwards claim to fame.

In this poem, Dryden fashions his own identity with as much care as he does that of

Congreve, the author who the poem is supposedly both to and about. Dryden classes himself as

one of the modern authors who fail in strength, praising Congreve as “the best Vitruvius” who

will “Our beauties equal; but excel our strength,” creating an architectural structure that will last

as long as the temples of antiquity (IV.432-3). This allows him to retain the appearance of

modesty while also presenting himself as Congreve’s literary father, and claiming the privileged

position of a literary ancestor. At the same time, Dryden reclaims the territory of the ancients by

55

saving “the diversity of nature” from the “flood” of the Civil War and culture-destroying

interregnum, acting as a founding father and creator of culture in imitation of the biblical

patriarch, Noah (IV.433). “His complete career” becomes, as Raphael Lyne recognizes, “an Ark

of past culture preserved and categorized and resituated for a new era.”134

Although Lyne

presents this program as a holistic part of Dryden’s career, the program of preservation is most

evident in his translations, which explicitly connect past and present works. While he qualifies

his position, first in relation to the ancients, and then in relation to Congreve, Dryden chains his

own identity firmly to his classical literary ancestors.

“Oh that your brows my laurel had sustain’d,” he tells Congreve, reaffirming his own

‘laurelled’ position as the poet laureate, and also his powerlessness. While this position is

political, referring to his loss of position under William, his inability to pass on his ‘crown’ of

laurels is also connected to the lack of strength which Dryden claims modern poets have in

comparison to their forefathers. He next returns to the poem’s opening “promised hour” by

making a “prophesy” of his own. This returns the poem to its ostensible focus on Congreve, a

rising Whig talent, but it also re-establishes Dryden’s classical connection with the bards and

prophets of the classical era. If Dryden’s old-fashioned loyalty to the exiled Stuarts puts him in

the position of prophetic predecessor to Congreve, as he suggests, this establishes both himself

and king Charles as members of a Golden Age of literature and kingship. This subtle claim of

superiority over his successor is reinforced by Dryden’s re-invocation of the images of the

“laurel” and “genius” (IV.433).

134

Raphael Lyne, “Dryden and the Complete Career,” in Classical Literary Careers and their Reception, ed. Philip

Hardie and Helen Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 249.

56

These two images serve different functions. The laurel shows the unbroken continuity

between the ancients and moderns by demonstrating that the crown which the ancient writers

wore is still being passed down. Conversely, Dryden has reserved genius for the classical poets,

and it is this which he claims is revived now in his literary son, Congreve. By separating the

continuity of the laurel from the crown of genius, Dryden connects modern politics with classical

writers and Roman emperors, but at the same time, he claims a special status for his classical

forebears who had both the laurel and the crown, and for himself as the father and teacher of the

man who brings genius back to England, reclaiming the crown that had been lost over the

centuries.

Dryden’s references in this poem and elsewhere show him as unwilling to think of

literature without connecting it to the literary past. His connections to more recent English

literature are often perfunctory. His single reference to Shakespeare in this poem is brief and

formulaic and he not only does not mention, but subtly excludes, the anti-monarchical Milton

from the rank of geniuses which Congreve joins. Dryden’s focus is on the classical past, on Italy

and, as in the “Prologue and Epilogue to the University of Oxon [1673]” on “Greece, when

Learning flourish’d” (I.146).

Looking at the larger scope of Dryden’s work, it becomes evident that in both his

translation and his original work Dryden relied on his classical heritage to establish himself in

his contemporary literary context as well as to his support for aspiring authors. As Zwicker

notes, “his work points us at once to his deep indebtedness to the classical past and to his

vigorous advocacy of innovation.”135

Dryden saw reliance on a classical history not as a barrier

135

Steven Zwicker, “Dryden and the Problem of Literary Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dryden, ed.

Steven Zwicker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 284.

57

to innovation but as an aid to creatively navigating the difficult literary and political waters of the

late seventeenth century and to establishing his literary position.

Focusing on classical authors allowed Dryden to further explore the multiple voices

which feature in much of his work, whether original, adaptation, or translation.136

Even in his

original works, he borrowed many voices from other writers. In his preface to Annus Mirabilis

(1666), for instance, Dryden establishes his position as historian by comparing himself to Virgil.

This comparison served both his political and his literary ends. By choosing Virgil and

positioning him as a factual and historical writer, in comparison to the more luxuriant writer of

fiction, Ovid, Dryden attempts to create a neutral rather than a partisan persona.137

The choice of

Virgil as his pattern also establishes his literary bona fides. These choices are especially

interesting in light of his later choices of material to translate, where he used both Virgil and

Ovid to establish himself as a translator.

In Annus Mirabilis, Dryden calls attention to the way that his Virgilian link elevates his

poem. After a long, scholarly discussion in praise of Virgil, he addresses his audience, saying,

before I leave Virgil, I must own the vanity to tell you, and by you the world, that

he has been my Master in this Poem; I have followed him every where, I know not

with what success, but I am sure with diligence enough: my Images are many of

them copied from him and the rest are imitations of him. My expressions also are

as near as the Idioms of the two languages would admit of in translation. (I.55)

Already, twenty years before Dryden began to write his most famous translations, he is

connecting his work to this form in order to build his reputation. Taking Virgil as his teacher,

136

Paul Davis, “Dryden and the Invention of Augustan Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dryden. 137

Zwicker, Politics and Language, 41-2.

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Dryden suggests, means copying, and Dryden’s description of his imitation, copying, and near

translation is a forerunner of his discussion of imitation, metaphrase, and translation with latitude

in Ovid’s Epistles. Dryden does not see adaptation as a last resort, only to be turned to when he

cannot write anything else. Instead, he claims to be a translator, even in an original work.

Dryden’s claim to derivation is a means of establishing authority. By insisting that his

“Images are many of them copied” from the great master of writing, he asks readers to look for

similarities between himself and that master. That this opens him to the accusation of “Plagiary,”

he acknowledges, but Dryden treats this supposed charge with some disdain, claiming that while

“In some places, where either the fancy, or the words, were his, or any others, I have noted it in

the Margin, that I might not seem a Plagiary: in others I have neglected it, to avoid as well the

tediousness, as the affectation of doing it too often” (I.56). This type of casual borrowing was

common during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, in large part because the view

of the classical poets as an open source for writers to draw on was widespread. Isobel Grundy

shows how Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, “regarded poetry as an unbroken tradition on which its

latest practitioner could always draw” and therefore unashamedly “indulged in extensive

borrowing, even of whole passages” from other poets.138

Lady Mary’s willingness to plunder

other authors was not shared by all of the literati, however, and over the course of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as authors became increasingly preoccupied with notions

of originality, so the accusation of plagiarism, initially reserved for the copy and sale of entire

works, became applied to smaller and smaller pieces of an author’s writing.139

Dryden’s

dismissive claim to have cited only some authors in only some places shows his contempt for

138

Isobel Grundy, “The Verse of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: A Critical Edition,” (PhD diss., Oxford University,

1971), 1, 89. 139

Terry, The Plagiarism Allegation.

59

such accusations, but also his acknowledgement of their increasing power. Although Dryden’s

words acknowledge the need to differentiate between words that were directly copied from

another source and those that were not consciously derivative, he scorns careful distinction as

“affectation.” Not only does he claim that he is actively trying to copy Virgil’s language, he also

notes that although the words are the easiest to respond to with a claim of plagiary, in many

places where he draws from his source he takes not their words, or even their images, but their

“fancy.”

The decision to claim Virgil as his mentor was a carefully thought-out political statement,

but it was also a matter of fact. Dryden calls attention to his use of Latinisms “in abundance” as

well as “expressions that render Latin idioms more or less literally” both inside his poem and in

his preface (I.264). He uses these to connect Charles II with Virgil’s hero and to emphasize the

scope of his power. In Annus Mirabilis, Dryden claims that “He in himself did whole Armado’s

[sic] bring” (I.61), a translation of a passage that he writes in the Aeneis as “in himself alone, an

Army brought” (VI.601). In fact, several phrases from Annus Mirabilis reappear in his later

translation of the Georgics, particularly descriptions such as the “Sea-green Syrens” (I.62) of

Annus Mirabilis that appear as the “Sea-green Sisters” of Cyrene in the Georgics (V.253) or the

“Fasces of the Main” (III.67) that appear in the Georgics as the “Fasces of the Sea” (V.156).

These show that he did, as he claimed, include direct translation in his poem in addition to

borrowing fancies and images from his ‘master.’

Dryden performs similar acts of translation and transference in his plays, mixing original

work with plots, ideas, and language taken from his sources. Robert McHenry described him as

“revising Shakespeare’s obsolete Jacobean style into Restoration English” in much the same way

as he translated from Molière, Corneille, Sophocles, or Plautus, taking liberties with words,

60

phrases, and even plots.140

Although Dryden speaks scornfully of Authors who “make whole

Playes, and yet scarce write one word” in the Prologue to Albumazar, he openly experimented

with multi-author dialogues in his adaptations of older plays, particularly those of Shakespeare.

In his versions of Shakespeare’s plays, Dryden uses additional characters and plot to create the

multi-faceted pieces characteristic of the Restoration drama, but retains much of Shakespeare’s

original. In fact, Samuel Pepys, writing about the first appearance of Dryden’s The Tempest, calls

it, not Dryden’s, but “an old play of Shakespeare’s.”141

Admitting his debt to Shakespeare in his

preface to All for Love, Dryden presents his borrowings in a positive light, claiming that “‘tis

almost a Miracle that much of his language remains so pure” and so usable. (XIII.18). At the

same time, and in the same sentence, Dryden insists he has “not Copy’d my Author servilely”

but instead has altered, updated, and revitalized Shakespeare’s text. His use of “servilely” echoes

his description of “servile, literal Translation” in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles (I.117).

Dryden presents the age and literary history of his text as a sign of his own daring and his

own literary standing. Reminding readers of the popularity of his subject, the doomed love of

Antony and Cleopatra, Dryden claims that writers have treated this so “variously” that they have

“given me the confidence to try my self in this Bowe of Ulysses . . . and withal, to take my own

measures, in aiming at the Mark” (XIII.10). His metaphor not only pulls in another source text

but demonstrates his way of thinking about his play, and in fact, translation as a whole. Dryden

wants to test himself, not against his own mind, but against other great writers, and the best way

to do that, his metaphor suggests, is by writing the same story. This was an easy association for

him, because this type of dialogue is already visible in his original political and religious poems.

140

Robert W. McHenry, Jr., “Plagiarism and Paternity: Dryden’s Adaptations,” in Originality and Intellectual

Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9. 141

Samuel Pepys, cited in Works of John Dryden, X.321.

61

In political poems like “Absalom and Achitophel” and “The Hind and the Panther,” Dryden

creates characters to voice the opinions of his opponents, setting his claims in dialogue with

other ideas and creating multi-faceted works which include several perspectives and points of

view. In doing this he offers the appearance of even-handedness, but he also shows his ability to

manipulate the words, phrases, and ideas of others, just as he does in his translations.142

By

working with the same story, characters, and sometimes even words, Dryden creates points of

dialogue, comparison, and diversity, forcing his readers to compare to others. Whether his point

of comparison is a political opponent, the great writers he imitates in his plays, or the classical

authors he translates, Dryden asks readers to see him as a clearer thinker, a more entertaining

writer, and a better stylist.

Dryden’s claims of modesty serve to highlight his “courage” as he takes up well-known

subjects, calling reader’s attention to his abilities. He claims of his Amphitryon that “were this

Comedy wholly mine, I should call it a Trifle,” reaffirming his own modesty. But, he continues,

because this same piece was the “best” of “the two greatest Names of Ancient and Modern

Comedy,” he cannot call it a trifle, and can bring it before his chosen patron with pride

(XIII.224-5). Again, as he did in his preface to Annus Mirabilis, he connects his work on the

Amphitryon to translation. Still professing modesty, Dryden pretends that his audience will be

interested in the play solely because of its Latin and French roots, and that they will be

disappointed to discover “that more than half of it is mine; and the rest is rather a lame Imitation

of their Excellencies than a just Translation” (XIII.225). Translation, again, becomes the

142

Hammond, “Is Dryden a Classic?,” 6; Reginald McGinnis, introduction to Originality and Intellectual Property,

xi-xv; David Roberts, “‘Ranked Among the Best’: Translation and Cultural Agency in Restoration Translations

of French Drama,” The Modern Language Review 108.2 (2013): 396-415.

62

professed desire of Dryden’s readers, and Dryden acts to frustrate that desire at the same time as

he promises to partially fulfill it.

Almost half of the play, his words suggest, belongs to the famous writers he praises here.

This means that for those readers unfamiliar with the originals, Dryden’s play will provide an

introduction. But for those already familiar with the originals, Dryden offers a play that

incorporates both versions, translates them, alters them, edits them, and then adds new material

to create an original piece. Here as elsewhere, Dryden uses his prologues to portray himself as

compositor, editor, original writer, and translator, displaying his facility at blurring the lines

between the different stances he takes toward his texts. These roles give him space to explore the

differences between authors’ styles and ideas. Dryden includes references to and quotations from

classical and contemporary sources, and asks readers to look for them in his poems and plays,

much the same way as he would later ask readers to look for places in his translations where he

has altered the meaning of his originals, using his changes and connections to build up a

reputation as an author capable of making improvements to the works of great classical authors.

The Empowered Translator: Dryden’s Translation Theory

As a man who had already defined himself and his ability to write original work by his

relationship to classical authors and the Latin pre-texts that he used to create his own literary

origin story and whose self-presentation of original work shows him as both an original writer

and a conveyer of ancient thoughts, Dryden’s progression, after the Glorious Revolution, from

original poetry to the safer and perhaps more profitable venture of translation seems natural. This

shift aligned him further with his classical predecessors, placing his name next to the august

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names of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucretius, and also increased the difficulty of writing

adaptive work. As Hammond notes, although many readers came to Dryden’s texts to learn the

originals, “For others, Dryden’s English was enticingly engaged in an intricate dialogue with

Latin.” This word play “contributed importantly to the meaning and pleasure of the text,”

allowing Dryden to interact closely with his classical original.143

Dryden’s claim that translation improved his work was not made in an entirely congenial

atmosphere. Where Dryden likes to complicate his original works by linking them to translation,

his friend and patron Roscommon claims in his verse “Essay on Translated Works” that

“Composing is the Nobler Part” and his assurance that although “Invention labours less,” the

translator’s “Judgement, [labours] more,” while the clear forerunner of Pope’s later claims,

seems hardly equivalent to Dryden’s consistent praise of translation.144

Roscommon’s focus on

the judgement of the translator, does however, dovetail nicely with Dryden’s prioritizing of

learning, judgement, and editorial skill, and his essay shows the same insistence on conscious

modesty in the face of classical authors that Dryden continually displays. Dryden’s prefaces

combine Roscommon’s modesty in the face of classical authors with an insistence on the value

and importance of the editorial function of the translator. In so doing, he crystalized

contemporary debates on translation theory and created an example of verse translation that

authors like Pope followed for the next century.

As part of his ongoing discussion on the theory of translation, Dryden gives several

apparently conflicting views of the job of the translator. Examining Dryden’s most sweeping and

best known statement about translation from the preface to Ovid’s Epistles, it is evident that

143

Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 43. 144

Earl of Roscommon (Wentworth Dillon), An Essay on Translated Verse (London, 1684), 5.

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Dryden sets himself up in dialogue with and even in opposition to his author. He begins with a

variation on the standard idea of subordinating translator to original author, claiming that “‘tis

time to look into our selves, to conform our Genius to his, to give his thought either the same

turn if our tongue will bear it, or if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the

substance,” but he immediately asserts that “it would be unreasonable to limit a Translator to the

narrow compass of his Authours words” and admits that he may also have altered or expanded

the sense of Ovid’s text (I.118). He claims that “a translator has no right” to make any alteration

to his original, but he admits that “I have both added and omitted,” both acknowledging the

standard limitations which are placed on translators and rejecting them for himself, separating

himself – and indeed all poet-translators – from the lower ranks of those writers who consider

translation only a matter of conveying their author’s ideas (III.3). Where a translator of this sort

may have no right to take liberties, Dryden sets himself apart from mere copiers and encourages

poets to consider themselves capable of improving on their original.

A poet must be neither mimic nor pedant, but good translators were commanded by

nearly all theorists, including Dryden, to consult other translations and critics as they prepared to

write. Even writers who affected to disdain these critics needed to show that they were aware of

the work that had been done on their subject. But authors who followed too closely the

recommendations or the examples they studied could face accusations of copying other

translators – and these accusations were not leveled only at authors who deserved the criticism.

Tobias Smollett, for instance, faced accusations both of having too slavishly copied his

predecessors and of having failed to read these predecessors.

At the same time as authors struggled to both incorporate the interpretations of previous

translators and justify creating a new work, popular and modern translations were an increasingly

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widespread commodity. Depending on their intended readership, authors could expect many of

their readers never to have seen the original. Some translators worked without regard to

authenticity, taking other contemporary translations as their sources rather than a classical

original, a type of translation which resulted in texts bearing little relation to their supposed

original. Literary translators like Dryden, who had a reputation for scholarship and stylistic

brilliance to maintain, were more restricted, by both the audience’s knowledge and by the

translator’s desire to separate themselves from these hack translations. This same wide

knowledge of a classical original and its connections, however, allowed and encouraged writers

to differentiate themselves from other translators of the same text. In addition, the prestige of the

connection to the classics was an encouragement to writers, and helps to explain the importance

that Dryden and his contemporaries placed on translation.

His desire to show respect for the authors he claimed a kinship with through translation

does not prevent Dryden from manipulating his texts. His translations of Lucretius, although

Swedenburg insists that “What Dryden takes from Lucretius” is “genuinely Lucretian,” change

the setting and context in such a way as to remove much of Lucretius’ stoic composure, focusing

instead on his observations on romantic love until Lucretius himself seems to be a lover

(III.278). Although scholars debate Dryden’s intent, his Lucretian verses are clearly a radical re-

envisioning of Lucretius’ ideas. Dryden’s ability to make these verses fit into the love poetry that

surrounds them displays Dryden’s mastery at adaptation and revision as well as translation.

His translation of Lucretius in Sylvae is one of Dryden’s freer translations, done at fifty-

four, during the height of his career. Dryden took the young Creech, whose translation of

Lucretius had already gone through four editions, as his model in this translation. There is some

debate about whether Dryden’s alterations were made in order to reorient Lucretius’ atheistic

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poetry into something acceptable to Dryden’s contemporaries or whether his translation is

Dryden’s attempt to understand and to rescue the truly Lucretian ideas from his contemporaries’

perverted notion of Epicureanism.145

Whether Dryden’s liberties, as Austin and Swedenburg

suggest, involve Christianizing Lucretius or, as Hammond insists, expanding his words to better

convey Dryden’s “radical re-examination of what makes a human life” seen through Epicurean

philosophy, scholars agree that Dryden does not follow the literal sense of this text.146

He admits to taking “more liberty” than Creech, creating a poetic rather than a

philosophical version of Lucretius (III.14). To this end, Dryden’s tendency in this work was to

expand, to cut some passages and pull out new meanings from others in order to massage

Lucretius’ Epicurean ideals into something acceptable in Christian England. However, his

expansion continued to reference Lucretius’ words, ensuring that alert readers found the echoes

of his original and could clearly see how Dryden not only translated but also interpreted the

philosopher.

One example of Dryden’s work with Lucretius is his handling of the lines “pertineat

quicquam tamen ad nos id quoque factum, / interrupta semel cum sit repentia nostri” (Nothing,

however, belongs to us or our deeds / once interrupted by things unexpected to us). These two

lines, in Dryden’s translation become four:

What gain to us would all this bustle bring,

The new made man wou’d be another thing;

When once an interrupting pause is made,

That individual Being is decayed. (III.48)

145

Norman Austin, “Translation as Baptism: Dryden’s Lucretius,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics

7.4 (1968), 576-602; Paul Hammond, “The Integrity of Dryden’s Lucretius,” The Modern Language Review 78.1

(1983): 1-23. 146

Hammond, “Integrity of Dryden’s Lucretius,” 22.

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Dryden’s expansions add clarity to the original, changing the vague ‘belongs’ to the clearer word

“gains” and adding action by altering ‘us or our deeds’ to the active “bustle.” His final line,

“That individual Being is decayed” is nowhere in the original lines, but works to clarify the

“interruption” of the Latin, while his use of the Latinized “interrupting” clearly displays to his

reader where he is in the text, and shows Dryden’s awareness of the connection between the

Latin and English languages.

Again, Dryden both expands and subtly alters Lucretius’ “Imperfecta tibi elapsa’st,

ingrataque vita” to

From hence it comes thy vain desires at strife

Within themselves, have tantalized thy Life (III.52).

He retains the ideas of Lucretius, but not the words. Lucretius’ imperfect and ungratifying life

becomes, in Dryden, a different Latinism entirely as Dryden introduces a connection to Tantalus,

who was stuck between two temptations. This Latinate word, tantalized, while not new, was a

relatively recent addition to English usage.147

While Lucretius’ phrase makes life the subject of

the line and its movement away from the listener the action, Dryden focuses readers instead on

desire, making his poem a sharper condemnation of the hedonistic reader than his original while

keeping his reader’s attention on Latin history and myth by trying his own interpretation to a

Roman myth.

Dryden’s Virgil, his most famous work, is also the translation which he most clearly

revised to make his own overt political statement. Opening his book with a dedication that

connects himself to Virgil, Caesar to Virgil’s hero, and King William to Caesar as the conqueror

by force and not by right, Dryden’s language throughout is inflected to heighten the “political

147

"tantalize, v.," OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press.

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themes and topics” which haunted him at this time.148

Dryden’s work is not untrue to his

original, but he changes tenses, translates into language that is subtly inflected toward

contemporary political ideology, and expands Virgil’s thought. Latinus’ consideration of

marriage, for instance, which appears in Virgil as “conubio natae thalamoque moratur” (the

marriage of his daughter and the deferral of her bridal bed), and which H. Fairclough translates

as “his daughter’s wedlock and bridal bed,” become, in Dryden’s text, a reflection on “future

Things of wondrous weight / Succession, Empire, and his Daughter’s fate” (III.346).149

As this

demonstrates, there is clear evidence of alteration in Dryden’s text, but his work also follows the

main strain of Virgil’s ideas, offering a translation that is also an interpretation. This is not the

kind of analogized retelling that he offers in Absalom and Achitophel but a thoughtful revision

showing how a scholar can interpret Virgil’s text to support his own cause. Both Virgil and

Absalom and Achitophel show Dryden as a translator and experimenter following the ‘middle

way’ that he first espoused in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles – that of “Translation with Latitude”

(I.114).

These examples show that Dryden’s claims that translators must closely follow the sense

of their authors must be read in line with his own practices and his repeated admissions in the

prefaces to his translations that he has altered his original. This fact, placed in the endpoint of

many of his prefaces as the final word in his argument and the piece intended to stay with the

reader as they read, is not an admission of failure but an advertisement. He invites his readers to

comb through his translation looking for the places where he has added or omitted. By discussing

a few pieces of the text where he has made minor changes, Dryden encourages knowledgeable

148

Zwicker, Politics and Language, 196. 149

Virgil, Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (New York: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1942),

20, 21.

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readers to search carefully and to be aware of the larger alterations he makes. This highlights the

potential of these changes to alter the meaning of his original, encouraging readers to look for

hidden meanings. In order to truly understand his prefaces, readers must already have a

familiarity with other texts, especially the originals Dryden is translating but also other

translations and interpretations. Such knowledge is not necessary, however, in order to read,

understand, and enjoy his texts, thus allowing his works to substitute for, or even to replace, the

originals for many readers. Choosing his authors for their personal relationship to him as well as

for their sympathies, whether real or invented, with his own ideas, Dryden offers finished works

that are translations, not imitations, but he also selects and adapts, offering translations that he

clearly feels belong to himself, at least as a co-author.

Dryden’s culture encouraged translators to adapt the language and ideas of their source to

fit contemporary styles and mores. Jacques de Tourreil, a translator of classical philosophy,

succinctly explains this practice in the preface to his 1702 Several Orations of Demosthenes,

declaring that a translation should render “the thoughts” of an author in “a foreign Language” so

that they “seem born [into] that into which he has Translated them.”150

Later in the century,

Gilbert West declares in his 1749 translation of Pindar that he has attempted to render his

original “intelligible, or at least palatable to the generality of readers,” maintaining many of the

ideas of his source but acknowledging that he has made extensive changes in order to suit his

readership.151

Near the end of the century, George Campbell’s Four Gospels promise to convey

“the author’s spirit and manner . . . the very character of his style;” and to make “the author

‘speak’ like a compatriot.”152

150

Jacques de Tourreil, preface to Several Orations of Demosthenes (London, 1702), 161. 151

Gilbert West, Odes of Pindar (London, 1749), 67. 152

George Campbell, The Four Gospels (London, 1789), I.445-6; Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture, 220.

70

Like these authors, Dryden claimed for himself a privileged position as part of a doubled

community which consisted of both his English contemporaries and his classical sources.

Following the advice in Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse, which he praised in several

poems and prefaces, Dryden chooses “a Poet . . . [and] an Author as you chuse a Friend,”

becoming “United” to the authors he translates “by this Sympathetick Bond,” and growing

“Familiar, Intimate, and Fond.”153

Claiming this intimacy for himself, Dryden asserts a special

knowledge of these poets. Speaking of Ovid’s adaptation of Virgil, Dryden says “I think I may

be judge of this, because I have translated both” (V.300). This interpretation of method not only

justifies his own changes and declarations, it also signals to other writers how they ought to

interact with a text if they also want to act as critics.

Positioning himself in community with his originals in this way simultaneously grants

him a measure of license as a translator and confines him to a closer reading than is open to

writers working with a less celebrated original. In a typical piece of exposition in the preface to

Sylvae, Dryden claims that he has

sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my Authors, as no Dutch

Commentator will forgive me. Perhaps, in such particular passages, I have thought

that I discover’d some beauty yet undiscover’d by those Pedants, which none but a

Poet cou’d have found. Where I have taken away . . . what was beautiful in the

Greek or Latin, wou’d not appear so shining in the English – And where I have

enlarg’d them, I desire the false Criticks wou’d not always think that those

thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be

fairly deduc’d from him: or at least, if both these considerations should fail, that

153

Roscommon, Essay on Translated Verse, 7.

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my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they

are such, as he wou’d probably have written. (III.4)

Dryden claims to follow the spirit of the original, to say what he would have said if his source

“were living, and an Englishman.” Going beyond purely stylistic change, Dryden makes bold to

inform the reader what his original meant, and even what he would have meant if he had

Dryden’s knowledge and experience, taking the position of fellow poet and interpreter. Of

course, this was not an unusual thing either in translations or everyday writing. Reading

Boswell’s Life of Johnson, to give but one instance, shows many places where Boswell insists on

the right to interpret Johnson’s meaning.154

This right to interpret becomes even more fraught

when dealing with translations, and translators offer many, often self-contradictory, depictions of

their relations to their texts.

Dryden does not take a subordinate stance toward his contemporaries here. “The scorn he

affects for Dutch scholars,” as Swedenburg declares, “reflects the increasingly clear line being

drawn between the grammarian and the critic, the professional scholar and the man of taste,” but

it also shows the distinction between a translator and a mere writer (I.115). Dryden’s disdain for

these professional scholars is supported by Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse, which

creates a clear distinction between the educated reader and the academic. Roscommon connects

critics to “Pedantick Schools” of thought, calling them “Copies” which “Arrain th’ Originals”

they discuss.155

Dryden, like Roscommon, decries the critics who can only carp, not write, and

uses that criticism to elevate the poet above both critic and gentleman-scholar, as he claims that

only a poet could have found the beauties that he has. This elevation of the poet above the “false

154

Murray Pittock, “Boswell and the Making of Johnson,” in The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson, ed. Jonathan

Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 72-84; Adam Sisman, Boswell’s

Presumptuous Task (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000). 155

Roscommon, Essay on Translated Verse, 5.

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Criticks” leads naturally to Dryden’s claim that, as a poet himself, he can read more deeply and

see things that are “secretly” in his original. This was a common justification for alterations, but

it also opens the door to a claim of even closer kinship, and thus of a higher authorial position for

himself and poets who follow his lead.

By asserting, as Dryden does, that “my own is of a piece with” Virgil’s, “and that if he

were living, and an Englishman, they are such, as he wou’d probably have written,” Dryden sets

himself up as, if not the new Virgil, at least so close to Virgil that he can speak for the great

author. He insists that he has nowhere “offered such violence to his sense, as to make it seem

mine,” but where their senses may differ, he insists, “mine are fuller then his” (III.4). Dryden’s

thoughts are not always Virgil’s, and he invites and expects his readers to find the places where

they are not, but where they are not, they are the thoughts which Virgil would have had, his

preface claims, if Virgil had thought more and thought more deeply about his text.

Dryden makes similar claims about his other translations. In his preface to Ovid’s

Epistles, Dryden begins to display his tendency toward adaptation in his description of three

styles of translation. He dismisses the first, the most accurate, style scornfully, cautioning his

fellow translators that “Too faithfully is indeed pedantically: ‘tis a faith like that which proceeds

from Superstition, blind and zealous” (V.300). Authors, he claims, are to be admired, but they

are not to be left to themselves, and not only because Latin and English are such different

languages. Although Dryden claims that his primary consideration is the brevity of the Latin

language, and that it is impossible to translate from English to Latin while maintaining a

similarity of rhythm and line, especially when the translator is also required to make his lines

rhyme, he later makes just such an attempt in his Miscellany Poems, producing a rendition of

Ovid’s nineteenth elegy that has exactly the same number of lines as his Latin original. While the

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liberties he took in this poem support his complaint about the difficulties of translation, his

success in recreating a poem with the same number of lines as his original shows that his

dismissal is not merely a result of linguistic differences and difficulty, but a defense of the

underlying right of the translator to alter his source.

Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s nineteenth elegy in the Miscellany Poems is, as his editor

notes, both one of his loosest translations which, by the standards Dryden lays out in the preface

to Ovid’s Epistles, is closer to imitation than translation, and one of his most careful. Dryden

presents his readers with “an almost studied avoidance of verbal resemblance,” as he transforms

Ovid’s narrative into the story of a jaded Englishman and his mistress, complete with references

to the “Orange-wench” who carries letters from wife to lover (II.159). Despite the alterations

which adapt Ovid’s work to fit a contemporary story, Dryden nevertheless offers his readers “a

totally responsible English substitution. The length to which Dryden went in such careful

negligence is apparent in the unparalleled economy of the translation, where he renders Ovid’s

sixty Latin lines in a like number of English lines” (III.374-5).

The success with which Dryden follows the “numbers” of his author in this translation

shows that his scorn for the numerical accuracy of metaphrase is not absolute. This piece is part

of a series of experiments in translation that Dryden carried out during this early period, before

the exigencies of the Glorious Revolution encouraged him to use his translations to earn his

living. In the nineteenth elegy, Dryden experiments with the tension between different types of

translation, following a physical structure close to the metaphrase that he seems to find so

awkward in his preface but a linguistic structure closer to the loosest type, imitation.

As his Ovidian translation shows, it is not scansion that Dryden objects to in his criticism

of metaphrase, but the subordination of translator to author in what he calls “servile, literal

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Translation,” making a bid for the powerful nature of his own, freer verse (I.117). While the

translator must remember his duty to his author, Dryden claims, he also has a duty to himself and

to his own language. Denham, who Dryden quotes, claims that “a new Spirit” must be added to

translated poetry or else the translation is dead. Dryden picks up on this idea, claiming that the

translator is just as important as the thing translated. “No man,” he declares in blatant self-

flattery, “is capable of translating Poetry” who is not “a Genius to that art,” able to move beyond

mere repetition to create something new (I.116-8). This movement from repetition to creation, a

hallmark of modernist poetry as well as eighteenth-century translation, shows the reciprocal

relationship that Dryden’s translation created.

At the same time Dryden claims, in this preface, to be very much against the loose

translations of formal imitation. Although “Imitation of an Author is the most advantageous way

for a Translator to shew himself,” Dryden claims, it is also “the greatest wrong which can be

done to the Memory and Reputation of the dead” (I.117). This is a strange claim, and one that

sounds even stranger given Dryden’s inclusion in this collection of a translation by Aphra Behn

that, as he himself claims only a few pages later, is done without any understanding of the

original language and following “Mr. Cowleys way of Imitation” (I.119). Indeed, despite this

claim that Imitation wrongs the reputation of the dead, Dryden has little else to say against it

either here or elsewhere. He allows that this type of translation is useful when translating “wild

and ungovernable” poets like Pindar, if not for more regular authors who fit more neatly into

contemporary verse (I.117).

Dryden’s criticism of imitation allows him to take his habitual position, that of the

“mean” betwixt “two Extreams, which ought to be avoided” (I.118). Setting himself against strict

translation and against imitation allows him to champion his chosen method: “that of Paraphrase,

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or Translation with Latitude.” Using this method, although “the Authour is kept in view by the

Translator,” neither his words nor his sense are to be strictly followed. The line between

translation and imitation becomes blurred because both involve the translator and original

authors as co-creators. The difference between the two is simply that an Imitation goes farther

until “tis no longer to be called” the work of the original, but is “almost the creation of another

hand” (I.114-7). Importantly, even when speaking of imitation, which he has rejected for being

too unlike its original, Dryden calls it “almost” another hand and not actually another hand.

Moreover, he immediately goes on to claim that the imitation may be “more Excellent” than the

original work that it copies (I.117). This is not the language of a man who hates the idea of

imitation or who feels that the classical authors he translates are more important than the works

of his own time.

This struggle, or rather this balancing act which Dryden undertakes, is evident throughout

his career. In his dedication to an early play, The Indian Emperor, which was performed in 1665

and whose second, 1667 edition appeared with a defence of his Essay on Dramatic Poetry,

Dryden makes a claim for “the liberty of a Poet, to add, alter, or diminish” (IX.25) that is

strikingly similar to his declaration in the preface to Ovid’s Epistles that his author’s “words are

not so strictly followed as his sense, and that too is admitted to be amplyfied” (I.114), and even

more similar to his claim that “I have both added and omitted” in the preface to Sylvae (III.3). In

The Indian Emperor, Dryden makes this claim for the triumph of the poet over the historian

rather than the translator over his author, but the underlying assertion, that the contemporary poet

is and ought to be the focus of attention and that “the beautifying of” his work is more important

than staying true to facts, history, and sources, is the same (IX.25).

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In practice, Dryden was a much more careful translator than these words might suggest,

but he consistently claims pride of place for the translator. A good translator must “distinguish

that which is pure in a good Author, from that which is vicious and corrupt in him,” allowing the

translator the right of judgement not only over critics and commentators but over his author

(III.5). Dryden claims, in several places, that he has a duty to his original and is “bound when I

translate an Author, to do him all the right I can,” but he also asserts himself as a poet (III.12).

While modern writers and scholars view derivation as less important than original works, Dryden

asserts his poetic force in his adaptations and translations as much as in his original work. Even

scholars like MacFarlane, whose Original Copy complicates the shift from imitation to creation

in the Romantic period, do not see translation as an authorial undertaking. Scholars, however, are

increasingly questioning the status of original as opposed to derived works in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries. Anne Sechin, writing on Diderot’s views of originality, shows that he

“depicts a quite clear transition between the seventeenth century, where an ‘original’ is to be

understood as a model to be imitated, and the eighteenth century, where an original is a

‘prospector of new forms,’” thus shifting original from acted upon to actor, making originality an

almost verbal form rather than a purely descriptive adjective.156

Dryden’s writings, contrarily, show him taking just as much pride in his translations as

his original works. Although Dearing claims that “Dryden of course rates originality above

translation,” the lines which he interprets this way, on the Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on

Translated Verse seem to have another meaning (II.382). When Dryden writes,

To what perfection will our Tongue arrive,

156

Anne Sechin, “On Plagiarism, Originality, Textual Ownership, and Textual Responsibility: The Case of Jacques

le fataliste,” in Originality and Intellectual Property, 103.

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How will Invention and Translation thrive

When Authors nobly born will bear their part,

And not disdain th’ inglorious praise of Art! (III.173)

he is not denigrating translation but mourning the lack of fame which it offers. Instead of

uplifting the translator, he suggests in the next lines, translation “augment[s]” the “Fame” of the

original writer, because the translator improves their lines. Classical authors are the source of “all

that is pardonable in us,” Dryden says with false modesty, but in a bad translation, an author is

no more than a “Carcass” (III.5). Good translation is the living body of the poet, and the poets

who are also translators may stand “On equal terms” with classical authors, “Nor mighty Homer

fear, nor sacred Virgil’s page” (III.174).

Virgil is one of the greatest of the classical poets and the most-respected by Dryden’s

contemporaries. We can see evidence of Dryden’s own deference to this poet in Under Mr.

Milton’s Picture, which Dryden wrote for Tonson as an introduction to his edition of Paradise

Lost. In this short poem, Dryden reflects on the history of poetry.

Three poets in three distant ages born,

Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.

The first in loftiness of thought surpass’d;

The next, in majesty; in both, the last.

The force of nature could no further go;

To make a third, she join’d the former two. (III.208)

Dryden’s focus in this poem emphasizes the importance of the classical authors to

contemporary perceptions of literature, and also shows just how elevated was the position of

these two poets. Dryden does not need to give names in order for his readers to know that the

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Greek and Italian poets are Homer and Virgil. These simply are, in the minds of Dryden and his

contemporaries, the greatest poets of all time. And it is with these that Dryden aligns himself,

claiming to equal and in fact to surpass them, encouraging Virgil to “speak such English as I

[can] teach him,” placing himself as the mentor and Virgil as a struggling student of English

(VI.808).

Dryden’s deliberate positioning within a literary family ultimately makes him both

collaborator and rival to his originals – including Virgil, one of the most celebrated authors of his

time. By focusing his attention on educated readers and asking these readers to look from the

original to his translation and back, he is inviting comparison in a way that, despite his self-

deprecating demurral, calls both readers and potential writers to see his translation as not just a

companion to but an improvement on the original work. In so doing, Dryden makes a claim for

the works of modern authors – that their deference to the ancients is a deference to teachers who

they are capable not only of admiring but of joining and perhaps surpassing.

Creating the Ideal Reader

Dryden’s translations were read by a wide audience, but his prefaces worked to create an

ideal reader, one educated in the classics and aware of and interested in questions of translation.

Within this group of educated readers, translation allowed Dryden and poets like him a unique

method of dialogue. Dryden emphasizes his relationship to both his readers and his sources,

highlighting the erudition of his readers in order to situate himself within this elite group and to

display his ability to make judgements about and improve his original. But his addresses to the

reader, which focus on translation theory and refer to other contemporary translations as

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exemplars, are also an important part of his work to create a new generation of translators in his

image.

Restoration and eighteenth-century reading audiences, although in practice confused and

heterogeneous, can be divided for convenience into two groups. The upper class of men, and a

select group of women, who had benefited from private tutors and often university education

make up the majority of the educated or as they were sometimes called the literate readers who

could read Latin, and often Greek, as well as English and several other modern languages.

Unlike earlier periods, in which the majority of the reading public fell into this group, by the

eighteenth century an estimated 60% of men and 40% of women in Britain were literate, creating

a large class disparity within the reading public in place of previous class disparities between the

reading and the illiterate publics. This increasing rate of literacy is linked to an increasing

availability of books and other printed material and it resulted in a much larger and broader

reading public and a wider range of options for would-be readers.157

This was a period when

university dissertations were universally written in Latin and in which, for the first part of the

seventeenth century, many English translators worked with Latin originals written by

Englishmen. Latin was the universal language of the educated classes, nearly all of whom were

familiar with the classic texts. In contrast, the uneducated readers of the middling and lower

classes as well as many upper-class women could read in English and perhaps other modern

languages, but could neither read nor understand Latin or Greek and would be totally unfamiliar

with classical originals.

157

John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York:

Routledge, 2013), 141-164.

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For some readers, then, the translated versions of Latin works acted as a substitute for the

Latin, offering them access to a form of education they were otherwise denied. Although Dryden

is most interested in educated readers that he can groom to follow his example, he was a

professional writer who did not want to lose any audience, and he acknowledges his unlettered

audience in his careful address to female readers. The women who read Dryden’s translations

would have found it difficult to gain access to original classical texts because of the link between

classical scholarship and masculinity. Fielding is one of the most prominent examples of an

author who links masculinity and classical learning. He mocks female learning in Amelia and

uneducated lower-class readers in The Author’s Farce, Tom Jones, and Joseph Andrews,

demonstrating both class and gender biases linked to knowledge of classical history and texts.158

Although Fielding sneers at readers who learn the classics through English translations, other

writers, especially women, praise Dryden for allowing them a new familiarity with ancient poets.

Lady Mary Chudleigh focuses on just this, saying that Dryden “from our Confinement free[d]”

women by Englishing the greatest of the classical poets (VI.1189) and her advice to women to

read translations as well as important contemporary literature is repeated throughout her

works.159

More praise for Dryden’s translations as a source of education comes from Elizabeth

Thomas, Elizabeth Rowe, and Judith Drake.160

Although this was not the form of education that

Dryden was most interested in, Dryden recognized and responded to his female readership in the

158

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, ed. Martin Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1974), 421; Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Dent, 1986), I.289, II.166-8, 185-6,

306-7. 159

Mary Chudleigh, The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1993), 88-111, 255-61, 295-9. 160

Elizabeth Thomas, Miscellany Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1722), 18-25; Elizabeth Rowe, “To the

Reader,” Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1696); Judith Drake, An Essay in Defense of the Female Sex

(London, 1696), 41-2.

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preface to his Virgil, where he spends several pages discussing how women perceive Aneis’

flight from Dido, and in Ovid’s Epistles, where he assures them that he has done his best to

ensure their modesty despite Ovid’s “amorous expressions” (I.14). The majority of Dryden’s

prefaces, however, are focused toward a different type of education.

Instead of offering an introduction to his author’s life for the general reader, Dryden uses

his prefaces to discuss translation. He lays out his theories of translation as these change over

time and discusses wider issues of inheritance, influence, and transformation.161

His discussion

of Virgil in the preface to the Works of Virgil, which is clearly political in focus, demonstrates

that he is aware of the need for explanatory introductions and perfectly capable of writing them

when he wants to. The fact that Dryden’s other introductions to translations focus on translation

theory in a scholarly way that many of his readers found difficult to follow is not an accident but

a deliberate choice. Indeed, it was not only true of his uneducated readers who found his theories

difficult to follow. One contemporary response by Mathew Stevenson, objected to Dryden’s

attempts “to Extenuate [his] faults by an Elaborate Epistle or an insinuating Preface,” a tendency

that he complains is far too common among the prolix “Modern Sages.”162

Jonathan Swift wrote

that the preface and dedication to Dryden’s works are as hard to read as “so much Latin,”

suggesting that only those who are capable of reading the work in its original are able to find

value in Dryden’s preface.163

While neither response is positive, both reactions connect Dryden

161

David Hopkins, “Translation, Metempsychosis, and the Flux of Nature: ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy,’” in

Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. Wolfgang Görstschacher and Holger Klein (Tübingen: Stauffenburg

Verlag, 2001), 145-147. 162

Matthew Stevenson, The Wits Paraphras’d, or, Paraphrase Upon Paraphrase in a Burlesque on the Several Late

Translations of Ovid’s Epistles (London, 1680), A6. 163

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelth and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1958), 69.

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to a tradition of scholarship and suggest that readers recognized both the difficulty and the

educational value of these prefaces.

Dryden creates this scholarly atmosphere by joining current conversations about

translation, and in so doing he creates signposts for readers unfamiliar with the field. He

responds to well-known translations, and explains his theories about the three types of translation

by reference to translations by important contemporary figures, including Ben Jonson, Edmund

Waller, and Abraham Cowley (1.114). Throughout his text, Dryden assumes that his audience is

either familiar enough with these translations and with their originals to follow him in his

comparisons or eager enough to learn that they will follow his references and read these texts.

His reference, immediately in the Preface to Sylvae, to the “Rules” of Roscommon’s Essay on

Translated Verse also insists that his readers either be familiar with the essay or read it for

themselves. Dryden refuses to tell his readers what these rules are. If they have not read the

essay, he implies, and are not already familiar enough with the rules to judge whether Dryden

has, as he mockingly flatters himself that he has, “made Examples to his Rules,” then they are

not qualified to understand his translations, although they may read and enjoy them (1.115).

Refusing to make concessions for an audience that may not know the translations he

discusses or be able to compare them to the originals, Dryden does not offer examples from these

translations to explain why he uses them as examples, as Tytler does in his “Essay on the

Principles of Translation.” Instead, he uses these casual references to well-known classical works

and translations to situate himself for an educated audience and as someone who both is himself

and expects his readers to be conversant about these figures and their works. In this way,

although Dryden does not offer a beginner’s guide to translation, he creates a trail that educated

and interested readers can follow to educate themselves further.

83

Dryden’s preface to Sylvae demonstrates his method of setting himself up as a part of an

elite group, part of which is already in existence, and part of which he hopes to create in his

successors. This group not only reads the classics for pleasure, but also remains up to date on

contemporary productions. He begins his depiction of himself by claiming to have been

“troubled with the disease” of translation and to have found “a kind of ease” in the throes of this

disease (III.3). This, as his later reference suggests, may also be a reference to the Earl of

Roscommon, part of the larger group of writers he worked to encourage, who claimed that “No

Poet any Passion can excite; / But what they feel transport them as they write.”164

Transported

by the throes of passionate translation, Dryden finds an ease in the light, scurrilous work of Ovid

that is made more acceptable by the passion that creates a kinship between himself and his

author.

Demonstrating this ease, both in his prefaces and in his translations themselves, which

are filled with Latinisms and references to other authors, Dryden’s choice of language within his

translations helps to create points of reference to other works. When he discusses the “sylvan

scene” in which Aeneis shelters from Juno’s storm, he refers not only directly to the Latin itself

(tum silvis scaena coruscis) but also to Milton’s punning use of the same phrase to describe

Satan’s first view of Eden in his Paradise Lost and to Lauderdale’s earlier translation of the

passage.165

This is an excellent example of how Dryden uses earlier translations, and especially

Lauderdale, who he greatly admired.

Betwixt two rows of Rocks a Sylvan Scene

Appears above, and Groves forever green;

164

Roscommon, Essay on Translated Verse, 18. 165

John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 81.

84

A Grott is form’d beneath, with Mossy Seats,

To rest the Nereids, and exclude the Heats.

Down through the Crannies of the living Walls

The Crystal Streams descend in murm’ring Falls. (V.349-50)

This translation of Dryden’s clearly draws from Lauderdale’s translation:

And Sylvan scenes the shaded Bay inclose.

A natural Grot a marble Seat surrounds

And fronts the Entry: Here the murm’ring sounds

Of Water purling from a living Spring,

To this retreat the Nymphs and Nereids . . .166

Dryden’s indebtedness to this earlier passage is evident. He has adopted Lauderdale’s “Sylvan

scenes” with their resonances from the Latin and their Miltonic echo, but he also adapts and

rephrases Lauderdale’s translation. Lauderdale both insists on the grove’s naturalness and seems

to flaunt its unnatural connections. Where Lauderdale’s Nereids have apparently created a

“marble seat” to sit on as they watch the entry of their “natural” grotto, Dryden offers an image

much closer to Milton’s Eden, where nature itself, without the interfering hand of man, offers

man all the comforts of a created home. Milton’s “sylvan scene” is a hostile one, a “thicket

overgrown” forming a wall that attempts, and fails, to keep out Satan. 167

Virgil’s, in its larger

context, is a respite between one form of Juno’s anger and another, subtler form of temptation in

Carthage. These connections add depth to Dryden’s translation, allowing him to display his

learning as well as to delicately foreshadow the hardships which Aeneis will face.

166

Richard Lauderdale, The Works of Virgil, Translated into English Verse (London, 1709), 83. 167

Milton, Paradise Lost, 81.

85

This interest in making multiple connections between his work and that of other writers is

typical of Dryden’s translations and his prefaces, shown in Bottkol’s reconstruction of his

working method.

He sat with a favorite edition open before him . . . read the original carefully, often

the Latin prose Interpretario, and invariably studied the accompanying annotations

. . . he repeatedly turned to other editors, studied and compared their varying

opinions . . . Also he had open before him on the table one or more earlier English

translations, particularly those which were written in heroic couplets. From these

he often took rhymes, stray phrases, or even whole lines and passages.168

Robin Sowerby’s “Dryden and Homer” proves that Dryden used at least eight different English

translations in addition to English and Latin commentaries on the Greek when he wrote his

Homeric translations.169

Working within this long tradition of translators, Dryden references both

his predecessors and his original text in his introductions, to alert readers to his intentions, and

then within the text itself, shows off his own invention and his connection to his original. Even in

his loose translations from Lucretius, Dryden constructs his lines to echo the Latin with which

his educated, interested reader is familiar. One passage especially redolent of its Latin roots is

First guilty Conscience does the mirrour bring,

Then sharp remorse shoots out her angry sting,

And anxious thoughts within themselves at strife,

Upbraid the long mispent, luxurious life. (III.60)

168

J. Bottkol, “Dryden’s Latin Scholarship,” Modern Philology 40 (1943): 243. 169

Robin Sowerby, “Dryden and Homer,” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1975), 235-8; Gordon Braden,

“Translating Procedures in Theory and Practice,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, II.98.

86

Even to readers unable to understand the Latin, the original of the same passage is clearly related

to Dryden’s by sound:

Aut quod conscius ipse animus se forte remordet,

Desidiose agere aetatem, lustrisque perire.

Dryden expands this passage, but his “Conscience,” and “remorse” use the innate Latinism of the

English language, and luxurious, while not a direct translation of Lucretius’ “lustrisque” retains

something of both the meaning and the sound of the original. “Luxurious” not only has the same

initial letter, but the same number of syllables and sibilant internal vowel as its Latin source. This

type of phrasing, which references the original in ways that would be clearly understood only by

those educated readers familiar with the Latin, helps to continue the pose that Dryden begins in

his prefaces – that of a writer who resists reading by unlearned readers and who aligns himself

instead with an educated elite. Furthermore, insisting that he is not taking up his authors anew,

but “resuming [an] old acquaintance” with them raises Dryden clearly out of the purview of the

Grub Street writer and offers a shortcut to establishing his credentials as a scholar and as a poet

(III.3).

The liberties that Dryden takes are emblematic of the exploration and experimentation he

undertook in the 1680s. As Swedenburg declares, “whatever else translation was to him, it was

also a proving ground, an opportunity to explore the prosodic limits possible in his day”

(III.281), and the publicity of that proving ground made it an encouragement to younger authors

to follow in his footsteps. Dryden’s The paradoxical emphasis on his faithfulness, his alterations,

and his experimentation is echoed by the many styles of translation which Dryden’s publishes in

his miscellany volumes, creating exemplars of many different styles for future writers to imitate.

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A Poetic Father

Dryden’s multiple hands edition of Ovid’s Epistles is the first of a series of carefully

structured translations that offered other writers a means to become part of his poetical family.

Just as Dryden portrays himself as a son to the classical writers and the great English authors, he

envisioned becoming the father of future English poets. Although he did not publish another

collaborative edition of a single work, Dryden’s next translations were also published as part of a

collaborative edition. This edition included many of his translations that did not fit into larger

projects: an Ovidian elegy, an Idyllium from Theocritus, and two of Virgil’s Eclogues, later

revised as part of his Virgil. These translations appeared, with a large selection of Dryden’s

prologues, epilogues, and miscellaneous poems, as Miscellany Poems: Containing a New

Translation of Virgills Eclogues, Ovid’s Love Elegies, Odes of Horace, and Other Authors; with

several Original Poems by the most Eminent Hands, a title that emphasizes the translations it

contains and its collaborative nature (IV.435). This volume, which included not only these pieces

by Dryden but works by other authors and translators may have seemed less important than the

Epistles when Dryden first agreed to publish as part of it. There is no introduction to the work,

only a table of contents which orders the miscellaneous translations by their originals, and lists

the names of the authors next to their poems. Although Dryden’s name is attached to the pieces

he contributed, and he is the primary contributor to the volume, the title does not mention his

name, attributing the work only to “the most Eminent Hands.”170

170

John Dryden, Miscellany Poems (London, 1684).

88

A year later, when Sylvae was published, Dryden was considerably more invested.

Sylvae, despite its collaborative nature, is very much Dryden’s production. As Walker shows in

his examination of the relationship between Dryden and his publisher, for this volume, “Dryden

made suggestions for work to be published, solicited contributors, wrote prefaces, translated - in

short, ‘edited’,” this volume, insisting that “I am resolvd we will have nothing but good”

writers.171

Not only is this one of the earliest examples of modern editing, although neither

Tonson nor Dryden used this term, it is also a clear indication of the importance which Dryden

now attached to the project.

At the same time, Dryden admits that the project is larger than he is. “I hope,” he ends the

preface to Sylvae, “it will not be expected from me, that I shou’d say any thing of my fellow

undertakers in this Miscellany” (V.325). While he had been happy to defend the two imitations

in the Epistles by way of concluding his theoretical discussion and ameliorating the admission

that he himself has “transgress’d the Rules which I have given,” his relationship to the pieces in

Sylvae is much more complex (I.118). He is too close, and was too involved with many of the

authors to praise them “without suspicion of partiality” (V.325). This illustrates how involved

Dryden was in the project, to the point that Tonson published the second edition of the

Miscellanies as a set which claimed to be “Published by Mr. Dryden.”172

Dryden’s claim

immediately following this, that he has “not perus’d” some of these translations, allows him to

take a step back, claiming only limited editorial intervention. It also shows the number of poets

171

Keith Walker, “Jacob Tonson, Bookseller,” The American Scholar 61 (1992): 426; John Dryden, “Letter to

Tonson, August/September 1684,” in The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons, ed Stephen Bernard (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2015), 88. 172

Hugh MacDonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions of Drydenia (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall,

1966), 70.

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he was able to find who were doing similar work, as there are so many that he is not acquainted

with all of them despite his close involvement in the English literary world.

Dryden’s miscellany set a trend which he continued and encouraged others to follow.

“Ovid’s Epistles, advertised on 6 February 1680, contains the first of Dryden’s translations to

appear in print,” and from this point until the end of his life and career “the great bulk of his

nondramatic poetry was to consist in translation” in both poetry and prose (I.323). Dryden used

his Miscellanies to test his audience, experimenting with different forms and levels of latitude

and waiting for a reaction. The frame of a miscellany volume allowed him to try new methods

and support the work of new authors without committing himself to a large project like his Virgil

or risking his reputation by advertising an experiment.

After the success of his Miscellanies, Dryden began other translation projects to

showcase further experimentation. His translations from Juvenal and Persius, which he described

as “a kind of Paraphrase; or somewhat which is yet more loose, betwixt a Paraphrase and

Imitation” (IV.87), show him working through different styles of translation, moving between

near-faithful line for line renditions and broad paraphrase in a continuation of his

experimentation with the types of translation.173

Dryden’s rendition of The Art of Painting, and

especially the preface comparing painting to poetry, shows his attempt to conceptualize a theory

of translation that would explain his practice and aid other writers.

Dryden participated in a multiple hands translation of Tacitus in 1698 as well as writing

an introduction and preface to a new multiple hands translation of Lucian. Appearing to think of

the authors of the Lucian as “an association of scholars and gentlemen of quality,” Dryden’s

participation both encouraged these particular writers and suggested that he might be willing to

173

David Hopkins, “Dryden and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal,” Translation and Literature 4.1 (1995): 34.

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support future translation projects.174

He knew several of the translators, and his very public

participation in the project, not only writing a “Life of Lucian” as a preface but allowing his

name to be included on the title-page, demonstrates his support and the ways that he positioned

himself as a literary “father’ to other authors. The Tonson edition of Tacitus also brings together

a group of translators who are introduced by Dryden in the same way as the Epistles. While not

part of his Miscellanies series, these works clearly participate in Dryden’s project of assisting

and supporting good translation and the poets who write it.

Most of Dryden’s translations from the 1680s to the end of his life show his

preoccupation with theories of language and translation, and his work to promote these theories

and encourage his successors, a work which I explore more thoroughly in my recent article.175

His Miscellanies were at the centre of this work, the most clearly outward-reaching of his

publications in their inclusion of works by other writers and Dryden’s use of them to support and

promote translation. The centrality of the Miscellanies and their extension of his genealogical

line is demonstrated by Dryden’s willingness to use better-selling books to support the series.

Even in his Virgil, published as a stand-alone piece, Dryden continually references his

Miscellanies in the notes, discussing translations of various pieces by others which were

published in the Miscellanies and referring his reader there to read Rochester’s notes in lieu of

providing his own full set (IV.813-4). Aware of the cultural and political value his Virgil had

taken on even before its publication, Dryden takes steps to ensure that its readers – those

interested and educated enough to read and benefit from its notes – return to his fullest

expressions of translation theory in his Miscellanies.

174

Hardin Craig, “Dryden’s Lucian,” Modern Philology 16.2 (1921): 153 175

Fleming, “Improvised Patronage,” 95-111.

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Dryden’s work in his Virgil examines several strains of his work on translation theory

that are visible in the Miscellanies. As Dryden says in his dedication to the Aeneis, he “Trade[s]

both with the Living and the Dead, for the enrichment of our Native Language” (VI.336). This

trade is what inspires his interest in importing useful Latinate words into the English language.

One place especially where Dryden acknowledges criticism is in his coinage of the word

“falsify’d,” an innovation he uses to replace Virgil’s “falsar,” and which he supports both as a

part of his larger project relating to the English language and as an imaginative connection to the

original Latin (VI.824-5).

Much more interesting than the mere appearance of the term is his lengthy discussion of

the reasoning behind the Latinized word. Although Dryden ends his note by claiming that the

point is “not worth dispute,” he spends several paragraphs, spread over multiple pages,

explaining his reasoning and defending – importantly – not his particular practice here but his

wider ability to create or to adopt words which he had already pointed out in the dedication to the

Æneis, defending himself against the claim that “I latinize too much” by declaring that he only

does so when he cannot find an English word that is “significant and sounding” (V.335). In the

notes, by contrast, Dryden focuses on the need to improve the English language rather than on

defending his own practice. He claims that the Italian from which he took this new word is “a

polish’d Language” in implicit contrast to his “Native Tongue” which still needs to be refined.

This note briefly identifies the source for the new word, skims over his reasoning for its

invention, and ends by claiming that he might as easily and as well have used an already existing

word, pierced, guiding reader attention to his overarching linguistic project and emphasizing his

creativity and his connection to the original (VI.828-9).

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Dryden does not include this type of discussion in Ovid’s Epistles or in his four

Miscellany volumes, preferring to write in such a way that he was understandable with the

minimum number of notes. As he says in the Virgilian note, “The words . . . .make my meaning

plain” (VI.829), and for the most part this is the rule by which he writes. Many of his subtlest

allusions require an intimate knowledge of the original – or that consumers read with another

copy of the work at hand – but these, while they enhance his translations, are not required to

understand them. What Dryden makes overt in this footnote in the Virgil appears more quietly in

his other translations: his desire to import especially beautiful or useful words from the Latin as

part of his project to improve the English language. Dryden uses Latinisms in this way

throughout his career, but not until the Virgil, with its reputation and market already established

by the time he writes his notes, does he make his work so explicit.

Given Virgil’s centrality to Dryden’s theories of translation, Dryden’s connections

between this text and his Miscellanies are important to understanding the ways in which Dryden

attempted to groom his successors. The Miscellanies provided a medium for publishing and

sharing translations from the classics and encouraged the careers of younger poets. The young

poets that were featured in the Miscellanies used their association with Dryden and the

readership his sponsorship gained for their translations to further their own careers, as Dryden

hoped they would. Addison’s career offers one example of how the Dryden-Tonson pair could

help aspiring poets by including them in their translation ventures. Dryden’s position as sponsor

is even more apparent in his relation to Congreve, but his association with Addison is more

93

typical and less complicated by the pressing questions of authorship, influence, mutual debts, and

succession that haunt the Congreve-Dryden relationship.176

Addison’s first and second publications, a series of Latin verses in praise of King

William, appeared in 1689 and 90 in collections sponsored by his college at Oxford. He broke

into the larger field of publication in Examen Poeticum, with a short poem in praise of Dryden.

The following year, apparently impressed by his poetry, Dryden included a long translation from

the Georgics and several short poems by Addison in the 1694 Annual Miscellany. Although two

translation projects suggested to Addison by Tonson failed to come to fruition, Dryden

introduced the young poet to Congreve, who in turn led Addison to his patron, Montagu.

Addison, then contributed an anonymous essay on the Georgics to Dryden’s Virgil. This was

both a repayment of his debt to the older poet and a shrewd career move. While the majority of

the reading public may not have known the author of this essay, identified by Dryden (he claims

at Addison’s request) only as a “Worthy Friend” (V.337), Addison’s patron, Montagu, and those

authors and patrons in both Dryden’s and Tonson’s circles would have known the author and

given him credit for his work, and Dryden cites Addison in his “Postscript to the Reader” as a

translator in his own right, whose work “has put me to sufficient pains to make my own not

inferior to his” (VI.810). This is high praise, and Dryden’s commendation of this young writer

shows Dryden’s eagerness to support Addison in his career.

Together, Dryden and Tonson acted as sponsors to the young poet, giving him

opportunities and introducing him to other poets, publishers, and patrons. Without detracting

from their own interests, the pair’s Miscellany volumes and the group translations which Dryden

176

Harold Weber, “A ‘double Portion of his Father’s Art’: Congreve, Dryden, Jonson and the Drama of Theatrical

Succession,” Criticism 39.3 (1997): 359-382; Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late

Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976): 381-90; Robert Markley, Two Edg’d Weapons: Style and

Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 200.

94

organized of Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, and Plutarch, also helped to support the kind of translating

collaborative that Dryden hoped would take on some of the linguistic questions of his age. The

Miscellany volumes “permitted new, young poets to get into print early in their careers and in the

company of their elders,” forwarding their careers as Dryden, a professional writer who was very

aware of how his own reputation worked, hoped.177

He intended these to mold the language

through collaboration with ancient writers, and credit him for the change, establishing a line of

literary children to carry on his work.

Although Dryden “published some of his most important reflections on the English

language, translation, the classical heritage, and the role of the poet” in poetic and prose prefaces

to his translations and to the works of friends, including his poem on Roscommon’s “Essay on

Translated Verse,” he never collected these elsewhere, leaving them to stand in connection with

his translations and the apparently minor poems and works of his friends and unofficial

clients.178

This suggests that Dryden felt these works were important enough and likely to remain

so for long enough that his words were safely preserved within their pages. It also, given his

references to these prior works in his most acclaimed production – his Virgil – shows his desire

to promote these publications. Readers who wanted to read all of Dryden’s works needed to also

buy, and hopefully read, the translations, essays, and poems that he promoted in this way.

Dryden supported his own children in the same way that he did other poets. His 1693

multiple hands translation of the satires of Juvenal and Persius includes translations by both of

his eldest sons, who are named in the table of contents, along with Creech and Congreve, as

some of the “Several Other Eminent Hands” featured on the title page.179

His eldest son, Charles

177

David Wykes, A Preface to Dryden (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1977), 47. 178

Paul Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry (New York: D.S. Brewer, 2006), 147. 179

John Dryden, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis … Together with the Satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus

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Dryden, also appears in the Annual Miscellany, the fourth of Dryden’s Miscellany volumes, and

Dryden wrote a preface and several songs for his second son’s play, The Husband His Own

Cuckold.180

Although his sons died young, producing neither children nor an extensive body of

work, this shows how Dryden used the same techniques to promote his physical and his literary

progeny. In both cases, he used his Miscellany volumes, his multiple hands translations, and his

prefaces to improve the circulation of these writers.

Dryden’s legacy among his contemporaries was shaped by his facility with language and

particularly by his translations. This inheritance, taken up by the brilliant young poet Alexander

Pope, set the stage for the poetic style that was to dominate much of the following century, and

provided a new venue for young poets attempting to break into the literary market. It is a

testament to Dryden’s forethought that while his first piece of poetry to be published was a

laudatory poem, Pope’s initial foray into the wider literary world was in one of the Tonson

Miscellanies that Dryden had popularized – and it came in the form of a translation.

(London, 1693).

180 John Dryden, The Annual Miscellany, for the Year 1694 (London, 1694); George Watson, ed. The New

Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), II.441.

.

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Chapter 2 Pope, His Homer, and Himself

Alexander Pope’s struggle to fashion himself as a man of genius is usually seen as

evidence of his focus on originality, a quality he ironically praises in prefaces to his translated

editions of Homer and his heavily edited critical edition of Shakespeare, but his stress on

originality disguises a career based heavily on adaptation. Much of Pope’s time was taken up in

editing both his own writing and that of others, as the many editions of the Dunciad demonstrate.

His choice to edit and adapt this poem instead of creating new poems to destroy new adversaries

is one of many indications of the editorial and adaptive process he brought to both his original

works and his translations. Although Pope’s talents led him toward adaptation, he wanted to be

known as an original author and feared that his editorial talent would not bring him the same

praise that Dryden received for his translations.

This conflict between Pope’s adaptive focus and his desire to be seen as original

manifests itself in his editorial and adaptive work as an antagonistic relationship between himself

and his originals. If Dryden saw translation as a way to join his classical predecessors on a poetic

Mount Parnassus, Pope saw it as a way to surpass them. Dryden claimed in the notes to his

Æneïs that his words “make my meaning plain” to readers unfamiliar with his originals, but

offered readers who could compare his works to his originals a deeper, more nuanced reading

experience.181

Unlike Dryden, Pope was not content to speak to the reader through prefaces.

Indeed, although his preface to the Iliad is a long and important piece, which clearly displays his

jockeying attempts to position himself above Homer, he chose not to include a preface to the

181

John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, H. T. Swedenburg, Alan Roper, et al. (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956-90), VI.829.

97

Odyssey. Instead Pope inserted long sections of “Observations” between each book of his

Homeric translations, added essays and indexes, and worked to assert his presence throughout.

Where Dryden alters his text’s meaning primarily to reflect his party politics and religious

affiliation, Pope’s alterations of Homer present a specific image of himself as, in his own terms,

a more moral, manly, and virtuous writer than his original. Pope uses his “Observations,” and the

textual changes which the “Observations” discuss, to set himself above Homer.

The majority of Pope’s writing addresses the issue of proper behaviour in one way or

another, from the insistence on politeness and civility in the Essay on Criticism and the gentle

satire on flirtation and spleen in Rape of the Lock to the harsh denunciations in the Dunciad,

which closes his career on a note of moral and literary censure. Pope structured his public

persona as a moral exemplar – sometimes going to surprisingly immoral lengths in order to do

so. Bringing a lawsuit against the publisher he himself had clandestinely encouraged to publish

his letters on the grounds that they were printed without permission would hardly be an

appropriate way to promote your morality, even if Pope had been successful in keeping his

actions a secret.182

Similarly, Pope’s presentation of his multiple-hands translation of the

Odyssey as a single-author text, while it backfired, was an attempt to shape public perceptions of

himself and his works.

Pope’s attention to his reputation is a central theme in scholarly dialogue. Dustin

Griffin’s perennially important Alexander Pope: The Poet in Poems examines the self-expressive

nature of Pope’s poetry and the difference between the poet his poems describe and the known

details of Pope’s life, while James McLaverty shows how Pope continually fashioned his

182

Mark Rose, “The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741),” Cultural Critique 21 (1992): 203.

98

reputation through new and innovative publishing techniques.183

Despite the wealth of

information provided by these and other examinations of Pope’s authorial persona in his life and

poetry, Pope’s translations are underrepresented in discussions of his self-fashioning. While

Pope’s struggle with originality and derivation is central to Helen Deutsch’s study of authenticity

and authorship, and Richard Terry’s recent work on plagiarism, and Pope’s Imitations of Horace

are often considered in relation to his self-fashioning and his creation of a new relationship to

classical authors, the translation of Homer, which was even more important to Pope’s

contemporary reputation, has been comparatively neglected.184

This translation plays a pivotal

role in his practice of self-creation. Indeed, redefining Pope as an author who saw his writing as

adaptive, even within his original works, illuminates his process of polishing and editing a work

for production. For Pope, editing was not only a matter of final touches to an already beautiful

work, but a central part of his creative process which played an important role in his self-

fashioning. An examination of Pope as a translator, editor, and imitator reveals the uncertain

boundaries between writing and adapting which he struggled with throughout his life.

Judgement and Invention, Derivation and Debts

Pope begins his preface to the Iliad, “Homer is universally allowed to have had the

greatest invention of any writer” (VII.3), and he continues with praise not only for Homer but for

183

Dustin H. Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); James

McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 184

Helen Deutsch, Resemblance & Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Harvard University

Press, 1996); Richard Terry, The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Howard D. Weinbrot, “Pope and the Classics,” in The Cambridge Companion to

Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 81-3.

99

invention. Invention was a contested idea in the eighteenth century, as Robert Macfarlane and

Paul Davis have demonstrated, showing how writers and audiences struggled to define

originality, caught between a paradigm in which originality was defined by style and a new

definition of originality that focused on broader themes, plots, and arrangement of ideas. These

competing views, as Mark Rose, Ronan Deazley, and Joseph Loewenstein have argued, were

influential in the development of copyright, authorial ownership of a text, and the notion of

literary property.185

Pope appears to create his own place relative to this paradigm of originality

in his stream of metaphors praising Homer’s invention. But there is a discordant note to his

praise. If Homer’s work is “a wild paradise,” filled with “the seeds and first productions of every

kind,” it is a paradise in which readers “cannot see all the beauties so distinctly as in an ordered

garden.”186

For Pope, who as Maynard Mack shows, was an avid gardener whose passion for

design informed his work, a disordered garden is an unsightly blot on the landscape.187

A garden

in which “some things are too luxuriant” and others “are not arrived to perfection or maturity” is

in desperate need of a gardener, as Homer’s poem, Pope suggests, is in need of an editorial

translator (VII.3). In the middle of his praise for the greatest of poets, with whom Virgil can only

“contest” (VII.3), Pope promises to improve Homer.

Although, as Richard Terry shows, he was often accused of copying the work of others,

Pope was a perfectionist whose editorial advice was sought after from his early correspondence

185

Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2007); Paul Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English

Culture, 1646-1726 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Mark Rose, Authors and Owners (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1993); Ronan Deazley, Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language

(Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2006); Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of

Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 186

Alexander Pope, Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, Maynard Mack, et al. (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1939-67), VII.3. Cited with parenthetical volume and page references. 187

Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 22.

100

with William Wycherley to his collaborations with Swift, Gay, Broome, and Fenton later in his

career. Moreover, Pope’s literary judgement was widely praised, and Percival Stockdale’s

formulation of Pope as someone who “takes a guinea, and returns a diamond,” borrowing ideas

from other authors and “improving” them with “force and beauty,” exemplifies the contemporary

response to Pope’s focus on regularity, style, and manners.188

Stockdale’s defence of Pope,

which describes him as a thief, albeit one whose poetry is so beautiful that his theft ought to be

pardoned, demonstrates the same conflicted response to originality that Pope describes in his

preface to the Iliad. Pope makes it clear that pure invention, without perfect judgement to temper

it, fails to fulfil its promise, praising Homer, whose story the other epic poets copy, but also

denigrating Homer’s practice and placing him in the same category as those poets who went to

Pope for editorial advice.

Granting Homer the leadership in invention, Pope nevertheless prefers the “succeeding

poets” who have translated, imitated, and adapted Homer, because of “their judgment in having

contracted” (VII.6) Homer’s overly luxuriant metaphors. Now that science has expanded its field

and offered these poets more knowledge of the world, he claims, it is “as reasonable in the more

modern poets” to abandon such metaphorical language “as it was in Homer to make use of it”

(VII.6-7). Damning him with faint praise, Pope admits the beauty of Homer’s imagination but

denies his right to exercise it, suggesting that he would have done better to keep his activities

within the realm of nature as defined by science. Pope grants Homer’s imaginative superiority,

but suggests that this imagination creates a story that is unbelievable and which would be

improved by the poetic judgement of later authors such as Virgil, who reworked Homer’s epic in

his Aeneid, and, implicitly, Pope.

188

Percival Stockdale, Lectures on the Truly Eminent British Poets (London, 1807), I.428.

101

Throughout his life, Pope responded to personal and literary attacks by formulating

accusations against his opponents, and he follows the same tactic here, heading off potential

complaints about his lack of invention by attacking other poets. It is, he says several times in this

preface, evident that Virgil “has scarce any comparisons which are not drawn from his master,”

(VII.9) and he closes the opening section of his preface, in which he spends so long praising

originality, with an apology to Virgil that serves as a defence of his own practice.

I hope, in what has been said of Virgil, with regard to any of these heads, I have

no way derogated from his character. Nothing is more absurd or endless, than the

common method of comparing eminent writers by an opposition of particular

passages in them, and forming a judgment from thence of their merit upon the

whole. (VII.12)

Having taken pains to point out Virgil’s copying, Pope insists that this should not reflect badly

upon the writer. Instead, he abandons his praise of invention in order to prioritize the editorial

judgement that Virgil shows in his adaptation of Homer, concluding that “Homer was the greater

genius, Virgil the better artist” (VII.12).

This backhanded compliment reflects Pope’s view of his own career. His career began

with a translation which appeared in one of the Tonson Miscellanies which was followed by the

Essay on Criticism which not only prioritizes critical judgement, but is itself an adaptive work,

famously modelled after Nicholas Boileau’s L’Art Poétique. Pope’s imitative practice continued

in Windsor Forest which, as Pat Rogers shows, displays Pope’s learning by adapting and

imitating Virgil, Spenser, Drayton, Camden, and Dryden among other authors.189

These poems,

189

Pat Rogers, The Symbolic Design of Windsor Forest: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work

(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 113, 203.

102

like much of Pope’s later work, demonstrate the beauty and variety of Pope’s adaptive process.

By prioritizing Virgil’s “attractive majesty” and “careful magnificence” over Homer’s

“commanding impetuosity” and “generous profusion,” Pope separates invention from art.

Homer’s invention, in this formulation, is not a matter of genius or even beauty, for it is Virgil

who is described as beautiful and awe-inspiring. Homer is described as a patron of literature,

who commands and bestows gifts, but not as a creator of art. By claiming that judgement is the

truer sign of artistry, Pope speaks to his own writing, defending his adaptive and editorial

practices against the contemporary focus on originality and modernity.

Modernity and originality were important concerns in contemporary debates about the

nature of literature which raged through France and England, and in which Pope’s friend

Jonathan Swift bore an important part.190

Although Pope, unlike Swift, never took a direct

position in the battle between the Ancients and the Moderns, his worries about invention and

praise of universalism, industry, and the display of classical sources, clearly reflect Swift’s

position in the debate. Both Pope’s original works and his translations display his connections to

classical authors through their references and wide-ranging imitations. His concerns about

originality and his imitative practices, as Brean Hammond shows, earned him a reputation as a

supporter of Swift and defender of the Ancients who used modern methods to show the

applicability of classical teachings to modern life.191

They also led to accusation of literary theft

from authors less willing to forgive his borrowing than Stockdale, who insists that Pope’s

“generous and luxuriant thought” outweighs his “transplanted” ideas.192

190

For the French sources of the debate, see la Querelle des anciens et des moderns CVIIe-XVII siècles, ed. Anne-

Marie Lecoq (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 191

Brean Hammond, Pope Amongst the Satirists 1660-1750 (Devon: Northcote House, 2004), 69. 192

Stockdale, Truly Eminent Poets, 430.

103

Pope attempted to stave off accusations of plagiarism in part by stressing the importance

of judgement and refinement in his translations, but his unwillingness to share credit with others

he disliked worked against him. In the footnotes to his Homeric translations, while he cited many

authors, translators, and commentators, his omissions are almost as obvious as his inclusions, as

is clear in his treatment of Mme Dacier. Although the French prose translation of Mme Dacier

was both his primary source of competition and his principal source for notes, he rarely

acknowledges his indebtedness (VII.xli). In fact, Pope makes disparaging comments about her

translations and commentaries both in his notes and in his more public letters.

These letters, usually directed to gentry with the expectation that they will be shared, are

often carefully-crafted pieces of art which are further edited in the authorized editions of his

Correspondence.193

Preserved, edited, and clandestinely published late in his life, the public

letters are very different from the hastily-scribbled notes that survive to show how Pope spoke on

less formal occasions. The simultaneously public and private nature of these letters and the many

changes Pope made to his correspondence, as Winn demonstrates, are evidence of Pope’s use of

editing to present himself as a “witty writer, sympathetic friend, serious thinker, sensitive

observer, and (not least) educated practitioner of the epistolary form.”194

Despite their claims to

privacy, his formal letters can be read as public essays which Pope uses to continue his process

of self-fashioning.

In one of these formal letters, directed to the Duke of Buckingham and published in every

authorized edition of the Correspondence, Pope compares himself to Mme Dacier, denigrating

both her morals and her scholarship. He insists that Dacier’s femininity ought to relegate her to a

193

Alexander Pope, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, in 5 vols, ed George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1956), I.xv. Cited as letter date and correspondent, volume, and page reference. 194

James Winn, A Window in the Bosom: The Letters of Alexander Pope (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977), 72.

104

lesser position than male writers, claiming that it is the “complaisance” of the “polite” French

that “allow[s] her to be a Critic of equal rank with her husband,” whose “Sense, Penetration” and

“Taste” prove a foil for her “slighter” learning (Pope to Buckingham, 1 Sept 1718, I.492). Pope’s

declaration of his own superiority is subtler, expressed in his insistence that he, unlike Dacier,

recognizes the need for “more depth or learning” in her notes on Aristophanes and the Greek

Scholia. In Pope’s formulation, Dacier’s womanly fragility prevents her from displaying more

than the slight amounts of knowledge that her weaker frame can support, and more, it encourages

her to borrow from others. Eustathius, who Pope himself had to ask for help in understanding, “is

transcribed ten times for once that he is quoted” by Mme Dacier.

Although Pope’s words could show Mme Dacier’s learning, in that she has so thoroughly

partaken of the ancient commentators as to be unable to distinguish their thoughts from her own,

he uses this evidence as a sign of her weakness. To refuse to disclose where you have borrowed,

he suggests, is to tacitly admit your inability to contribute anything new. This sentiment is then

turned on its head as Pope claims that “I have had so much of the French complaisance as to

conceal her thefts; for whenever I have found her notes to be wholly anothers [sic], (which is the

case in some hundreds) I have barely quoted the true Proprietor without observing on it” (Pope to

Buckingham, 1 Sept, 1718, I.496). As Maynard Mack points out in his edition of the Poems,

many of Pope’s notes are directly copied from the English translation of Dacier’s work (VII.xli).

Thus Pope’s note above, which implies that his failure to cite Mme Dacier is a compliment to

her, allows him to ignore his scholarly debts. Instead of pointing out Dacier’s theft, he claims, he

has returned the credit to where it is due, and obviated the need to admit his dependency.

This need to pay debts appears throughout literature in the period, partaking in the

increasingly blurred boundaries between legal ownership and appropriation. Tilar Mazzeo shows

105

that sometimes accusations of plagiarism were made even when authors explicitly cited their

sources, making it difficult for authors to avoid plagiarizing.195

Outright piracy, as Simon Stern

points out, was “the only prohibited form of copying,” which meant that accusations of

plagiarism rarely led to legal charges, but defences against these claims were essential to the

literary culture of the enlightenment.196

One of Boswell’s unpublished poems illustrates

eighteenth century discussion of debts, calling this type of writer “a jackdaw dress’d in foreign

plumes” who “tells us, when he comes to print, / Tho’ all is stolen – he borrow’d but a hint.”197

Boswell criticizes writers for claiming the credit for works which belong to other authors.

Although he says nothing against derivative works – and implies that those who freely admit

their borrowings may indeed profit by them – he clearly indicates the increasing sense that

literary ideas belonged to their creators and that writers incurred debts when they used other

writers’ ideas.

In order to maintain his reputation, Pope needed to pay his debts, and so despite his

disinclination, he gave some credit to Mme Dacier. Pope claims in his letter to Broome part-way

through their collaborative translation of the Odyssey, that Broome has “sometimes made as free

use of Madame Dacier, as she did of Eustathius” and this is the “best excuse” for a lack of

citation (Pope to Broome, 20 Jan, 1725/6, II.363). Recognizing the need to avoid accusations of

intellectual theft, Pope does his best to turn the same accusations against his primary source.

Although Howard Weinbrot calls Pope’s discussion of Dacier “generous and generously

acknowledged . . . demonstrably regard[ing] her as the eminent authority she deserved to be,”

195

Tilar Mazzeo, “Byron and the Scandal of Paternity: Anonymity, Plagiarism, and the Natural Rights of Authors,”

in Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New

York: Routledge, 2009), 163. 196

Simon Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Doman in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Originality and

Intellectual Property, 69. 197

James Boswell, Boswell’s Book of Bad Verse, ed Jack Werner (Toronto: White Lion Publishers Ltd., 1975), 81.

106

there are strong indications even at the beginning of the Iliad that his intentions toward her are

not so friendly as Weinbrot suggests.198

Pope declares partway through the Odyssey that “till very lately I never imagined” that

Dacier had borrowed many of her notes from Eustathius (Pope to Broome, 20 Jan, 1725/6,

II.363), but his notes in the Iliad show him using this accusation as a programmatic campaign

against Dacier long before he began the Odyssey. He includes references to Dacier in many of

the notes in the Iliad, but several of these include insinuations that her commentaries are stolen.

In one such note, Pope says openly that, “Madam Dacier should have acknowledged this Remark

to belong to Eustathius” (VII.314). In another place he silently implies the same by ending his

note with the attribution “Eustath. Dacier” (VIII.528).

This attempt to shift his reliance on the female Mme Dacier to the older, male critic

Eustathius is emblematic of Pope’s general attitude toward debts, derivation and invention in his

most famous translation. He received, and partially acknowledged, help with both his first and

second translations from Homer, but in both cases he attempted to minimize his debts. After the

success of the Iliad, Pope was both exhilarated and exhausted. But for the sake of his pockets

and his reputation, he wanted to complete the work he had begun and translate both of the great

Homeric epics. To do so, he enlisted the help of Broome and Fenton, two men who had helped

him as he wrote his Iliad to be co-writers of the Odyssey. This type of collaboration was, as

Stuart Gillespie points out, not a new idea but “a practice Pope inherited primarily from Dryden,

198

Howard D. Weinbrot, “Alexander Pope and Madame Dacier’s Homer: Conjectures concerning Cardinal Dubois,

Sir Luke Schaub, and Samuel Buckley,” Huntington Library Quarterly 62.1 (1999): 2; Weinbrot, “‘What Must

the World Think of Me?’: Pope, Madame Dacier, and Homer: The Anatomy of a Quarrel,” in Eighteenth-Century

Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel, and

Stepehen E. Karian (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 183-206.

107

the editor of a number of ‘several hands’ translations.”199

His failure to publicly acknowledge his

collaborators, however, and his attempt to pass off a translation by several hands “under his own

Name” and as entirely his own work doomed the reputation of the Odyssey.200

Pope’s

relationship to his collaborators reflects the way he deals with his text, privileging his editorial

judgement above both his collaborators and his source. Pope claims that although Homer’s

invention is his most striking feature, “it is often hard to distinguish exactly where the virtue

ends, or the fault begins” (VII.13). Worst of all, according to Pope, are “his compound epithets,”

which “cannot be done literally into English” by any good poet because they destroy “the purity

of our language” and do “violence to the ear” (VII.19), clear evidence of Pope’s superiority.

As a translator, Pope sits in judgement over Homer. Pope presents his translation as a

triumph of judgement that acknowledges his editorial supremacy like that of Virgil, who won

praise by imitating and adapting Homer’s epic. Rene Rapin, a seventeenth-century writer and

critic, exemplifies neoclassical responses to Homer and Virgil when he declares that Homer “is

the Model and Original by which Virgil form’d his whole design,” that “Homer, has more Spirit

and Virgil, more Judgement,” and that he should “much rather wish to have writ the Aeneid, than

the Iliad and Odyssey.”201

Pope follows this same formulation, separating judgement and

originality and connecting himself to the judgement which neoclassical taste preferred.202

Although Pope concludes with apparent modesty that

Upon the whole, I must confess myself utterly incapable of doing justice to

Homer. I attempt him in no other hope but that which one may entertain without

199

Stuart Gillespie, English Translation and Classical Reception (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 12. 200

Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985), 414. 201

René Rapin, The Whole Critical Works of Monsieur Rapin (London, 1706), I.210. 202

Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688-1798)

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 83.

108

much vanity, of giving a more tolerable copy of him than any entire translation in

verse has yet done. (VII.21)

In fact, this claim shows exactly that “vanity” it purports to avoid. Pope makes the standard

claim that he cannot measure up to his original, but at the same time he claims that no other man

has done better. He restricts this claim to “any entire translation in verse,” thus carefully not

including Madame Dacier’s recent prose translation, but his emphasis on Virgil’s Aeneid as a

copy of Homer implicitly includes Virgil in the group who he has bettered, staking his claim to

fame and reputation not on invention but on judgement.

The Value of an Original

Although Pope understood that his Homeric translation was the foundation of his

contemporary reputation, he disliked working with Homer’s Greek and may have initially seen

creating a multi-authored translation as the natural response to this dilemma. Pope had

experience working with collaborators, beginning with his work as editor for William Wycherley

early in his career. As a subordinate author, Pope made extensive revisions to the poetry of the

aging playwright but he finally published Wycherley’s work, posthumously, without taking any

credit for himself.203

This work, in which one man took credit for the work of two, prepared Pope

for the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which he similarly massages a Greek original and a series of

English translations into a beautiful and coherent poem which integrates Homeric and

eighteenth-century standards by responding to and integrating criticism not only in the notes but

also in Pope’s alterations to the text itself. Pope’s work with Wycherley’s poems taught him that

203

Mack, Alexander Pope, 98-100.

109

it was acceptable to take advantage of a younger, subordinate poet, and he seems initially to have

had no qualms about the public reaction to such an admission, even after learning that his co-

conspirator had let the cat out of the bag (Pope to Broome, 4 Dec, 1724, II.273-4).

Putting aside the ethical problems with Pope’s decision to take the credit for this

translation, which even Mack, Pope’s staunch supporter and defender, helplessly calls “a shabby

business,” the question of why Pope was willing to share not only the tedious work but some of

the glory remains. Pope’s collaborative translation builds on work by John Dryden, who was the

primary writer in several multi-author translations, and who also acknowledged that the internal

essays in his Virgil were written by others. Dryden’s work, especially his shorter translations

from Homer is often referenced in Pope’s Iliad, suggesting that Pope had Dryden’s work in mind

when planning his Homeric translations, but Dryden was careful to publicly acknowledge the

help he received, and Pope claimed he intended to do the same. Pope repeatedly promised his co-

conspirators that he would “promote your reputation[s] . . . more than my own” and that his

name would be “read with yours by posterity” (Pope to Broome, 4 Dec, 1724, II.273-4; Pope to

Broome, 2 Jan, 1726, II.358).204

Broome was never fully satisfied by the “share of honour,”

which Pope finally gave him, but Pope insisted in later years that he had “made it good” with his

collaborators finally claiming “only twelve books of the poem” and not the notes as his own

(Broome to Fenton, 1 Dec, 1725, II.344; Pope to Broome, 2 Oct, 1735, III.497). This willingness

to share even partial credit seems unlike Pope’s usual desire for fame, but may be attributed to

his mixed feelings about the work itself.

His letters, especially those to John Caryll, clearly show how tiring – and tiresome – he

found the work of translating. He complains of “the Drudgery of an author in correcting sheets,”

204

Mack, Alexander Pope, 414.

110

his unhappiness at being “obliged to do [his] drudgery at home, and stick to [his] old task and

daily labor,” and the “bitter dry drudgery” of the work (Pope to Trumbull, 14 Feb, 1714/15,

I.281; Pope to Caryll, Apr, 1715, I.290; Pope to Caryll, June, 1715, I.292). By defining

translation as drudgery, and as the work of the laborer, Pope separates it from the gentleman’s

leisure activity of original writing. Dryden, in comparison, wrote to Tonson on sending a series

of translations for his Miscellany that “my business heere is to unweary my selfe, after my

studyes, not to drudge.”205

Pope’s exhaustion and “weariness” which make him almost “willing to leave poetry”

show how different his attitude was from his predecessor (Pope to Caryll, 13 July 1714, I.235).

Some fatigue is to be expected, with long works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the longest

work that Pope had yet produced and the most difficult. This project required not only Pope’s

usual struggle for verbal perfection but mastery of multiple languages, an elaborate set of notes,

and a series of revisions tailored to make Homer socially acceptable. The Odyssey also forced

him to manage a group of authors, chivvying his co-writers into completing their portions of the

work and reassuring them about his intentions. It is no wonder that Pope found the process

exhausting.

But Pope’s willingness to share the work and the praise of the Odyssey stemmed from

something more than mental weariness. The same process of scholarship and revision

characterized his imitations of Horace, where he included the original on the facing page for

better comparison, and his many editions of the Dunciad, where the notes which were even more

integral a part of the composition and required just as much innovation and care as the text

205

John Dryden, Letter to Tonson, August/September 1684, in The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons, ed.

Stephen Bernard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 88.

111

itself.206

Both the imitations of Horace and the Dunciad postdate Pope’s Homeric translations,

indicating Pope’s continuing reliance on editorial practices. True, Pope never again produced a

poem the length of the Odyssey or Iliad and the sheer volume of the work was certainly a major

factor in his consequent fatigue, but although he complained of the difficulty of dealing with

publishers and proofs, Pope repeatedly and minutely edited the thick volumes of his Works and

Letters.

In fact, Pope’s letters suggest that he found his Homeric translations tiresome and

fatiguing in part because he believed the work was beneath him. It may be unimportant that

much of his work on Homer was done on the backs of letters to save paper – paper, after all, was

expensive and Pope not yet wealthy – but it certainly is important that although he included short

translated poems he chose not to include his Homeric translations in early editions of his Works.

His personal letters are even more telling. In a teasing letter to Cromwell, Pope declares, “I

would lay out all my Poetry in Love; an Original for a Lady, & a Translation for a Waiting

Maid” (12 Dec, 1711, I.137-8). The claim is hyperbole, but his hierarchy is telling. Pope’s

original works are worthy of the gentry, and he shows his pique that they are not enough to win

him the favour that he craves. But although his translations began his career, showcase his skill,

and earn him his first entry into society, Pope calls them less than his originals, worthy of the

lower orders.

Given this letter, written two years before Pope announced his intention to translate the

Iliad, it may seem surprising that Pope chose to translate Homer, a massive undertaking for

someone who claimed not to value translation. Another, more serious, letter to Caryll describes

206

Although Pope invented spurious authors for his notes and Warburton posthumously attributed many them to

others, Valerie Rumbold declares it “overwhelmingly likely” that most of the notes are by Pope. Valerie

Rumbold, Introduction to The Dunciad in Four Books, by Alexander Pope (New York: Routledge, 2009), 2.

112

Pope as shrinking, “by due Gradation of dullness, from a poet to a translator, and from a

translator to a mere editor,” belying his praise of judgement in the introduction to the Iliad and

clearly showing Pope’s hierarchy of writers (26 Oct, 1722, II.140). He later discusses this

hierarchy publicly in his Dunciad, where he belittles Grub Street translation and bemoans his

own fate at having been forced for “ten years to comment and translate” (V.336) when he could

have been creating his own poetry. In these letters and poems he seems to be wondering “if he

was anything more than a dull drudge,” a position which he refutes by the very existence of the

poem surrounding these lines but which displays an evident worry about his own originality and

reputation.207

In his relationship with his translations, Pope shows the increasing demand of eighteenth-

century writers for ‘original’ writing. While Addison, by the mid-century, claimed that “Wit and

fine writing doth not consist so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that

are known an agreeable turn,” this was a contested claim, as Addison’s phrasing demonstrates.208

The two views of wit that Addison outlines in this quotation existed simultaneously throughout

the seventeenth and eighteenth century, demonstrating a conflicted desire for both originality and

adaptation. Indeed, while translation was a respectable occupation during the period, Theo

Hermans points out that much of the Renaissance discussion of translation was depreciatory.209

Edward Young, one of the most prominent writers on originality in the period, claimed that

“thoughts, when become too common, should lose their currency” and be replaced by newer

207

Griffin, Poet in Poems, 228. 208

Joseph Addison, Critical Essays from the Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1970), 59. 209

Theo Hermans, “Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation,” in The Manipulation of

Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, ed. Theo Hermans (London: Routledge, 2014), 103-35.

113

ideas and plots.210

Pope was especially polarising in this debate and his prominence as a writer

drew Young to attack him both for his Heroic couplets, which he claimed put “half Homer to

death” and his lack of originality, insisting that adapted work “differs as much from an Original,

as the moon from the sun” and that even “supposing Pope’s Iliad to have been perfect in its kind;

yet it is a Translation” and therefore automatically inferior to original work, offering only a pale

reflection of Homer’s “masculine melody.” 211

While Young approved neither of Pope’s verse

nor his subject, however, Theophilus Cibber declared that “a line of his is more musical than any

other line can be made” and that Pope “discovers invention” as well as “fine designing, and

admirable execution” in his original works and his translations.212

Pope worried about the

negative aspects of translation, “the imposition of severe constraints on [his] imaginative

freedom, a sense of belatedness pregnant with suspicions of inferiority,” and the “sheer

toilsomeness” of retreading ground that had been broken by many poets before him.213

Pat Rogers who calls Pope’s focus on translation and editing “a break in creative

activity,” rather than accepting that this was a period of intense creative work, follows in the

footsteps of writers like Young who ignore translation’s importance and difficulty.214

Despite

critiques, translation was still one of the most well-respected, and lucrative, forms of writing.

Pope’s publication of the Iliad, whose first popular duodecimo edition sold out of 2,500 copies

within six months, made him wealthy enough to begin work on a villa to rival those of his titled

friends.215

In fact, Pope’s adaptive translation of Homer was so popular that it encouraged him to

210

Edward Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” in The Works in Prose, of the Reverend Edward Young,

LL.D (London, 1765), 281. 211

Young, “Original Composition,” 61. 212

Theophilus Cibber, Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1753), V.249. 213

Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life, 6. 214

Pat Rogers, Alexander Pope: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), i. 215

David Foxon and James McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon

114

extend his editorial office. While Pope’s scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s Works, in which he

“played fast and loose with the evidence of Shakespeare’s text,” deserves to be dismissed as a

portrait of Shakespeare, it demonstrates Pope’s intensely creative editorial work, showing the

same sensibility and focus which he brought to his translations.216

Following his usual liberal

practice, Pope removed “over fifteen hundred lines” of Shakespeare’s which he thought were too

vulgar to suit his audience and therefore too vulgar to have really been Shakespeare’s.217

He uses

footnotes, as he used his endnotes in the Iliad and Odyssey, to showcase his judgement,

highlighted in a comprehensive preface that allows Pope to guide his readers to important

interventions. Pope begins the preface to his Shakespeare edition in the same way he does the

preface of the Iliad, separating his author’s invention from his own judgement. His language

reflects the contemporary debate over originality, and instead of discussing a generalized idea of

invention, he calls Shakespeare “an Original.”218

But as in his preface to Homer, Pope qualifies

his praise, showing the need for editorial judgement. Although, Pope says, Shakespeare “has

certainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse, than any other.”219

By attributing

whatever is “wrong” in Shakespeare to his “Publishers,” and the “ignorance of the Players,”

Pope gives himself licence to change the text, elevating his own edition and judgement over past

readers of Shakespeare.220

Moreover, just as Pope shared the work of the Odyssey with Broome

and Fenton, so he shared the edition of Shakespeare with a group of “hired assistants” who

Press, 1991), 58.

216 Randall McLeod [Random Cloud pseud.], “‘The very names of the Persons’: Editing and the Invention of

Dramatic Character,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed.

David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 88-89. 217

Paul Baines, The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (New York: Routledge, 2000), 27. 218

Alexander Pope, The Works of Shakespear (London, 1725), ii. 219

Pope, Works of Shakespear, iv. 220

Pope, Works of Shakespear, xiv.

115

“eased” him of “a considerable amount of [the] drudgery” of production.221

This brief treatment

shows some of the ways in which Pope treated his scholarly edition like a translation, to a very

mixed effect.

Pope’s youthful attempt at an epic followed the same lines as his translation and edition,

collecting “all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece: there was Milton’s style in

part, and Cowley’s in another; here the style of Spenser imitated, and there of Statius; here

Homer and Virgil, and there Ovid and Claudian.”222

An ambitious project for a young man, it

shows his focus on judgement and improvement rather than on invention.223

Pope used this focus

and his connection to ancient writers throughout his career to gain a wider audience, more

lucrative prospects, and a platform to speak about himself.

Manliness and Morality

Pope was already a household name when he began the translation of Homer that he

hoped would permanently establish his reputation. If the ultimate result of this translation was to

tarnish his reputation, this was due to no failure in his efforts to emphasize his moral and manly

character. It would be redundant to list all of the ways in which Pope’s size, illness, education,

and religion worked to render him uneasy in his social world. The charges of irreligion,

effeminacy, and social climbing which were levelled against him are well known among scholars

of the eighteenth century. Mack spends much of his biography arguing against such charges and

presenting Pope as a consistently pious man who focuses on friendship first and sees titles as

221

Leopold Damrosch, Jr, The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 1987), 126; George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1934), 234. 222

Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (London, 1820), 48. 223

Reuben Brower, Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 283.

116

proof of virtue rather than something to be sought after, and Carolyn Williams examines

accusations of femininity, insisting that Pope’s only way to “‘make a man of himself’” was to

publish “a translation of Homer” and to establish his abilities in the field of classical learning.224

Translating Homer, who Pope’s contemporaries viewed as “the source of a true and significant

picture of the moral and human universe,” offered Pope one opportunity to display both his

manliness and his morality.225

Both manliness and morality are complex terms tied to diverse and sometimes opposing

markers.226

Eighteenth-century ideas of morality consisted of a mixture of religious,

philosophical, and societal positions which were closely tied to gender and status. Manliness was

a marker of class and status within one’s class even more than sexual difference, signifying not

only a physical state but also a position of social power and a moral position of power over

oneself.227

Both manliness and morality were defined and opposed by effeminacy, which

signalled subordination, susceptibility to temptation, and lack of originality in men as well as in

women.228

Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘manly’ as “firm, brave, stout, undaunted,

undismayed” shows how manliness was defined by opposition to the feminine qualities of fear,

timidity, and malleability, and especially by the will and ability to carry one’s point.229

224

Carolyn Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness (New York: Routledge, 1993), 57; Stephen Gregg, Defoe’s

Writings and Manliness (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 43-4; Henry Carey, “A Satyr on the Luxury and

Effeminacy of the Age,” Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1729), 29. 225

Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius, 7. 226

R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 76. 227

Susan S. Lanser, “Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.2

(1999): 179-198; Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England,

1660-1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.3 (1995): 295-322; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and

Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 83-93; 411; Stephen Gregg,

“Defoe’s Good Men in Bad Times,” in The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature, ed. Andrew P.

Williams (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 151; Andrew P. Williams, “Soft Women and Softer Men: The

Libertine Maintenance of Masculine Identity,” in The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature, 108-10. 228

Raymond Stephanson, The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750 (Philadelphia: The University

of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 229

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755).

117

Pope’s hyper-masculine presentation in the Iliad, and what Christa Knellwolf calls his

“numerous explicit statements” that “women are morally and mentally weak,” must be read in

the context of the attacks he faced throughout his life.230

His heroic claims are an attempt to

defend and establish his reputation in the face of repeated attacks on his manliness, his writing,

and his very humanity. The best-known of these attacks today appears in Lady Mary Wortley-

Montagu’s “Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book Of Horace,”

where she sneers at Pope for choosing to “libel those who cannot write” because he is incapable

of beating them as he ought, comparing his wit to “The female scold’s” use of “weakness” as a

“defence.”231

She mocks his attempt to join in the masculine world of letters, insisting that

without a strong physical body he will only be responded to as a woman. Finally she does her

best to remove him from humanity entirely, describing him as a “carcase” whose body is “the

Emblem of [his] crooked Mind,” given to him “by God’s own Hand” as an outward sign of his

alienation from mankind.232

Pope’s body, Lady Mary writes, is inextricably connected to his

works.

Thine is just such an image of his [Horace’s] pen,

As thou thyself art of the sons of men,

Where our own species in burlesque we trace,

A sign-post likeness of the human race,

That is at once resemblance and disgrace.233

230

Christa Knellwolf, A Contradiction Still: Representations of Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope (New York:

Manchester University Press, 1999), 14. 231

Mary Wortley Montagu [a lady pseud.], Verses Address’d to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of

Horace (London, 1733), 6. 232

Montagu, Verses, 4. 233

Montagu, Verses, 8.

118

She plays on an established image of Pope’s body as a twisted, misshapen, barely human thing

“at once resemblance and disgrace” to the real men who look at it in order to refute the

resemblance to classical writers that Pope uses his translations to establish.

Claims like this naturally enhanced Pope’s fear of inferiority and his acute desire for a

good reputation and a positive self-image. Lady Mary’s satire is one of the most famous, but it is

only one among many of the responses which struck as much at Pope’s physical deformity as at

the flaws in his poetry. The casually cruel crudity of eighteenth-century criticism meant that

critics of Pope’s works often found it expedient to attack Pope directly rather than to focus on his

writing. In Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput, Pope is defined by his appearance. His size, the

writer claims, is a “Security from Slander” despite “those great ladies who do nothing without

him.” Pope is a “harmless Creature” whose pen is not only his sole weapon but one that is only

drawn “in defence of their Beauty or to second their revenge” or, at best, “in privately

transcribing and passing for his own, the elaborate Studies of some more learned Genius.”234

Pope’s size makes him both inadequate and feminine, which, in eighteenth-century parlance,

bars him from the violent masculine world.

John Dennis is among the first to connect Pope’s unmanly body with an unmanly mind.

Although Dennis’ pamphlet on the “Essay on Criticism” begins by pointing out real logical flaws

in Pope’s argument, Dennis turns in his last pages to a personal attack which focuses on Pope’s

physical characteristics. Not only is Pope a bad poet, he is “a Creature,” a “hunch-back’d toad”

rather than a man. In a reverse of Lady Mary, who declares that Pope’s unmanly body created his

unmanly works, Dennis declares that he has “taken a Survey of [Pope’s] inward Man” and has

used his writing to discover the deformities of “his outward Person.” This is all bad enough, but

234

Gulliver [pseud.], Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput (London, 1727), 16-17.

119

Dennis’ triumphant conclusion not only claims that “a Survey” of Pope’s body makes it clear

that he is not “a proper Author to make personal reflections on others,” he also makes Pope’s

body actually inhuman, a “Spectre,” and declares that had Pope been born in Greece, where a

parent had the right to dispose of their children as they pleased, “his Life had been no longer than

that of one of his poems, the Life of half a day.”235

Dennis claims that even this is inadequate and

that

his inward Man is ten times more ridiculous; it being impossible that his Outward

Form, tho’ it should be that of a downright Monkey, should differ so much from

human Shape, as his immaterial thinking part does from human understanding.236

Here Dennis has created an image that will endure throughout Pope’s career – that of Pope as the

small, hunchbacked monkey grinning over his writing. That this picture stuck is a tribute

Dennis’s success in reflecting the spirit of the time, and demonstrates the link between Pope’s

physical and mental abilities that he was never able to overcome.

Dennis’ continual references to Pope as a “little” author or a “very little . . . Creature”237

touch one of the poet’s sore points. Pope always resented his stature, and from Mack’s Life to

Williams’ Manliness it has become standard to talk of Pope’s early translation of Statius’

Thebaid as a celebration of the shortness of the epic hero.238

Later, Pope refined his boyish

attempt to derive manliness from translation. He removes the passage on Tydeus’s triumphant

battle from his published translation of the Thebaid in order to make it fit for publication, but he

retains the ideals which this work inspired in his translation of the Iliad (Pope to Cromwell, 19

235

John Dennis, Reflections Critical and Satirical upon a late Rhapsody Called, an Essay upon Criticism (London,

1711), 26, 28-9. 236

Dennis, Reflections, 29. 237

John Dennis, A True Character of Mr. Pope and His Writings (London, 1716), 4. 238

Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness, 61.

120

June, 1709, I.37). Tydeus, one of the heroes of the Thebaid, is described in Pope’s Homer as one

“whose little Body lodg’d a mighty mind” and who, as Pope points out in his Observations,

“fought and overcame the Thebans even tho’ Minerva forbade him,” (VII.314) in direct contrast

to Homer’s Hector, a hero of more traditional stature.

In his relationship to Hector, Pope clearly defines himself against both Homer and

Homer’s commentators, establishing the primacy of his judgement and editorial intervention. In

one of his semi-public letters239

to the Duke of Buckingham, Pope announces that he is “shock’d

at the flight of Hector upon the first appearance of Achilles,” and that “to shew [him] self a true

Commentator, if not a true Critick . . . [he] will endeavour to excuse, if not to defend it” (Pope to

Buckingham, 1 Sept 1718, I.492). In the letter, he suggests that Hector’s failure is due to his

certainty that his cause is not only doomed but morally wrong. In his note for this section of the

Iliad, however, Pope expands on this suggestion, both explaining and condemning Hector.

At the beginning of his note, Pope quotes his friend Lord Peterborough, who he claims

was an exceptionally brave man but who said, “Shew me but a certain Danger, and I shall be as

much afraid as any of you” (VIII.461) and it is on these lines that Pope offers a defence.

Granting that Hector was afraid of Achilles and that he fled, Pope gives four reasons in why this

behaviour might not negate Hector’s courage.

Pope’s reasons focus on Hector’s manliness and morality. Beginning on the purely

physical level, with the fact that Hector could not best Achilles, Pope works his way to the final

claim that Hector’s flight was as much a flight from his city’s moral failings as from any sort of

physical danger. Pope uses Mme. Dacier both as a source and as a foil throughout this note,

239

Amy Smith, “Naming the Un‐’Familiar’: Formal Letters and Travel Narratives in Late Seventeenth‐ And

Eighteenth‐Century Britain,” Review of English Studies 54 (2003): 178-202.

121

saying that he and his readers “may observe with Dacier” the terror which Achilles inspires

(VIII.461). Connecting this terror with Dacier, whose femininity he continually references,

allows Pope to undermine the argument’s efficacy as a bolster to Hector’s manliness.

Instead of being satisfied that Hector’s actions are those of a reasonable man in fear of his

life, Pope continues to offer reasons why his contemporaries should excuse Hector’s flight. The

physical danger, he suggests, is secondary to the moral situation in which Hector, through little

fault of his own, has been placed. Pope’s third ‘reason’ for Hector’s flight is not a discussion of

his flight at all but a fatalistic discussion of why he stayed to watch Achilles in the first place,

why he was still in danger and not hidden safely behind the walls of Troy with the rest of his

companions.

Emphasizing Hector’s inherently staunch, manly nature, Pope reminds readers that

Hector, unlike the rest of the Trojans, was willing to stand face to face with Achilles. Pope’s

Hector muses on the shame of acting like his fellow warriors “Woman-like to fall, and fall

without a Blow,” embedding Pope’s defence of Hector within the text of the Iliad (VIII.460). In

his notes, Pope admits that this shame has been looked on as a fault by Eustathius, and that

Homer explains Hector’s immobility as the “Will of Heaven” rather than as a virtue, but carefully

refrains from commenting on this judgement himself. Although Hector’s death dooms Troy,

Pope seems to approve of his courage in facing Achilles.

It is “no part of a Hero’s Character to be impious” Pope grandly concludes (VIII.462).

While he establishes Hector’s real physical danger and his courage in attempting an attack, Pope

concludes by suggesting that the only real excuse would be impiety. “Deprest [sic] by Heaven”

as Pope insists, Hector sees himself as already shamed, dragged into an impious act, and deserted

by the gods (VIII.461). In this context, Achilles appears not as an attacking man but as a god

122

come to punish Troy’s misdoings. If Achilles takes the place of a god, then a firm stance would

show disrespect to the gods. In the very next paragraph, however, Pope rejects all of these to

declare that Hector’s flight is dishonorable, but he redeems himself by turning at the end, and

acting as though he indeed has “A brave Man’s soul” which is “still capable of rouzing [sic]

itself and acting honorably in the last Struggles” (VIII.462). Pope presents a conception of

manhood that is hard to live up to, condemning one of the greatest heroes for a single failure in

courage.

Even as his note condemns Hector, Pope’s translation mitigates Hector’s actions. While

the Greek shows that “Ἕκτορα δ᾽, ὡς ἐνόησεν, ἕλε τρόμος: οὐδ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἔτλη / αὖθι μένειν,

ὀπίσω δὲ πύλας λίπε, βῆ δὲ φοβηθείς:” (Hector was grasped by trembling that did not suffer him

to stay, but left the gates behind him and ran in fear,) and Pope’s English predecessor and

inspiration, John Ogilby, moves from a neutral description of Achilles as a man whose “Armes

like Lightning Shone” to a declaration of Hector’s fear, Pope adjures any description of Hector’s

terror.240

Instead, Pope’s translation focuses on the cause of Hector’s fear, describing Achilles

not merely as “ἐλάμπετο εἴκελος αὐγῇ” (shining like the light of the sun) but as shooting forth

“trembling Rays” like “Jove’s own Lightning” (VIII.460-1) around him.241

By transferring

Hector’s shivers and trembling to the light itself and describing Achilles as “dreadful” or

inspiring of dread, Pope transfers the effects of cowardice from Hector to the reader.

Moving beyond Hector’s emotion to his reaction, Pope removes Hector’s volition to

mitigate the charge of cowardice and writes, not that he is terrified, but that he is “struck by some

God” and under that irresistible influence, “he fears, recedes, and flies” (VIII.461), and it is to

240

“Homer, Iliad,” Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, accessed Feb 29, 2016,

http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc1:22.224-22.259, XXII.136-7; John

Ogilby, Homer, his Iliads translated (London, 1660), 461. 241

“Homer, Iliad,” XXII.134.

123

this line that Pope’s long note excusing Hector’s flight is attached. Compare this to the same line

in Ogilby, who declares that “When Hector saw AEcides draw near /He stay’d no longer, struck

with suddain Fear.”242

Pope recedes from the reality of Hector’s fear by insisting on the

responsibility of an unknown god rather than of his hero.

Ogilby’s Hector declares that “I shall no more/ fly thee” and in the original Greek

Achilles says “οὔ σ᾽ ἔτι Πηλέος υἱὲ φοβήσομαι,” (No more, son of Peleus, will I flee from

you).243

Pope, on the contrary, edits his Homer so that Hector spares no circumlocution to excuse

his flight. Perhaps ashamed of his actions, Pope’s Hector avoids the subject position. “Troy,” he

says, “has viewed / Her Walls thrice circled, and her Chief pursu’d” (VIII.469) His phrasing

rejects responsibility, reporting his own panicked flight around the walls of his city in passive

voice and without description. Pope is usually more rather than less descriptive than Homer, and

the brief and spare description in this section highlights Pope’s editorial changes.244

Repeating the phrasing of Pope’s narrator in describing the flight itself, Hector declares

that “some God within me bids me try / Thine, or my Fate: I kill thee, or I die” (VIII.469). This

sentence, like the last, opens by rejecting responsibility, volition, and the subject position, but

then immediately reverses itself as Hector make the standard heroic declaration, “I kill thee, or I

die.” Hector’s sudden shift in subject reflects his shift in tone. Abandoning responsibility for his

past actions, he begins again. From this point on, Pope’s Hector speaks as though he has just

stepped onto the battlefield, ready for a new day. His declaration that “I kill thee, or I die”

sounds almost as though he is the challenger, heroically stepping forward to throw down the

gauntlet, rather than the reluctant acceptor of Achilles’s challenge, cornered and unable to flee.

242

Ogilby, Homer, 461. 243

Ogilby, Homer, 464; “Homer, Iliad,” XXII.250. 244

Morgan Strawn, “Homer, Sentimentalism, and Pope’s Translation of ‘The Iliad,’” Studies in English Literature

53.3 (2012): 585-608.

124

Pope’s Hector shows more courage and willingness to stand firm than does Homer’s, but

Pope still chastises him for being unable to resist the influence of the gods. While Pope’s Hector

is less fearful, he is also more condemned than the original Hector. Looking down over the

battlefield, Jove watches Hector’s panicked flight and sighs.

‘ὢ πόποι ἦ φίλον ἄνδρα διωκόμενον περὶ τεῖχος

ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶμαι: ἐμὸν δ᾽ ὀλοφύρεται ἦτορ

Ἕκτορος, ὅς μοι πολλὰ βοῶν ἐπὶ μηρί᾽ ἔκηεν

Ἴδης ἐν κορυφῇσι πολυπτύχου, ἄλλοτε δ᾽ αὖτε

ἐν πόλει ἀκροτάτῃ: νῦν αὖτέ ἑ δῖος Ἀχιλλεὺς

ἄστυ πέρι Πριάμοιο ποσὶν ταχέεσσι διώκει.

(Oh shame! He the beloved one forced to run about the wall, these eyes of mine see and

my heart laments Hector, who to I myself has many times cried and thigh-bones kindled

on Ida’s heights, and at other times in the city of Troy: now again is heavenly Achilles

pursuing him round about the city of Priam on swift feet.)245

Ogilby’s Jove is equally moved by the sight of “One whom I much respect . . . And needs must

pity” being “pursued” by Achilles.246

Compare this to the reaction of Pope’s Jove, who cries,

Unworthy Sight! The Man, belov’d of Heav’n,

Behold, inglorious round yon’ City driv’n!

My Heart partakes the gen’rous Hector’s Pain;

Hector, whose Zeal whole Hecatombs has slain,

Whose grateful Fumes the Gods reciev’d with Joy,

245

“Homer, Iliad,” XXII.168-173. 246

Ogilby, Homer, 462.

125

From Ida’s Summits, and the Tow’rs of Troy :

Now see him flying! to his Fears resign’d,

And Fate, and fierce Achilles, close behind. (VIII.464-5)

Taking the opposite part to Pope’s narrator and to Hector himself, Pope’s accusations of

unworthiness are in stark opposition to the original’s lament over a worthy and beloved hero.

This differentiates his translation from his predecessors, including Mme. Dacier, whose

translation of the passage runs:

Jupiter, rompant le silence, leur dit ; «Je vois donc dans le plus grand danger un

homme que j’aime! Je ne puis n’être pas touché du malheur d’Hector, qui m’a

offert tant de sacrifices sur les sommets du mont Ida et dans la haute forteresse de

Troie. Voilà Achille qui le poursuit avec la dernière fureur…» (Jupiter, breaking

the silence, says to them, “I see there in the greatest danger a man who I love! I

cannot fail to be touched by the misfortune of Hector, who offered many sacrifices

to me on the summits of mount Ida and in the high fortress of Troy. See Achilles

who pursues him with the final rage…”).247

Pope retains the declaration that Hector is loved, a constant throughout these texts, but Pope’s

Jove dissociates himself from that love. Pope consistently connects Jove with the Christian god,

which makes it imperative for him to dissociate him from faults as much as is possible when

working with Homer’s text. At the same time, the appellation “belov’d of Heaven” which Pope’s

Jove uses is a Christianized form of the personal love that appears in other translations. This

tension, which runs throughout Pope’s translation, is one result of Pope’s attempt to make his

247

Anne Dacier, L’iliade (Paris, 1892), 444-5.

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writing moral, manly, and up-to-date. The notes highlight Pope’s changes, inviting readers to be

aware of and to approve his alterations.

In this case, Pope separates Hector from Jove just as Pope divorces Hector from his fear.

Instead of talking about the sacrifices Hector has made to him, Pope’s Jove references oblations

to “the Gods” and while Pope’s Hector does his best to elude responsibility for his fear, Pope’s

Jove makes all the accusations that Pope’s note ostensibly refutes. Instead of beginning by

describing Hector as beloved and then describing the chase, Jove begins by exclaiming that the

sight of Hector’s flight is “unworthy” and only then admits that Hector is nevertheless beloved.

Pope’s Jove insists on Hector’s unworthiness, on the “inglorious” nature of his flight, and

the “Fears” to which Hector is “resigned.” The position Pope takes here is complicated. He

appears to attempt a mitigation of Hector’s ‘unmanly’ actions, but in fact Pope’s alterations

highlight and castigate Hector’s flight. While Pope defends Hector in his commentary, offering a

nod to human fallibility and to his own position as someone who, due to his physical deformity,

is unable to demonstrate the type of courage that he wishes Hector to show, his final position

rejects Hector’s actions. Crippled himself, Pope displays little sympathy for the man whose

perfect physique is not matched by perfect courage.

Pope’s response to the death of Patroclus, who is struck from behind by a god, stunned by

the spear of another fighter, and finally killed by Hector while he is attempting to flee the battle,

is much less mixed. Although he tells the story as it is written, and concedes that “no Mortal” can

compete with Homer for “Wisdom, Learning, and all good Qualities,” he declares that he feels

like he is following not Homer the great writer of epics but “Don Quixote,” the crazy parody of

romance. Pope portrays himself “at a loss to excuse” this manner of his death (VIII. 283-4). It

seems, like the flight and defeat of Hector, to contradict the manly principles which Pope

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ascribes to epic, and Pope seizes the opportunity to chide Homer for the deviation. By

condemning Homer’s descriptions, Pope emphasizes his own good judgement.

This judgement is especially visible in Pope’s attempts to make Homer more Christian.

Nearer the end of his preface, Pope attacks Homer’s gross and imperfect “representations of the

gods” as well as displaying “vicious and imperfect manners” in his heroes (VII.14). Although

Homer has many thoughts that are “sublime and noble,” he also has “many thoughts that are low

and vulgar” (VII.9) by eighteenth-century standards, and Pope attacks these thoughts in his notes

while often replacing them, in his text, with his own phrasing. Pope declares that he is joining a

wider debate on Homer’s heroes

It must be a strange partiality to antiquity, to think with Madame Dacier, ‘that

those times and manners are so much the more excellent, as they are more

contrary to ours.’ Who can be so prejudiced in their favour as to magnify the

felicity of those ages, when a spirit of revenge and cruelty, joined with the

practice of rapine and robbery, reigned through the world: when no mercy was

shown but for the sake of lucre; when the greatest princes were put to the sword,

and their wives and daughters made slaves and concubines? (VII.14)

This move was one part of Pope’s attempt to inflate his own reputation by praising his own era.

While Madame Dacier and others claim that the further Homer’s world was from their own the

more virtuous it was (VII.li), Pope praises his own society. This allows him to use the morally

problematic moments in the poem that he has chosen to translate as a display of his superiority,

not only over Addison and those others who defend these moments, but over Homer himself.

Beginning a lengthy note on Juno by claiming the moral high ground, Pope declares that

Juno’s deception of Jove contains the greatest amount of “Impiety and Absurdity” (VIII.166) of

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any story from its period. His note takes up two and a half pages of the modern version, and took

up considerably more space on the original, with its larger print and wider margins, creating a

visible moment of intervention in the text. Denigrating the tendency of ancient writers to write

their gods as human and fallible, Pope sets himself as the arbiter of the existing conversation

while distancing himself from the criticism of Homer by quoting from M. de St. Evremond.

Pope snidely claims that some “mystical or allegorical sense might atone for the

appearing Impiety” of the passage and create an “Excuse” for Homer. This insistence that Homer

needs an excuse overlays his own century’s moral code onto the classical writer and shows how

deeply Pope believes in his own correctness. His warning that readers should withhold

judgement “lest what we decry as wrong in the Poet, should prove only a Fault in his Religion”

(VIII.167), emphasizes Pope’s certainty that there is a “Fault” and one that he is qualified to

judge.

Pope’s alterations to the text of the Iliad are visible from the very beginning of the story

of Juno’s description of her husband where he emphasizes the numinous rather than the human

nature of the gods. His Juno “trembles at the Sight” (VII.168) of her husband, and even when he

is about to be deceived, Pope’s Jove is still “all-beholding” (VIII.168) and awe- inspiring. Even

Juno, the deceiver, is viewed “With Awe divine” (VII.172) in Pope’s version of the poem.

Pope’s claim to “give up the morality” (VIII.166) of Book XIV, which tells the tale of

Juno’s seduction of Zeus, is a refinement on Addison, whose moral interpretation of the tale is

criticized in Haywood’s The Female Spectator for ignoring the Homeric context and ratifying

the deceit practiced by Juno upon her husband. While Pope quotes Addison’s lines in the Tatler

without open judgement, he positions this quotation as the capstone to a note that has been

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consistently skeptical of Homer’s morals.248

Pope’s overtly neutral description of Addison as

“ingenious” further emphasizes Pope’s dubious response to this interpretation. When he returns

to the question later, he ironically calls Juno’s deception a “Propriety in the Character of the

Fair” and a “Folly which in all Ages has possest her Sex” (VIII.171).

In the part of Homer’s story that is supposedly impossible to reconcile to Christian

morality, Pope finds a very different moral message than Addison does. While Addison focuses

on the fact that Juno dresses herself up to prepare herself for her husband, comparing her to

slovenly modern women, Pope focuses on the simplicity of her dress, comparing her favourably

to the modern woman who requires “Washes for the Face,” “Dies for the Hair,” and so many

“artificial embellishments” that they require a “Tire-Woman, or waiting maid” to help them dress

(VIII.169). Pope connects this to biblical stories, comparing Homer’s image of Juno dressing to

Isaiah’s critical description of Asiatic women’s dress, and then turning “to ask the Ladies, which

they should like best to imitate” (VIII.170). Pope offers a sermon to his readership in this note,

combining moral teaching with scriptural reference.

In passages like this, Pope asks readers to notice his attention to the ways in which he

has, as Joseph Spence declares, made Homer “resemble our sacred Writings.”249

Pope’s choice to

emphasize these passages and to play up their scriptural connections shows his attempt to

demonstrate what Spence calls his “virtuous generous soul” (Spence I.105). On the one hand, the

Christian ideas he incorporated in his translation displayed his own virtue and morality. On the

other hand, he can blame Homer’s pagan beliefs for any places in his text which do not suit the

sensibilities of his contemporaries. This allows Pope to claim superiority throughout the text,

248

Joseph Addison, The Tatler (London, 1777), I.183. 249

Joseph Spence, An Essay on Pope’s Odyssey (London, 1726), 104. Cited as Spence.

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claiming the moral high ground both in places where Homer is aligned with Christian virtues and

in places where he is not. Using Homer to improve his reputation, for Pope, meant showing that

he understood Homer’s moral purpose and bringing him closer to Scriptural ideas.

Commenting at length on Homer’s hero and gods and rejecting the popular image of

Homer as the arbiter of morality, Pope positions his own judgement against Homer’s. Homer,

these passages and their commentary implies, simply did not understand the demands of the

manly virtues as thoroughly as Pope and his contemporaries do. This finicky reaction to Homer’s

text is not merely a personal response. By placing himself against Homer, in direct opposition to

his declaration in the Essay on Criticism that “Those are but Stratagems which Errors seem, Nor

is it Homer Nods, but We that Dream” (I.261), Pope displays his ability to refine and improve on

his predecessors, and even on Homer himself.

Horace

After his great effort on the Homeric translations, Pope looked for a form which allowed

him to retain his connection to ancient writers but gave him fuller control, and found it in his

“Imitations of Horace.” Howard Weinbrot, who established the autobiographical nature of

Pope’s response to Horace’s satires, examines Pope’s claims about his life in the satires. In these,

as in his Homeric translations, Pope simultaneously connects himself to his works and elevates

himself above his author.250

More recently, James Turner, Laura Brown, and Brean Hammond

have questioned the authenticity of Pope’s self-presentation.251

Despite Pope’s claims that

250

Howard D. Weinbrot, Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1982). 251

James Grantham Turner, “Pope’s Libertine Self-fashioning,” The Eighteenth Century 29.2 (1988): 123-144;

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“taking to imitating was not out of vanity, but humility,” Pope’s imitations were a self-conscious

boast.252

What is missing from these is a clear connection between Pope’s self-conscious

editorial strategies in his imitations and his translations and earlier editorial work. Seen together,

these are part of a larger strategy that uses translations to shape Pope’s self-presentation in ways

that original writing could not.

Horace’s autobiographical style presents him as exactly what Pope was or wanted to be:

an “upwardly mobile” self-made man who was lionized for his innate talent.253

In fact, as

Gowers points out, Horace’s style is so autobiographical, especially in his first book of satires,

that some readers have taken his statements in his satire as purely factual accounts of his life, and

the question of how much of Horace’s literary persona is autobiographical and how much

fictional has become a popular subject amongst classical scholars.254

Pope’s advertisement to the

first of his Horatian imitations claims that he felt this “Answer from Horace” was more

compelling than “any I cou’d have made in my own person” (IV.3). Although this appears to

disclaim Pope’s own authorship, in his very next sentence he speaks of “the Example of much

greater Freedom in so eminent a Divine as Dr. Donne” in copying Horace, inviting readers to

discover the liberties that he has taken with his author.

Pope uses his connection to Horace to disguise his hubris as faithfulness to his original,

but at the same time he encourages readers to search for his changes. Horace was a friend to the

leading politicians of his own day, and, unlike Pope, could therefore afford to ignore libel laws,

Laura Brown, Alexander Pope, ed. Terry Eagleton (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1985); Brean Hammond,

introduction to Pope (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1-25. 252

Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, 49. 253

Emily Gowan, “Fragments of Autobiography in Horace Satires I,” Classical Antiquity 22.1 (2003): 55-91. 254

Ellen Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13-14.

132

but here he flatters a patron by comparing himself to a Lucilius who is dedicated to Virtue.255

Elsewhere in Horace, Lucilius is treated more ambiguously, and even here his virtue is the grace

of a man whose openness and looseness Horace gently mocks even as he claims it for his own.

Pope takes the lines as purely laudatory and reorients his translation so that he takes Lucilius’

place throughout. 256

Pope translates Horace’s phrase, “TO VIRTUE ONLY and HER FRIENDS,

A FRIEND” (IV.16-17). With its large capital letters, this is “the loudest statement in the poem,”

showing a “self-assured egotism” that David Fairer argues Pope makes acceptable by presenting

it as “part of a conversation between texts.”257

Griffin points out that when this change was

discovered, Pope reverted to less pointed italics in an attempt to rebut charges of hypocrisy,

suggesting a hope that translation would hide his hubris from unfriendly eyes.258

Pope’s position, as the friend of rebels, exiles, and Catholics, also sharpens the line so

that it leads to a very different conclusion. Horace, who Pope criticized as a flatterer to a tyrant,

can “pull Caesar out of his hat” at the end of the poem as his final defender.259

When Pope,

always quarreling with those in power, does the same thing, it becomes an attack on the

willingness of critics to accept Walpole’s ruling even in literary matters. But Pope also

appropriates Homer’s claim to be a friend to the virtuous men of his day, applying it to himself

rather than to his model. Here, as in his letters, Pope gives friendship a central place and defends

himself against accusations that he had been an ungrateful friend.

255

Frances Muecke, “Law, Rhetoric, and Genre in Horace, Satires 2.1,” in Homage to Horace: A Bimillenary

Celebration, ed. S.J. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 203. 256

Weinbrot, Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire, 46, 299. 257

David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 62. 258

Griffin, Poet in Poems, 15. 259

Weinbrot, “Pope and the Classics,” 81-3; Michèle Lowrie, “Slander and Horse Law in Horace, Sermones 2.1,”

Law and Literature 17.3 (2005): 417.

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Where Horace humorously associates his choice to write satire with “a series of

criminals,” with “two wild beasts and an even more savage human being,” and with “the highly

unnatural but effective arts of criminals,”260

Pope has worked to contrast himself with the same.

Pope follows tradition in rendering the Latin of Horace’s text

Quid faciam? . . .

quot capitum vivunt, totidem studiorum

Milia: me pedibus delectat claudere verba

(What should I do? . . . .

for each person that lives there are as many thousand studies:

for me, it is sweet to shut up words into metrical feet)

But in his imitation, Pope separates the ideas that Horace connects. The first line of this

quotation appears in response to Horace’s examples of a fool and two famous athletes,

connecting these to his writing, but Pope moves this section. Instead of connecting the fools to

his own practice, he replaces Horace’s question, “What should I do?” with a statement that

“Each Mortal has his Pleasure” (IV.9) and a strident declaration that “None deny” the pleasures

of the flesh to fools. While these fools are allowed to eat and drink until they make themselves

ill, Pope’s imitation claims, Pope is not allowed his own pleasure and must defend himself.

While the Latin text connects the two types of pleasure, Pope’s English imitation

separates the pleasure of fools from his own, beginning a new sentence to describe the pleasures

which he enjoys. He loves, he claims, “to pour out all myself” and he again commandeers the

description Horace gives to Lucilius, describing himself as plain, open, and fully exposed in his

260

William S. Anderson, “Ironic Preambles and Satiric Self-Definition in Horace "Satire" 2.1,” Pacific Coast

Philology 19.1 (1984): 40.

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text. This shift, which distances Pope from previous examples and identifies him with Horace’s

moral example presents Pope as a more virtuous, less foolish version of Horace.

Modern interpretations differ as to the seriousness of Horace’s defence. He is generally

agreed to be witty, but some scholars believe that this satire is “a kind of inspired buffoonery,” or

even “humorous innuendo,” while another view, that which Pope takes here and in his

advertisement, is that Horace’s text offers “a serious discussion of the moral and legal issues

involved with the writing of satire.”261

Whichever Horace would have agreed with, it is clear that

Pope offers a more serious and sustained moral defence against a more serious threat than

Horace faced.

Like translation, formal imitation is a confused topic in English literature. Dryden classed

imitation as a problematic type of translation, and despite his brilliant imitations in “London”

and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Johnson disparaged them in his “Life of Pope.” Johnson

declared that in imitations “nothing was required but to accommodate as he could the sentiments

of an old author to recent facts or familiar images; but what is easy is seldom excellent” and

therefore imitations will “be generally uncouth and party[sic]-coloured; neither original nor

translated, neither ancient nor modern.”262

This same condemnation is directed at translations,

and Pope’s response to such claims shows his worries about appearing derivative. Pope’s

insistence, in his advertisement for the collected poems, that they were written “at the Desire of

the Earl of Oxford . . . and of the Duke of Shrewsbury” (IV.3) shows his defensiveness about his

choice of work.

261

G. Harrison, “The Confessions of Lucilius (Horace Sat. 2.1.30-34). A Defense of Autobiographical Satire?”

Classical Antiquity 6.1 (1987): 39; Kirk Freudenburg, “Horace’s Satiric Program and the Language of

Contemporary Theory in Satires 2.1,” The American Journal of Philology 111.2 (1990): 192, 187. 262

Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

2006), IV.78.

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Writing to Swift, Pope says “I have translated, or rather parodied, another of Horace’s”

satires, demonstrating an underlying uncertainty about his relationship to Horace’s text (2[0]

April, 1733, III.367). Calling his poem both a translation and a parody underscores the

complexity of Pope’s alterations, inviting realization of the fact that Pope’s self-promotion

through these poems replaces Horace’s fundamentally self-deprecating verse. The different titles

under which Pope published his formal imitations echo this linguistic uncertainty. The first satire

is “Imitated” (IV.1), the second “Paraphrased” (IV.51), and the “Sober Advice” which Pope

disclaimed is published with the tag, “Imitated in the Manner of Mr. Pope” (IV.71), the two odes

are given no tags at all, and Pope finally settles into calling the remainder of the poems

“Imitations.” While Richard Steiger shows that the eighteenth century was “a period notoriously

lax about the consistent denotative use of words,”263

Pope’s struggle for an acceptable term here

shows how important these words and their connotations were despite their wide range of use.

Pope’s use of older poems as models, criticized by both modern scholars and

contemporaries, makes him hesitant in assigning a firm name to these imitations.264

He is

uncertain “how far the liberty of Borrowing may extend” and for that reason does not want to

classify them as originals (Letter to Walsh, 2 July 1706, I.19). But Pope needs to foreground the

connection between his poems and Horace’s in order for the poems to succeed. His declaration

that the second satire is “Paraphrased” attempts to find a middle path between calling it a

translation and the exaggerated label of parody he uses in his letter to Swift. The text is, Pope

seems to admit, not altered enough to be a formal imitation, but he refuses to call it a translation

263

Richard Steiger, The English and Latin Texts of Pope’s Imitations of Horace (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,

1988), 7. 264

Richard Terry, “Pope and Plagiarism,” The Modern Language Review 100.3 (2005): 594; Deutsch, Resemblance

& Disgrace, 22.

136

and settles on the word which he must know that Dryden used for interpretations too free to be

acceptable as translations.265

Pope’s unwillingness to write translations was offset by the increased “Dignity” of the

connection to the ancients which formal imitation and translation offers and, which Pope had

already exploited in his Homeric translations (IV.3). Horace was especially apt for Pope, who

needed a defence after his “Epistle to Burlington” involved him in a scandal. As his enemies

accused him of making “a wanton attack on one of his supposed benefactors,” Pope scrambled to

disprove an attack that modern scholars agree he had no intention of making, and in so doing

found himself working to defend his satires and the practice of writing satire itself.266

Pope published many of his imitations separately, and did not include the sort of

defensive preface, simultaneously praising and denigrating originality, that he offered in his Iliad

and his edition of Shakespeare. Indeed, Pope’s advertisement for the collected Imitations of

Horace is closest to that for the Dunciad, which initially promises to include “The Imitations of

the Ancients. . . together with some of the Parodies, and Allusions of the most excellent of the

Moderns” as well as some of his original poems, insisting that his imitations do “the same thing

in jest, which Boileau did in earnest, and upon which Vida, Fracastorius, and many of the most

eminent Latin Poets professedly valued themselves.”267

Pope’s declaration that his models, the

Latin poets, only “professedly” prided themselves on writing translations, imitations, and

conglomerations of foreign works shows Pope’s hesitation, but does not prevent him from taking

part in the same practice.

265

Dryden, Works, IV.87. 266

George Sherburn, “‘Timon’s Villa’ and Cannons,” The Huntington Library Bulletin 8 (1935): 131-2; James R.

Aubrey, “Timon’s Villa: Pope’s Composite Picture,” Studies in Philology 80.3 (1983): 327. 267

Alexander Pope, “Advertisement” in McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning, 88.

137

Pope spoke of his first imitation from Horace “in a tone of disparagement” (IV.xiii),

calling it “the work of two mornings” in a note to Jonathan Richardson and “a slight thing, the

work of two days” in his letter to Caryll (18 Feb 1732/3, III.350 ; 8 March 1732/3, III.353). In

later letters, Pope continues to insist on the shortness of his formal imitation and the speed of its

composition, telling Caryll that though his friends “do not believe me when I speak truth,” he has

written his second formal imitation in “much in the same space of time” as he did the first (20

March, 1732/3, III.358). This stands in stark contrast to the “Epilogue to the Satires,” which

Warton reports was “more diligently laboured, and more frequently corrected than any of our

Author’s compositions.” As was his usual practice, Pope sent his manuscript back to the

publisher many times, and his friend and editor Warton reports that “Every line was written

twice over” by the time his manuscript was finally published.268

The contrast between Pope’s

self-presentation in the first and last of this series shows how his worry about the genre changed.

Instead of fearing that imitations are too low for him, Pope’s “Epilogue” shows him defending

their virtue, morality, manliness, ability, and strength of conviction, the same concerns with

which his Homeric translations were occupied.

Pope’s publication style, followed consistently in editions within his lifetime was to print

“the relevant portions of the Latin original,” facing his English verse.269

This style visually

emphasizes his alterations even as he verbally downplays their craftsmanship. The “Imitations of

Horace” have no scholarly apparatus, but rely on visual differences to display their superiority to

the original. While less overt, Pope’s alterations follow the pattern of inflating his reputation at

the expense of the classical originals that he used in his translation of Homer. Commandeering

268

Joseph Warton, The Works of Alexander Pope (London, 1797), 298. 269

Mack, Alexander Pope, 566.

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Horace’s autobiographical elements and twisting them into straightforward positives in place of

Horace’s own self-deprecating poetry, Pope creates a flattering self-presentation. Even in his

original “Epilogue to the Satires,” Pope continued the autobiographical pattern that he began in

his first satire. Trying to reframe public opinion, he addresses criticisms directly in a dialogue

with an unknown ‘friend, in which he reframes the worry about originality that has plagued his

writing.

“Why now, this moment, don’t I see you steal?” his friend asks, quoting Horace himself

as he accuses Pope of taking his imitations “from Horace,” rather than writing his own work

(IV.297). But the accusation of slavish copying soon reverses itself. “Horace,” Pope has his

accuser say, “was delicate, was nice” (IV.298). This is a direct response to Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu’s accusation that while Horace “is delicate, is clear,” while Pope can only “coarsely

rail” with veiled accusations.270

Pope puts her words in the mouth of his foolish ‘friend’ as an

insult. Pope declares that “Bubo observes” that Horace “lash’d no sort of Vice,” but used

euphemisms to shelter those he accuses. In fact, this is not Horace’s practice at all. While Horace

does recommend using euphemisms in Satire 2.1, he commends this practice for use with one’s

friends, the men of whom it can be said, “He’s a good man, none better.”271

Horace calls for

poets to “assign just penalties to just offences,” and certainly does not scruple to use names both

in praise and in blame.272

When Pope’s friend offers examples to support Horace’s difference

from himself, therefore, Pope is not trying, as Niall Rudd suggests, to “assert his independence”

270

Montagu, Verses, 4. 271

Howard Erskine-Hill, Pope: Horatian Satires and Epistles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 172;

Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1926), 35, 39. 272

Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, 43; Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1966), 132-59.

139

by portraying Horace as “a smooth, malicious toady.”273

Instead, Pope is agreeing with the

accusation of theft and claiming that he prefers theft to the style, “So Latin, yet so English all the

while” which loses satire’s pointedness and ability to wound (IV.304).

In this piece, Pope admits to being unoriginal, something he has already admitted in his

previous translation. In his Homeric translations, Pope responds by balancing originality and

literary judgement; here Pope balances originality with moral judgement, leading the dialogue

away from writing into a discussion of the proper targets of satire, the “Vice and Folly” which

Pope accuses ‘friends’ like Lady Mary of trying to protect (IV.302). Pope does not attempt to

defend his invention here not only because he is not attempting to create an original work but

also because, by disclaiming ownership of the ideas he rephrases, he can avoid discussing his

true fault in these satires – hubris. Pope admits to charges of copying, of harshness, even of

cruelty to those who deserve it, and he uses these to distract readers from the pretension in lines

like these, from the second of the dialogues that make up his “Epilogue to the Satires.”

Names, which I long have lov’d, nor lov’d in vain,

Rank’d with their Friends, not number’d with their Train;

And if yet higher the proud List should end,

Still let me say! No Follower, but a friend. (VI.318)

In lines like these, Pope’s defence against charges of flattery thinly veils a boast about the rank

and quality of his friends, and his quick movement from there to a defence against the charge of

merely flattering those who are his friends allows him yet more scope for puffing himself up. His

verse follows virtue, he claims, but only that of the great. Pope “cannot stoop” to befriend the

“Number,” or the populace. Even “half the Greatest of these days” can barely hope “To ‘scape

273

Niall Rudd, “Pope’s Farewell to Horace: ‘Dialogue’ I, 1-22,” Translation and Literature 14.2 (2005): 244.

140

my Censure, not expect my Praise,” in Pope’s formulation (IV.319). His quick shift from

personal language to the more distancing “a Poet,” “the Muse’s friendship,” and the example of

“Virgil” shows his awareness that he has nearly overstepped his bounds (IV.319-20) and

revealed to the reader his true purpose, which is not so much to satirize others as to praise

himself.

Pope’s Audience

Despite scholarly interest in Pope’s self-presentation, comparatively little has been

written about the ways in which readers responded to Pope’s self-fashioning strategies,

especially his emphasis on judgement and morality in the Iliad and Odyssey. There are several

reasons for this apparent oversight. The first is the difficulty, at a remove of nearly three hundred

years, of creating a map of reader responses. Making Pope’s case more difficult is the virulent

and personal nature of so much of the published material we have relating to him. These

responses tell us little about how readers responded to Pope’s writings, however much they may

add to our sense of the way contemporary literary society responded to him personally.

Disregarding, then, the portion of the reading populace who examined and wrote about

Pope’s books from a predetermined position of antagonism, a few sources remain to scholars

wishing to examine Pope’s reading reception. Moving from the mocking reaction of Henry

Fielding to Pope’s readership to what the publication history can tell us about Pope’s readership

itself, and ending with Spence’s scholarly response, this section examines the reactions of the

public and publishers to Pope’s Homeric translations and his Collected Works to show how

central a role the Homeric translations played in Pope’s reputation.

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When speaking in his position as the author, Fielding “stresses,” as Henry Power argues,

“his awareness that [Pope’s translation] is not the real thing,” drawing comparisons between

Pope’s translation and Homer.274

Thus he compares Sophia’s constancy and love to that of

Penelope in the Odyssey, mockingly pointing out the way that Homer ascribes her love to a

desire for glory, and then firmly adding, “The English reader will not find this in the poem; for

the sentiment is entirely left out in the translation” which, he implies, is all that the common

Englishman will read.275

This demonstrates a belief that knowing the original is a mark of

superiority and that Pope’s translation was the real thing for some. “Pope’s Homer” offers a new

conception of Homer himself, as literary readers mistake Pope’s views for Homer’s and illiterate

readers mistake the translation for the original. Parson Adams, in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, is

nearly thrown out as an illiterate imposter when he claims that although he has “heard great

commendations of” Pope as a poet, he has “never read nor knew any of his works” not even his

Homer, which his interlocutor thinks is a necessary part of a clergyman’s education.276

After all, as Fielding shows in Tom Jones, even the common soldiers have read Homer in

one translation or other. The most learned of them, a “worthy lieutenant,” speaks of “Pope’s

Homer” and Pope’s rather than Homer’s comparison between soldiers and geese. The less

learned French soldier, who speaks an abominable mixture of French and English, claims no

acquaintance with Homer but says he remembers the Greeks and Trojans very well, for he read

them at school in “Madam Daciere,” Pope’s greatest rival. Only the complete ignoramus, who

274

Henry Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 42. 275

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Martin Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1974), 202, n. 276

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin Battestin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 196-7.

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cannot even pronounce Homer’s name but calls him “Homo,” has not read Homer, but all of

these readers look at Homer through the lenses of modern translations.277

The most telling of these examples is that of the lieutenant, who cannot separate Homer

from Pope but speaks as though Homer is a character in one of Pope’s poems. Pope’s plan to use

Homer to bolster his own manly, moral, and original character is here fulfilled in a way that he

probably did not anticipate and would not have approved. These soldiers do indeed see the views

that Pope espouses in his translations as his own, but not because he has successfully

differentiated himself from Homer. Fielding’s common reader judges Pope by his translations

because the common reader is not fully aware of Homer’s relationship to Pope’s work.

Neither Fielding nor his characters offer a judgement about the literary merits of Pope’s

Homeric translations. Fielding criticizes translation and writers whose goal is money, as Pope’s

is often seen to be, in Amelia, where his Grub Street translator exclaims rapturously that Pope’s

Homer is “the best translation in the world” because of how much money Pope received from it,

and Fielding is scathing on the subject of translators who are unfamiliar with their original or not

equal to the task of understanding their source, but he has nothing to say about the quality of

Pope’s work.278

Indeed, Fielding seems to appreciate Pope’s ability as a poet and many of his

sentiments. Tom Jones is sprinkled with quotations from Pope’s Essay on Criticism and praise

for his judgement in the matter of taste.

While Fielding is careful to separate Pope from Homer and to point out the flaws in those

who cannot tell the two apart, he also disapproves of Parson Adams’ position as someone who

has never read Homer in anything but the original. While Adams’ ability to cite large passages of

277

Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 372-3. 278

Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin Battestin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 326; Henry Fielding, “The

Author’s Farce,” in Plays, ed. Thomas Lockwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), I.248-9.

143

Homer by heart is impressive, it is also, as G. F. Parker claims, “in its utter unconsciousness of

the immediate circumstances” and of “his actual contemporary company” more than a little

absurd.279

It would have been more appropriate, under the circumstances, for Adams to abandon

his pure Homeric simplicity and to quote from “Pope’s Homer” rather than Homer’s Greek, but

it would also have shown a greater ability to recognize and adhere to the standards of the modern

day than Adams possesses. Fielding, whose Adams illustrates many of the difficulties Pope sees

in Homer, seems to approve of Pope’s translations so long as readers realize that he is not

Homer.280

What Fielding’s comments show, however, is that for many readers Pope was indeed

Homer, and that Fielding does not approve.

Pope may not have approved of the popular conception of his works either. McLaverty

deals at length with the way that Pope manipulated his published works in order to give himself

“the status of a classical author,” writing to his booksellers about “the beauty of the Impression,”

and insisting that pieces be “made to match in colour & Size” so that his published books look

like a collected set.281

He took care to arrange copyright terms with his booksellers so that he

retained control over future publications, using them to create his own collected edition of his

Works in 1717.282

But while Pope intended his focus to be on himself, and claimed to prefer

original writing, his market did not always agree. Even before his death, Pope succeeded in

becoming one of the great literary figures of his age, and during the mid-eighteenth-century

process of canon formation, Pope figured prominently next to Milton as a part of the English

poetical canon.

279

G. F. Parker, “‘Talking Scripture out of Church’: Parson Adams and the Practicality of Translation,” Translation

and Literature 14.2 (2005): 182. 280

Parker, “‘Talking Scripture,” 183, 185. 281

McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning, 46; Alexander Pope to Tonson the younger, The Literary Correspondence

of the Tonsons, ed Stephen Bernard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 232, 280. 282

Foxon and McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, 47.

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But when the Foulis brothers began their series of English poets in 1766, they followed

Milton’s Poetical Works first with Pope’s translations, advertised as “Pope’s Homer’s Iliad and

Odyssey” and only later with Pope’s Poetical Works. This order can be ascribed partially to the

Foulis brothers’ uncertainty about what type of series they were in the process of creating.

Although they began by advertising the Iliad to be printed “in the same Size as Milton’s Poetical

Works,” implying that they were in the process of publishing a series of English writers, their

next advertisements combine the Iliad and the Odyssey into a group of ‘ANCIENT GREEK

HISTORIANS’ to which they later add Milton, and it is not until 1769, two years after they

began to advertise Pope’s translations, that they add Pope’s Poetical Works along with a promise

to add Dryden’s Virgil to the series.283

The progression of this series shows how these publishers viewed the English writers.

Pope’s separation of original from translated works prevails, but the order and titles of the works

suggests that the Foulis brothers subscribed to Dryden’s belief that English writers gain their

reputations through classical connections. Although advertised as “Pope’s Translation of

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey,” the published books reversed the order of names, being titled “The

Iliad of Homer” and “The Odyssey of Homer” with “translated by Alexander Pope” in

significantly smaller letters under the primary title and attribution.284

Pope’s name offers a major

selling point, and so appears first on the advertisement, but the prestige of the work itself comes

from its classical author, and the Foulis brothers find it easier to conceive of publishing a

collection of Greek writers and historians than a collection of English texts.

283

Thomas Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765-1810 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2008), 56-7. 284

Glasgow Journal (5-12 May, 1768), cited in Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 57; Alexander Pope, The Iliad of

Homer (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1771); Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer (Glasgow: Robert

and Andrew Foulis, 1768).

145

The Foulis brothers’ focus on translations from classical writings may seem strange to

modern literary scholars, most of whom find the original work of these authors to be more

interesting than their translations, but this policy reflected the habits of the contemporary reading

public. This is evident from the fact that, seven years after their series had ended, the Foulis

brothers decided to reprint only one of Pope’s works – the Iliad.285

Evidently, they found a larger

market for the Iliad, which was widely agreed to be the better of Pope’s two Homeric

translations, than for his other works.

In 1770, Bell’s Works of the English Poets reflected a more modern conception of the

works of Pope and Dryden. In this series, “Fragments of Ovid and Statius were admitted into

Pope’s works, but not his Homeric translations, nor Dryden’s Virgil.”286

Bell did include

Dryden’s translations from Horace, declaring rather facetiously that “‘The Translations which

follow are foreign to the purpose of this Publication, which is confined solely to the Original

Poems of Mr. Dryden; but having a few spare pages toward the close of this volume, it is hoped

the Reader will not be displeased to find these occupied by any thing from the hand of this

inimitable Writer.”287

This claim clearly articulates a belief in a hierarchical movement from

original to translated literature, if one that Bell felt it was acceptable to overrule when it suited

him.

His public, however, was, as Thomas Bonnell writes, “Disappointed that Pope’s Homer

and Dryden’s Virgil were to be left out” and “readers urged that they be added” to the series.288

Not wanting to disappoint his public, Bell promised that once his current series was finished he

would make a “continuation of this work” which would include “all the eminent translations and

285

Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 65. 286

Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 102. 287

John Bell, The Poetical Works of John Dryden (Edinburgh, 1777), III.205. 288

Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 102.

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fugitive pieces of merit” which his readers desired.289

Although Bell never followed through on

his promise, the desire for Pope’s translations to be included with the remainder of his works

continued so strongly that in the 1790s, publishers Martin and Bain offered the translations “in

volumes identical to Bell’s” so that readers could have a complete collection.290

While later publications of Pope’s work offer evidence of a popular response, they say

little about the scholarly reaction to Pope’s texts. This is most evident in the writings of Joseph

Spence, a rising author with no apparent connection to the controversies in which Pope

embroiled himself, who published the anonymous An Essay on Pope’s Odyssey: in which some

particular Beauties and Blemishes of that Work are consider’d, possibly the earliest attempt at a

purely literary criticism of Pope’s translation. This measured response, which mixes judicious

criticism with overall approval, won him Pope’s friendship and the approbation of his university,

leading to his appointment as a Professor of Poetry at Oxford.291

Spence offers a piece that is not only anonymous but hides behind the fiction that his

dialogues are merely a record of what is “chiefly [the] thoughts” of two other distinguished

gentlemen (Spence I.a9). Although he cannot have hoped to preserve his anonymity for long in

eighteenth-century England, Spence removes himself as much as possible from the conflict over

personalities, asking readers to focus purely on the texts before them. Nineteenth-century writers,

after Pope had fallen from favour, suggested that Spence wrote his Essay, which falls rather on

the side of praise than blame, in an attempt to curry favour with Pope.292

Spence himself told

Warburton in a private note that although his Essay was “not so blunt and ill-natured” as other

289

Morning Post (24 July, 1777), cited in Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 103. 290

Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 103. 291

Baines, Critical Guide to Alexander Pope, 28; Austin Wright, Joseph Spence: A Critical Biography (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1950), 28, 33-34. 292

George Saintsbury, History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1902),

II.454-5; Thomas R. Lounsbury, The Text of Shakespeare (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1906), 194.

147

criticisms it was “blunt, & rough” enough that he “did not care to be known” by Pope, and tried

his best to hide his identity.293

Although Spence allowed Pope to look over the manuscript of his

second book, Spence does not invariably follow Pope’s suggestions, and the majority of

Spence’s criticisms of Pope were permitted to stand.294

It would be unfair to conclude that

Spence is entirely unbiased, but this stance together with his attempt to blend praise and

criticism, suggest that he is attempting to write an impartial response to the text, and that his

comments reflect the real concerns of his era.

Spence’s primary concern is the uncertain authorship of the Odyssey, and he insists that

the judicious reader can clearly distinguish that, although “Mr. Pope is not the sole Translator,”

Pope “gives the finishing stroke to everything” (Spence I.a6-a7). Therefore, he decides, it is fair

to ascribe the work as a whole to Pope, and to let his seconds take silent pleasure in passages that

pertain to them. An Essay on Pope’s Odyssey responds reservedly but positively to Pope’s

alterations to his author, praising him for the “improvements” he makes to Homer’s “coarse,

rustick Dialect” but also hesitating over whether it is really proper to alter Homer’s sense, even if

a direct translation would be “unpolite and even shocking” (Spence I.49-50) Spence finally

decides against Pope’s substantive changes to Homer’s text, but approves Pope’s alterations to

Homer’s language. Spence criticizes Pope’s shift from “low” to more “decorous” language only

because it does not go far enough, and he includes a long discussion of the “Lownesses” in

Pope’s translation (Spence I.105). Spence especially approves Pope’s habit of “Transferring

Beauties” from other texts into Homer’s, noting “how he introduces the Elegance of Virgil,” as

well as the beautiful phrases of “Dryden, Addison, Milton, and several others of the most

293

Joseph Spence, Egerton MS 1960, in Arthur E. Case, “Pope, Addison, and the ‘Atticus’ Lines,” Modern Philology

33.2 (1935-36): 187-93. 294

Wright, Joseph Spence, 11.

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celebrated Moderns” and makes good use of “Expressions borrowed from our Translation of the

Sacred Writings” (Spence I.86, II.13, I.94, 96-7).

Moreover, Spence notices and admires the way that Pope changes Homer to fit the moral

values of eighteenth-century England. He admits that he had expected the translation’s morals to

contain “Improvements from Mr. Pope” and that he approves of these changes, despite preaching

a general policy of faithfulness to the original (Spence II.105). He especially approves of Pope’s

“Sententious passages and moral reflections,” which are much more clearly drawn than in the

original Greek, and which shows that Pope’s bid for a moral reputation was both expected and at

least partially successful (Spence I.87).

Although he finds much to criticize, Spence’s primary response is praise. In some places,

he claims, Pope’s version is “enliven’d and improv’d” rather than simply “well translated,”

which is “too narrow a commendation” for a translation that so clearly attempts to improve on its

original (Spence I.81). While Spence does not always agree with Pope’s alterations, he is

generally in harmony with the sentiment that actuated those changes, and he believes that they

“serve to establish a poet’s moral character,” exactly as Pope intended (Spence II.108). Whether

he approves or disapproves of a particular change, therefore, the very expressing of the dilemma

which Pope faces: to keep Homer’s words when they go against contemporary morals, or to

make Homer’s heroes into “the most accomplish’d, finest Gentlemen in the world,” shows that

Pope’s project succeeded. He may not have created the perfect translation, but he convinced at

least one countryman that he was agreeable to the tastes of educated men and that he knew better

than Homer did what makes a gentleman (Spence I.50, 95).

This claim is supported by the reception which Spence’s text received. During the

eighteenth century, while Pope’s reputation remained contested, Spence’s work was almost

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universally admired. Although Johnson complained in his Lives that Spence’s “learning was not

very great,” yet he admitted that “His criticism . . . was commonly just” and his Essay on Pope’s

Odyssey an accurate commentary on that poet.295

Joseph Warton, in 1797, offered much less

mixed praise when he claimed that “no critical treatise [is] better calculated to form the taste of

young men of genius” than Spence’s Essay.296

The market was nearly as kind to Spence as the

critics. A second edition was called for only a year after the first, and ten years later Spence

signed a contract with Dodsley for a third edition.297

Although no other full-length responses to

Pope’s Homeric translations exist, these responses, together with the Oxford position which

Spence was granted soon after the Essay’s publication, indicate popular approval of Spence’s

observations, which is echoed in contemporary works such as the Lives of Cibber and Johnson

and Addison’s Freeholder.298

After Life of Pope’s Translations

As these examples show, Pope’s literary reputation rested largely on his translations, and

despite what his enemies claimed, his bids for increased manliness, morality, and connection

with the ancients resonated with his readers. When James Thomson remembered Pope in his

Seasons, he complimented Pope’s “self-cultivation as the virtuous recluse or Horatian happy

man” which Pope had emphasized in his Imitations, and “the enduring Song” of his life, but

295

Johnson, Lives, IV.31. 296

Warton, Works of Alexander Pope, I.xxxvi. 297

British Museum, Eagerton MS 738, cited in Wright, Joseph Spence, 28. 298

Cibber, Lives, V.242-4; 257-8; Johnson, Lives, IV.31; Joseph Addison, The Freeholder 40, 7 May 1716.

150

mentions only one of Pope’s literary works – his Homer.299

Thomson judges that it is Pope’s

Homer that wins him a place on “the Muses’ Hill.”300

Although Thomson does not view Pope’s

Homer as equal to the original, he believes that it is these translations that make Pope one of the

giants of literature.

Pope’s epitaph also emphasizes his translations, coming to a triumphant conclusion in the

words, “being without a Rival in his own Age, [Pope] imitated and translated, with a Spirit equal

to the Originals, the best Poets of Antiquity.”301

The conception that Pope’s translations show

him among the best of the classical poets, shows a merging of Dryden’s belief that translation

would lift him out of the ranks of the mere English poets and Pope’s attempts to set himself up

against his classical models. Although Pope’s implicit claims to have bettered his originals was

rarely accepted, the responses shown in this chapter demonstrate that Pope succeeded in two out

of his three attempts. He established himself as a manly and a moral man, but the belief in his

derivative nature continues to this day, and his best translations garnered more favourable

attention from his literary contemporaries than did his original works. Even Samuel Johnson,

leader of literary taste after Pope’s death, offers much stronger praise for “that poetical wonder,

the translation of the Iliad; a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal” than he

does for Pope’s original works.302

The ambivalence which Pope felt about his editorial focus and his translations created

many of the problems that he hoped to solve. His desire to be seen as the sole translator and

primary creator of the Odyssey robbed Pope of the prestige he could have had as the editor of a

multiple-hands translation. Instead, he attempted to claim full responsibility and faced a scandal.

299

James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 230. 300

Thomson, Seasons, 230. 301

Mack, Alexander Pope, 618. 302

Johnson, Lives, IV.72-3.

151

His desire to be seen as a scholar and not an editor robbed him of the ability to create a popular

reinvention of Shakespeare. Instead, he attempted to present a scholarly edition and was mocked

for his eagerness to alter his original. His greatest success, his translation of Homer’s Iliad,

emphasizes the changes he made to his original, accepting and flaunting his position as translator

and editor.

Pope and Dryden both used their translations to establish and cement their literary

reputations, but Pope instituted a change in the publication and focus of translations. Pope began

by following the pattern that Dryden had set, submitting his short translation for the judgement

of both bookseller and public in a group of similar poems by other hands. In fact, his first

published poem appeared in one of the Tonson Miscellanies, but he ended by setting the standard

for self-publishing in his day. Moreover, while Dryden popularized the “multiple hands” style of

translation and its cousin the miscellany, Pope began to turn the focus back toward single-author

texts, using even his most famous translations as a way to talk about himself. This reading of

Pope’s self-fashioning not only establishes the centrality of the Homeric translations to Pope’s

reputation during his life and after his death, it also highlights some of the primary themes which

he dealt with throughout his life. Responding to constant accusations of unmanliness, theft,

plagiarism, and immorality, Pope showed his mastery of the contrasting virtues through his most

prized literary device: his judgement.

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Chapter 3 Haywood: Consistency of Purpose

From the beginning of her career in 1719, Haywood struggled with an unstable

reputation. Even after her death, her image has varied drastically. She has been portrayed as an

emotional moralist, an unrepentant scandal-monger, and a reformed pornographer. In the twenty-

first century, her story is being revised yet again by the current generation of scholars. While still

representing the novels she wrote at the end of her life as her best and most mature work and her

primary output as amatory fiction, scholars are increasingly taking into account her secret

histories, her pamphlets, and her political works. Feminist approaches, beginning with Walter

and Clare Jerrold (1929), have reclaimed Haywood as a writer who thrived in the steamy

underground of Grub Street, writing in genres that more conventionally respectable authors

would not touch and creating a place for herself outside conventionally acceptable female

discourse. More recently, the apparent contradictions of Haywood’s heterogeneous career have

become a focal point for scholars. Paula Backscheider describes Haywood’s career as standing

for “the nexus and the point of tension between a number of things — the transgressive,

outspoken woman and the moral, admonishing woman writer, between amatory fiction and the

new novel,” a comment which demonstrates a worrying tendency to see her as a writer divided,

separating her novels into early scandal fiction and later moralistic work.303

Using her

translations as case studies, this chapter attempts to reconcile Haywood’s dichotomous writings,

demonstrating how, throughout her career, she attempts to establish and maintain a reputation

based on a stable moral self-representation. Her books balance a progressively positive depiction

303

Paula Backscheider, “The Shadow of an Author: Eliza Haywood,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11.1 (1998): 80.

153

of female sexuality and independence with a firm insistence on sexual fidelity, contractual

obligation, and marital compromise. These works not only, as scholars increasingly recognize,

sought to improve the situation of the women they entertained, but also portrayed Haywood

within a constant moral and social milieu.304

Backscheider’s essay, “The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels: Caveats and Questions,”

argues that the story of her conversion is troubled by a continuous “participation in hegemonic

processes” and a desire to raise questions of “pathology, personality, and evil.” Although, two

years after her portrayal of Haywood as divided between “transgressive” and “moral,”

Backscheider recognizes the problematic nature of this story, her work does not closely examine

the false dichotomy the story creates between Haywood’s moralistic and amatory fiction.305

Even

Kathryn King, whose work questions the scandalous nature of Haywood’s early amatory

productions, separating them from the intentionally shocking personal attacks that appear in her

secret histories, views Haywood’s anonymous publications as attempts to separate her works into

more and less polite groups. By following the different translations she carried out during her

career and examining her advertisements and the varying quality and price points of her works, I

argue that Haywood’s moral and social claims were part of a single rather than a divided self-

representation. Recognising that, despite differences of genre and form, Haywood’s books

demonstrate a consistent vision of her ideal moral and social behaviour helps to explain her

continual shifts from moralizing to entertainment, and creates a more holistic understanding of

her life and works.

304

Kathryn King, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 91. 305

Backscheider, “Shadow of an Author,” 80; Paula Backscheider, “The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels: Caveats

and Questions,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on her Life and Work, ed. Kirsten T.

Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 11, 42.

154

The perceived divide between her early scandalous and late moral fictions can be traced

back to an unfortunate tendency in early scholarship to take Pope’s accusations in the Dunciad as

reflecting both her life and her literary output. George Whicher’s 1915 Life and Romances of

Mrs. Eliza Haywood rescued her from obscurity despite his feeling that “with the passing of

Ramillies wigs and velveteen small-clothes the popularity of her novels vanished once for all.”

This book offered a valuable opening for Haywood studies by placing her within the history of

the novel, but it also uncritically accepts several claims which still trouble scholars today,

including the idea that she abandoned her erotic writing to re-invent herself as a Richardsonian

moralistic novelist.306

Richetti’s 1969 Popular Fiction Before Richardson encourages scholars to

understand Haywood as an accomplished literary figure, examining the sophisticated techniques

she used to create characters and interest her readers in her social and moral programs, but leaves

her situated firmly among “the lower reading classes” when, as this chapter shows, she aimed

many of her publications, and especially her early translations, at a higher-class audience. While

never literally entering either the French or the English court, Haywood encouraged readers to

think of her as though she was part of that social world, and she strove to attract noble and even

royal readers.307

By emphasizing similarities between herself and the authors of her source text,

Haywood attempted to create a narrative of acceptance, implying that her books were commonly

read by the noble ladies of the court and would be easily accepted by nobles such as those her

dedications addressed.

Haywood’s work to position herself as an accepted author is contrary to the scholarship

of the 80s and 90s, when feminist writers like Deborah Nestor emphasized her former

306

George Frisbie Whicher, The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (New York: Columbia University Press,

1915), vii. 307

John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1969); Walter and Clare Jerrold, Five Queer Women (London: Brentano’s Ltd., 1929), 210.

155

disenfranchisement and celebrated her new place in the English canon, rejecting “official

histories of the novel [which] ignore Haywood’s contribution.”308

Since this period, she has

“received much needed critical attention,” and her works are accepted as an important part of the

development of proto-feminist literature and the rise of the novel.309

Although her books are still

considered “forerunners” of later, and implicitly better novels, her shorter works have appeared

in canonical anthologies and book lists since the mid-1990s.310

As late as 1992, Ros Ballaster

could claim that “Haywood did not indulge in any form of political journalism,” a statement

which rediscovered political periodicals such as the 1746 Parrot show to be incorrect.311

This

newly complex picture of Haywood is encouraging closer examination of the scanty biographical

details of her life. Scholars like Elizabeth Kraft and Kathryn King now challenge the idea,

accepted by early scholars of Haywood, that she was crushed by Pope’s attack on her in the

Dunciad and responded by shifting from emotional, descriptive, amatory fiction to more

Richardsonsian moralizing romances.312

Questioning the standard narrative that Haywood was shamed into altering her style has

led some scholars to adopt the cynical view that she shifted away from amatory fiction near the

end of her life in a purely mercantile move. This view, which Clara Reeve first presented in her

1785 Progress of Romance, presents Haywood as operating purely from mercenary and

308

Deborah Jean Nestor, “Women’s Discourse and the Construction of the English Novel, from Eliza Haywood to

Jane Austen” (PhD Diss., University of Michigan, 1993), 8. 309

Dwight Douglas Codr, “A Store Yet Untouched: Speculative Ideologies in Eighteenth-Century English

Literature” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2005), 72. 310

B. G. MacCarthy, The Female Pen: Women Writers and Novelists 1621-1818 (New York: New York University

Press, 1994), 13, 212, 194. 311

Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992),

156; Patrick Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 490-2. 312

Elizabeth Kraft, Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers

(Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 88.

156

commercial motives, removed from literary and artistic concerns.313

King, for example, argues

that Haywood moved away from amatory fiction toward a more Richardsonian style in response

to new market pressures and her consistent desire for recognition.314

Catherine Ingrassia also

sees Haywood’s goals as largely mercenary, describing her early attempts to solicit noble

“patron-subscribers,” and the relatively high quality of her first translation, but claiming that her

aim was merely “to benefit from the financial opportunities available in an increasingly

commercialized literary marketplace,” a claim which ignores her attempts to use noble patrons

and subscribers both to financially support her and to position her works within an upper-class

literary society. 315

Like other authors of the time, Haywood’s writing was driven by a variety of

motives both pecuniary and social. Just as Dryden’s translations are both lucrative sources of

income and important parts of his reputation-building strategy, Haywood’s writing demonstrates

the complexity of her motives, which incorporate monetary need, proto-feminist concerns, and a

desire to be known by upper-class society.

This chapter argues that her literary shifts were not as dramatic as these authors assume.

As King suggests, Haywood always hankered after fame, and the shape which her self-

promotion took in her later works was not significantly different from that of her early

publications. Combining literary and book-historical methodology, this chapter uses extant

copies of her translations and other books, with special reference to Patrick Spedding’s recent

and monumental, if contested, bibliography, to show how both Haywood’s erotic and her

didactic translations demonstrate a consistent elitist and moralistic focus throughout her

313

Backscheider, “Eliza Haywood’s Novels,” 19. 314

King, Political Biography, 30. 315

Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80-81.

157

career.316

Although the lack of information about Haywood’s life and her practice of anonymous

and pseudonymous publication means that her canon is necessarily speculative, Spedding’s

bibliography is the most recent and comprehensive summary of her works. Leah Orr is one of

several scholars raising questions about Spedding’s attributions, but her arguments are, as she

herself admits, not definitive, nor do they question the specific works discussed in this study.317

Instead, the difficulty of determining authorship supports my argument that the division of

Haywood’s works into moral and scandalous categories needs to be questioned. She used

varying levels of anonymity, including publications that have her name on the title page, books

which she signed in the dedication, books marketed as by the author of one of her known works,

and books which appear completely anonymous, throughout her career in each of her genres,

periods, and levels of publication quality. This calls into question the viability of dividing her

writing by genre or content. Instead, I argue that she consistently endeavoured to present her

works as part of court society, as promoting morality, and as part of a coherent authorial plan. By

focusing on her translations as evidence of her self-presentation throughout her career, this

chapter will offer a holistic view of Haywood’s oeuvre and her self-perception. Far from being

incompatible or at odds with each other, I argue, Haywood’s erotic amatory novels, straight-

laced moralizing prose, and pointed political satires followed consistent ethical, social, and moral

strategies that can be traced throughout her long, productive career.

316

Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood.

Because this bibliography provides such an important reference point for this study, it has been cited parenthetically

throughout this chapter. 317

Leah Orr, “The Basis for Attribution in the Canon of Eliza Haywood,” The Library: The Transactions of the

Bibliographical Society 12.4 (2011): 335-375.

158

Who Wrote That? Reputation and Anonymity

Examining Haywood’s attempt to establish herself is complicated by a publication

history which includes many works that appeared anonymously. In order to study her self-

presentation, close attention must be paid to which books she put her name to and which she

signed with a pseudonym or left unsigned. King divides Haywood’s works into different

‘brands,’ identified by what she calls “lateral attributions,” in which she identifies herself as “the

author of” one of her better-known texts. It is true that fewer than half of her sixty-nine published

books bear her name, while eight others are identified by lateral attributions, but by the end of

her lifetime only five books that we know of remained unidentified.

While King’s image of Haywood brands is useful, her depiction of Haywood as trying to

separate her amatory novels and her “high-toned Gomez translations” from both each other and

“the contaminations ensuing from” her “scandal narratives” must be problematized.318

Although

her long series of translations from the French novels by Madeleine-Angelique de Gomez were

taken from popular, well-known texts and given sophisticated French titles which set them apart

from her vernacular offerings, Haywood maintained a unity between her publications through

her thematic content and dramatic, romantic plots. The emotional and sexual intensity of her

works varies, but her content consistently emphasizes women’s rights, proper behavior, morality,

romance, and the restrictions her society placed on women. These similarities are frequently

heightened by productions which publicize her authorship and concentrate attention on her moral

values and upper class subjects. From the initial publication of the 1724 La Belle Assemblée,

318

King, Political Biography, 32-3.

159

translated from Madeleine-Angelique de Gomez’s Journées amusantes, the advertisements for

Haywood’s texts connect her “ultra-polite” translation to her other works.

Haywood’s control over her publication and promotion can never be fully ascertained, a

problem enhanced by the paucity of evidence, primary or secondary, on the authorship of literary

advertisements.319

As early as 1996, critical work on advertising raised what has now become

what Liz McFall calls “an increasingly embarrassing tendency within the academy for detailed

analyses of advertising to be carried out without any reference to the production context.”320

Theoretical profiles of early advertising, examinations of placement and cost, and discussions of

the percentage of a publisher’s outlay spent on marketing have begun to fill this gap. The first

advertising agents can be traced, using letters, bills, and contemporary references, to the

beginning of the nineteenth century, and Terry Nevett argues that the earliest agents were Taylor

and Newton, operating in 1786.321

Little evidence, however, remains for the authorship of earlier

copy.

C. J. Mitchell argues that some “authors were closely associated with the production and

marketing of their work,” not only correcting proofs and deciding on paper type and quality but

also participating in the creation and distribution of advertising material.322

Christopher Smart,

arranging for a 1746 publication, declares that “the advertisement may be carefully copied from

the title page,” where he has written the information he wishes to distribute, and insists that the

319

James Tierney, “Advertisements for Books in London Newspapers, 1760-1785,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century

Culture 30 (2001): 154. 320

Liz McFall, “What About the Old Cultural Intermediaries? An Historical Review of Advertising Producers,”

Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 532. 321

Terry Nevett, “London’s Early Advertising Agents,” Journal of Advertising History 1 (1977): 15 –18. 322

C. J. Mitchell, “Women in the Eighteenth-Century Book Trades,” in Writers, Books, and Trade: an Eighteenth-

Century English Miscellany for William B. Todd, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (New York: AMS Press, 1994), 36.

160

book be advertised “only for three days & only in one paper each day.”323

While few authors left

such clear records of their intentions, these examples demonstrate the existence of authorial

intervention within advertising copy.

Advertisements of Haywood’s works offer consistent references to the aristocracy, as in

the puff for La Belle Assemblée which insists that it was written “for the ENTERTAINMENT of the

KING,” and to the titles of her characters.324

These advertisements highlight the cautionary nature

of works like The Fortunate Foundlings, which follows eighteenth-century conventions in

claiming to offer both “Entertainment and Improvement.”325

The heightened emotion and focus

on feminine concerns typical of Haywood’s work also appear in her paratexts and the stylistic

similarities between the advertising copy for Haywood’s books throughout her career help to

suggest that a single author may have been responsible for her marketing.

In 1724, Haywood and Cogan published identical advertisements to promote her 1742

translation of The Virtuous Villager. This book, published while Haywood was her own

bookseller and distributor, is advertised by Haywood in the Champion, or Evening Advertiser on

March 18.326

Only two days later on Saturday, March 20, the same paper carries an identical puff

for the book, only this time it is listed as “Printed for F. Cogan.”327

This duplication is not in

itself evidence that Haywood provided Cogan with advertising copy. It could suggest that he saw

her text, liked it, and copied the blurb for his own version several days later, or even that it was

cheaper to reprint the same text than to reset the block. Even if she wrote this piece of

advertising copy, that would not prove that she had similar input into the marketing of her other

323

Christopher Smart to Robert Dodsley, 6 Aug. 1746. The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley 1733-1764, ed.

James E. Tierney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 100-1. 324

Daily Journal (London), August 28, 1742. 325

Daily Post (London), January 4, 1744, Issue 7610. 326

Champion, or Evening Advertiser (London), March 18, 1742; Issue 367. 327

Champion, March 20, 1742; Issue 368.

161

publications. But it does suggest that booksellers preferred to use pre-written copy for their

advertisements which she as the author may have been expected to supply.

The difference in textual style and emphasis between the advertisements she published

during her time as a bookseller strengthen the suspicion that she depended on authors to provide

their own puffs. The advertisements for the Virtuous Villager and the 1749 Letter from Henry

Goring, an original work by Haywood, demonstrate similarities that they do not share with the

puffs that she published for Hatchett’s 1742 A Remarkable Cause on a Note of Hand and an

unknown author’s 1744 The Humours of Whist, A Dramatick Satire. The Humours of Whist is

particularly interesting because it appeared in a succession of advertisements from January 10th

to 13th

, and over this period its text changed. The original text read as follows

The Humours of Whist, A Dramatick Satire. As acted at White’s, and other

Coffee-Houses and Assemblies. Founded on a late notorious Fact, and very

proper to be had in all Families of Condition, as a necessary Caution to the Youth

of Both sexes.328

But in later versions, the second sentence is expanded to “Founded on three well-known Facts: 1.

The Case of a noble Lord’s Son. 2. That of two celebrated Fair Whist-Players, near Hanover

Square. 3. That of the Son of a certain Alderman,”329

and the reference to its potential audience is

removed. These changes bring the text more closely into line with advertisements for Haywood’s

books. While some puffs for her scandalous secret histories, like her 1726 Court of Caramania,

focus more on physical format than content, the majority of the advertisements for her novels,

like her 1744 The Fortunate Foundlings, 1724 Memoirs of a Certain Island, and the 1725 Lady’s

328

Daily Advertiser (London), January 10, 1744; Issue 4050 329

Daily Advertiser, January 12, 1744; Issue 4052.

162

Philosophers Stone, tended to focus on the social status of the characters and the author.330

The

advertisement for her pamphlet Letter from Henry Goring, which was published anonymously

and circulated to be sold in other bookshops, shows how the changes echo the style she used

throughout her early career.

A Letter from H___ G___G, Esq; one of the Gentlemen to the Young Chevalier,

and the only Person of his own Retinue that attended him from Avignon in his

late Journey thro’ Germany and elsewhere. Containing many remarkable and

affecting Occurrences which happened to the P___ during the Course of his

mysterious Progress. To a particular Friend.331

In contrast to Haywood’s emotional and social description, which neatly avoids open discussion

of the dangerous political content of the work, Hatchett’s puff, below, demonstrates his

immediate legal and political concerns.

A Remarkable Cause on a Note of Hand, tried in the COURT of CONSCIENCE,

Anno 1741, by a special Jury; wherein B____n D____n, Esq; was Plaintiff, and

W____m H___t, Defendant. Made public, by order of the Court, for general

Introduction, and address’d in Particular

To the Worthy Citizens of YORK.332

While the description of Hatchett’s books is dictated in part by its legal conceit, its lack

of particulars, address to a specific group of readers, and open participation in a contemporary

quarrel between private persons all set it apart from Haywood’s advertisements for her own

works. Haywood’s advertisements, like her texts, often focus on class connections. In novels and

330

Daily Journal, September 24, 1726; Issue 1777; Daily Gazetteer (London), January 26, 1744; Issue 3089; True

Briton (London), January 24, 1724; Issue LXVIII; Daily Post, January 22, 1725; Issue 1662. 331

London Evening Post (London), November 28, 1749 - November 30, 1749; Issue 3445. 332

Champion, April 3, 1742; Issue 372.

163

pamphlets like A Letter from Henry Goring, this interest shows in her descriptions of her

subjects. While Hatchett’s puff buries the title of his antagonist in the middle of his text and

claims no title for himself, Haywood’s puts her protagonist’s name in her title and emphasizes

his status as a “Gentleman” and as an attendant to the young Prince Charles. The alterations to

the ad for The Humours of Whist work to do the same, inserting a reference to “a noble Lord’s

Son,” to “celebrated” women, and to the son of an “Alderman,” in each case highlighting the

social rank and connections of its subjects.

Advertisements for her translations often highlight the court connections of her original

author, as in the Virtuous Villager, in addition to the rank of her subjects.

THE VIRTUOUS VILLAGER; or VIRGIN’S VICTORY. Being the Memoirs of a

very great Lady at the Court of France Written by Herself. In which the Artifices

of designing Men are fully detected and exposed; and the Calamities they bring

on credulous believing Women, are particularly related.

Translated from the Original, by the author of LA BELLE ASSEMBLEE

In vain are musty Morals taught in Schools,

By rigid Teachers, and as rigid Rules,

Where Virtue with a frowning Aspect stands,

And frights the Pupil from her rough Commands;

But charming Woman can true Converts make,

We love the Precepts for the Teacher’s sake;

Virtue in them appears so bright, so gay,

164

We hear with Transport, and with Pride obey.333

Although the Virtuous Villager and A Letter From Henry Goring are very different, and the

Virtuous Villager was given much more space, the puffs display a similar focus on class and a

similar type of emotional specificity. As she does for A Letter from Henry Goring, Haywood

promises readers a specific emotional experience. The Letter directly promises to be “remarkable

and affecting” while the Villager more subtly offers a picture of “Artifices” and “Calamities,”

clearly referencing the emotional upheavals of amorous fiction, while identifying the book as a

“charming,” “bright,” and “gay” Woman who will teach virtue in a way that inspires “love” in

readers. By telling readers the type of event that her book deals with and indicating the response

she intends to elicit, Haywood sets up an expectation that her books will create a specific type of

experience. In contrast to Haywood’s experiential emphasis, Hatchett’s advertisement shows

clear factual specificity, and its reference to a “COURT of CONSCIENCE” promises to appeal to the

crowd’s morality, but neither this ad nor that for The Humours of Whist tell audiences about the

emotional tone that their pieces will take.

Following the supposition that Haywood’s marketing strategies worked toward a pairing

of emotionality and “Virtue,” I argue that her advertisements, whether published under her name

or not, helped to create the reputation she desired. Despite the number of her works published

without her name on them, Haywood’s anonymity was usually temporary. While fewer than half

of the first editions of her sixty-nine published books bear her name, the majority of her books

were acknowledged in advertisements, discussed in newspapers, or issued as part of a collection

within a few years of their publication, and many others use lateral attribution to establish their

333

Champion, March 18, 1742.

165

position within her canon. Other works were revealed to be Haywood’s in subsequent editions or

are referred to as hers in contemporary works, such as book lists, so that despite a general policy

of initial anonymity, all but five of her works were recognized as Haywood titles by the end of

her life (Spedding 160-221).

Haywood’s five truly anonymous works were commissions. Her 1724 A Spy Upon the

Conjurer was published anonymously and authorship was first attributed to Haywood in 1824,

but her name appeared in later eighteenth-century editions as a reviser (Spedding 143). The

Dumb Projector (1725), The Sopha (1743), Memoirs of a Man of Honour (1747), and Dalinda

(1749) are the other anonymous works whose authorship was established after the eighteenth

century, as opposed to the many pseudonymous works whose authorship was publicly

recognized during her lifetime. Phyllis Guskin calls A Spy Upon the Conjurer and The Dumb

Projector “advertising copy in epistolary form.”334

They promoted the famous eighteenth-

century seer and magician Duncan Campbell, and it is hardly surprising that Haywood did not

associate her name with these pieces.

Dalinda, The Sopha, and Memoirs of a Man of Honour have a more complex relationship

to her other works. Dalinda is a scurrilous secret history that was attributed to Haywood in court

when she was arrested and questioned about her Jacobite pamphlet on Henry Goring (Spedding

520-3). It is uncertain why this book was rarely counted among her works, unlike her other

pseudonymous secret histories, unless the lack of attribution stems from a lack of interest in the

book. The Sopha, contrarily, is an erotic book that Haywood found herself commissioned to

translate at very short notice in conjunction with William Hatchett. She almost certainly agreed

334

Phyllis J. Guskin, ed., Clio: The Autobiography of Martha Fowke Sansom (1689-1736) (Newark: University of

Delaware Press, 1997), 49 n19.

166

to participate in the translation in part because of the high rate of pay she was offered, estimated

at £2 2s every four to seven days (Spedding 375), a rate of pay which might have been intended

to compensate her for the possibility of discovery. This book, which has been described as “one

of the most obscene works that have seen the light of day,” was a more openly and exclusively

erotic story than her other texts, lacking the romantic and emotional connections for which

Haywood was best known. Further, this text was, according to Spedding, sold along with a

naughty illustration of its contents, a sign to readers that its sexual content was its primary

attraction (Spedding 372).

There seems to be less reason why she would not wish to acknowledge her 1747

commissioned translation of the Abbe Antoine François Prevost d’Exile’s Memoirs of a Man of

Honour. This French text was neither scandalous, like The Sopha, nor tied to commerce, like The

Dumb Projector, but Mary Helen McMurran suggests that its anonymity may be attributed to

Haywood’s “calculated” project of associating herself “with femininity, with Frenchness, and

with novels,” while the Memoirs is a factual description of French modes of character.335

This is

purely speculative, of course, but does suggest how unusual it was for one of her works to be

truly rather than only apparently anonymous. Despite these five outliers, her anonymity was

nearly always temporary, and rarely complete, as the example of La Belle Assemblée

demonstrates. While King sees Haywood’s pseudonymity in this series as “cannily

distinguish[ing] this ultra-polite offering from both the risqué amatory fictions that preceded and

the scandal chronicles that would soon follow,” her authorship was openly known from at least

the 1730s.336

Indeed, King elsewhere emphasizes Haywood’s intentionality in making her

335

Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 89. 336

King, Political Biography, 33.

167

authorship of her first scandal novel, Memoirs of a Certain Island, known in a form of “patron-

stalking” that showed “that her talents, including a flair for personal abuse on exhibit in the

preceding pages, were at their disposal.”337

This simultaneous self-advertising and apparent

anonymity, I argue, shows Haywood capitalizing on the possibilities of anonymity but it also

shows that she is not ashamed of these books despite their scandalous possibilities.

In one example of the complex web of interactions that reveal her identity, she used her

advertisements to connect The Virtuous Villager to a previously-known work, La Belle

Assemblée. These works were published without Haywood’s name on either title page or

advertisement, but she made her authorship public through other means. Her first step toward

making her authorship of La Belle Assemblée known was in the marketing. In the Daily Journal

for the day of publication, her publisher presented only two items as “This day published.”. La

Belle Assemblée was the first of these and its lengthy description, concluding with “Printed for . .

. without Temple Bar, and . . . in Pall Mall” was immediately followed by the legend, “Where

may be had, The WORKS of Mrs. Eliza Haywood.”338

While not an admission of authorship,

this creates an immediate link between acknowledged and unacknowledged texts that continues

in later advertisements for her works. The puff for the 1725 pseudonymous translation, The

Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone, also includes a reference to the availability of her collection of

Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems, Memoirs of Baron de Brosse, and La Belle Assemblée, and

only after these four works by Haywood are works by other authors mentioned.339

By creating a

connection between her supposedly anonymous works and her recognized works, the

337

King, Political Biography, 37; King, “Of Grub Street and Grudges: Haywood’s Court of Caramania and Pope’s

Ire,” Review of English Studies 67.281 (2016): 720. 338

Daily Journal, August 26, 1724; Issue 1123. 339

Daily Post, January 22, 1725; Issue 1662.

168

advertisements that appear both in the newspaper and the final leaves of the published book

helped to create a cohesive canon for Haywood.

Internal advertisements cannot be implicitly trusted, but her next link is more explicit.

We have two letters from 1728, a year after the publication of the second volume. These letters,

sent to the Countess of Oxford and an unknown figure that Haywood calls “Your Honr,” are

signed with her name although not written in her hand, and in these she claims authorship of La

Belle Assemblée (Spedding 166-7). In addition to these private letters, addressed to members of

the nobility from whom she might have hoped for money or other forms of patronage, she took

other steps to ensure that her wider audience was aware of her authorship. In 1732, the year after

volume three of La Belle Assemblée was published, she took on the daringly sexual role of the

Lady Flame in Samuel Johnson of Chester’s The Blazing Comet and used the name of Madame

de Gomez, author of La Belle Assemblée, as her pseudonym in advertisements for the play, while

giving her real name in the published cast list. This connection complicates the picture King

paints of a Haywood who separates her risqué and her respectable productions. The role of the

Lady Flame “verges on indecency” and the “publicity stunt” involved in claiming de Gomez,

who is not recorded as ever having performed on the English stage, as the actor in this

publication shows a crossover of roles that King fails to take into account.340

While Haywood

certainly used her various pseudonyms to group her published works by type, there is no

evidence that she strove for true anonymity in any but a very few cases, such as the frankly erotic

translation of The Sopha. In fact, while she does, as King suggests, use lateral attribution to La

Belle Assemblée for her 1734 L’Entretien des Beaux Esprits, she appeared in The Blazing Comet

340

M. Heinemann, “Eliza Haywood’s Career in the Theatre,” Notes and Queries 20.1 (1973): 11.

169

two years before the latter publication, which negates the possibility that she was still, if she had

ever truly been, anonymous by the time of the second Gomez translation.

With so little biographical information available, it is not possible to say for certain why

Haywood chose her temporary anonymity. Anonymity was, as John Mullan argues, a

complicated phenomenon in the eighteenth century, when “it is difficult to distinguish between

an anonymous and a pseudonymous work” or to be certain of authorial intention in either

temporary or long-term anonymity.341

Writers like Swift and Pope used anonymity to add spice

to their reception, and Mullan argues that their anonymity was “more promotional than shy,” but

although Haywood enjoyed the use of anonymity it seems unlikely that she was following Pope

and Swift’s example in her publication of La Belle Assemblée.342

The long period of time which

passed between initial publication and official public revelation of identity, and the fact that even

after her stage performance La Belle Assemblée was never published with her name on the title

page, suggest that she aimed for a gradual rather than a sudden and attention-grabbing revelation

of her identity. But her willingness to use the Gomez name to promote one of her scandalous

theatre roles in the middle of the publication of La Belle Assemblée, one of her most popular and

most respectable works, and only a few years before the publication of the next book in the series

argues against a desire to separate her career into more and the less respectable parts.

Indeed, La Belle Assemblée, which offers a modern spin on Boccaccio’s Decameron, acts

as an argument for thinking of Haywood as a part of polite, upper-class society. The spin that she

puts on her translation emphasizes this double purpose. While Haywood introduces her

characters as “set above the Vulgar World” both morally and socially, the phrase that Gomez’

341

John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6. 342

Mullan, Anonymity, 17.

170

original uses is “pour se passer du reste du monde” (to pass the rest of the world).343

Haywood

not only adds the damning adjective “Vulgar,” she also changes the sense of “passer,” thus

altering the sentence from a statement that the group had the physical resources necessary for

their comfort and support to a declaration of social status.

The status that she claims for her characters helps to reinforce the story’s claim that love

is a purifying power which strengthens the effect of a virtuous example. Both Gomez and

Haywood agree that love need not destroy the goodness in a man with “les dispositions

nécessaires pour la vertu, qui profitera par elles de son éducation & de les exemples,” which

Haywood translates as “a Person born with a natural Disposition to Virtue, will improve his

Education and Examples” (Assemblée I.28; Journées I.15). But Gomez highlights the virtues that

her ideal man will have, insisting that “l’ame noble et bienfaisante ne lui inspire que de grands

sentimens” (the noble and beneficent soul can only be inspired by great sentiments), and that

“lorsque l’Amour viendra l’assujettir il ne s’offrira à ses regards que sous sa véritable figure: il

ne fera que cimenter les principes de l’éducation” (when love comes to this subject, it never

offers anything other than its true face: it does nothing but cement the principles of his

education), while Haywood focuses on the power of love (Journées I.15). Ignoring Gomez’

description of her hero’s soul and sentiments, Haywood moves directly from the virtuous man to

the time when “subdued by Love, [love] but strengthens the Principles he before adhere’d to”

(Assemblée I.28). While both agree that one can tell a good man by the fact that he wants to love

virtuously, Haywood’s translation highlights the overwhelming power of love and its ability to

reveal men’s true character. Her love does not merely come to a man, it subdues him, and her

343

Eliza Haywood, La Belle Assemblée (London, 1724), I.1; Cited as Assemblée; Angélique de Gomez, Les

Journées Amusantes (Paris, 1737), I.1. Cited as Journées.

171

shift from education to principles shows her belief that education, while important, can be

overcome by inward virtue.

The emphasis that Gomez places on external aids to virtue, and Haywood’s rejection of

them, appears most strongly in the inserted “Instructions” which are left to Julia by her mother.

Haywood’s translation closely follows Gomez as they discuss the perils of the “Virgin or

Widow-State” (Journées I.103) which Haywood emphasizes only slightly, changing Gomez’

“exposé à des accidens qui ne me paroissent pas moins dangereux” (exposed to accidents which

seem to me no less dangerous) (Journées I.178) to “seems to me as much, or more expos’d to

danger” (Assemblée I.103) than the wifely state. Both writers point out that there is no safe way

for independent women to behave, but Gomez is much more strict in her advice. For those who

do not wish to retire, Gomez counsels:

du moins je voudrois qu’elle choisît, dans les femmes les plus sages, celle qui lui

paroîtroit la plus capable de conserver sa réputation, & qui la regardant comme sa

mère, la mît à l’abri d’une médisance qui ne trouve toujours que trop à se

manifester. (at least I would have her choose the wisest woman, who seems the

most capable of conserving her reputation, and who she could regard as a

mother, she would give protection from the scandal that always finds a way to

manifest) (Journées I.178).

Herself a woman living alone, Haywood refuses to repeat such restrictive advice. Her ideal

woman should guard herself carefully, and many of her books reveal the dangers of letting that

guard down. But while she is willing to agree that for some women it is better to live retired from

the world, she refuses to sanction the sort of retreat into childhood that is advocated in the

original. Indeed, even Haywood’s call to retirement is less constraining than that of Gomez.

172

Gomez’ mother suggests “la retraite; mais sans faire de vœux” (retirement without making vows)

(Journées I.178), implying that her young woman should go into a convent but as someone who

is not bound to remain. Haywood’s “Retirement, but without entering into religious Orders”

(Assemblée I.103), suggests, on the contrary, that she advocates a retreat within the world rather

than a retreat outside it.

This image of retreat might allow Haywood herself to claim retirement from the world,

although her participation in the publishing world would make this a dubious claim. Certainly,

many of her heroines attempt to flee from the cruel or disappointing world to a retreat where they

will be safe, though, as Anadea learns in the 1724 The Fatal Secret, even removing to a “solitary

place” in the country is no protection from rape.344

Although these women may stay hidden for a

long time, there is no place which is completely safe from men’s wicked desires. Indeed the best

and safest position, for Haywood and women like her, might be the one she portrays her

narrators taking in works like The Female Spectator, which ran from1744 to 1746. In the

company of virtuous women and men, like those on display in La Belle Assemblée and the

Spectator, but not mingling freely with others, a woman is shielded from the evils of the world

without being either restricted by the presence of a guardian or removed from the chance to

develop her intellect.

Although “femmes en général ne sont point sçavantes” (women in general are not

scholars), both Gomez and Haywood agree that they “possedent la délicatesse des expressions &

la facilité de bien écrire” (Journées I.210). Haywood strengthens the point, insisting that “the

brightest Men of Learning often esteem their Decisions well enough to refer to them,” where

Gomez says only that these men “estiment quelquefois assez leur décision pour s’y rapporter”

344

Eliza Haywood, The Fatal Secret (London, 1724), 46.

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(sometimes esteem their decisions enough to report them) (Journées I.210). The events of the

text support both Haywood’s and Gomez’ claims for the importance of female understanding.

Within the first volume of La Belle Assemblée, many of the long pieces of writing which are read

to the company are by women and with a few notable exceptions these pieces are praised as both

moral and witty, demonstrating feminine writing and virtue.

Given its emphasis on virtue and its determination to justify Haywood’s participation in

literary society and her views of proper femininity, it is easy to see why authors like King would

call La Belle Assemblée “ultra-polite.”345

But by separating this book from the other works by

Haywood which are advertised in its pages, we run the risk of ignoring the connections between

her different styles of publication. The advertisement, in the pages of La Belle Assemblée, for an

edition of her 1725 Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems must not be ignored or overlooked.

Although the Secret Histories does not contain the risqué Memoirs of a Certain Island, it does

include the first and only known publication of Fantomina, one of her most daring and sexually

adventurous stories. The connection between these demonstrates the dangers of speaking of her

temporarily anonymous publications, like her 1719-20 Love in Excess and La Belle Assemblée,

separately from the works she openly claimed from their initial appearance. The existence of the

few works that can be proven to be hers but which were not publicly attributed to Haywood

suggests that she was capable of hiding her authorship when she wished, and creates a clear

separation between her actually and her temporarily anonymous publications. As so few of her

pseudonymous works were unknown by the end of her lifetime, all of her known works, both her

amatory novels and her more polite offerings, must be seen as part of her attempt at fashioning

345

King, Political Biography, 33.

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an identity and a reputation in the public eye and must be read carefully to reveal the different

ways in which she understood and explained femininity, class, and morality.

Establishing a Reputation

Throughout this argument, Haywood is referred to as the primary agent in regard to her

publications. This provides an easy and necessary shorthand for discussion, but it risks

oversimplifying a situation that was, in reality, very complicated. Her interactions with

booksellers fall into three main forms: she wrote books of her own choosing and sold them to a

bookseller to print and distribute, she was hired by booksellers or other clients to write books

that her client or bookseller then printed and distributed, and for a short period she wrote books

that she distributed at her own shop.

Each of these interactions gives her a different amount of control over the finished work.

None offers her complete autonomy, and it is difficult to be certain which, if any, of her books

were ideas which she presented to a bookseller and which were suggested to her by her

publishers. At least eight of her works are known or believed to be commissions, and others,

such as the series of books collected in the 1724 Works of Mrs Eliza Haywood, were agreed on

by her bookseller before she began to write.346

Even when she owned her own bookshop, The

Sign of Fame, in 1741-2, there is no evidence to suggest that Haywood owned a printing shop.347

Some of the books she sold at her shop were printed primarily for her own sale, but others,

346

The Fair Captive (1721), A Spy Upon the Conjurer (1724), The Dumb Projector (1725), Mary Stuart, Queen of

Scots (1725), The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Carmania (1726), The Dramatic

Historiographer (1735), The Sopha (1743), and Dalinda (1749) are known or believed to have been

commissioned. 347

King, Political Biography, 8.

175

including The Virtuous Villager, were printed for a larger group of booksellers and publishers,

who appear on different issues of the same edition (Spedding 366). Her role as a bookseller may

have given her greater control over the finished product, especially in cases where she was

financially responsible for the printing, but she was still subject both to the printer’s decisions

and to the exigencies of trade.

As an author of the mid-eighteenth century, Haywood could expect to make some

decisions about the title page, advertisements, and format of her publications, though she did not

have as much control over typeface, format, illustration, and decoration as Pope demanded from

his own booksellers. Although she was impecunious during some points of her life, both

Backscheider and King argue against the view of Haywood as impoverished. Backscheider

claims that “Haywood could not have been the solitary, bedraggled hack peddling her works

bookseller to bookseller that she is so frequently described to be” and there is no evidence to

show that her financial situation was so dire as to make accepting commissions a necessity.348

King, examining a recently discovered advertisement for the sale of Haywood’s house and

goods, argues that her “household items are not what one expects to find in the possession of

someone thought to be chronically beset with pecuniary distress.”349

If she found a suggested job

distasteful or felt that it would damage her reputation, this suggests, she could either refuse it or,

as she appears to have done in the case of The Sopha, effectively conceal her authorship.

In addition, although she did not keep the role of bookseller for long, she succeeded in

gaining the respect of the more established booksellers. These, as Ingrassia argues, viewed her as

“some sort of colleague, a person of the trade,” and allowed her a good deal of control over the

348

Paula R. Backscheider, introduction to Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood, by Eliza Haywood (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xvi. 349

King, Political Biography, 101.

176

appearance and publication of her works.350

Although Ingrassia focuses on her time as a

bookseller, examining the language of fellowship other booksellers used toward Haywood when

questioned over the publication of the Letter from Henry Goring, she argues that Haywood’s

“high level of involvement with the production of her works” is demonstrated by her “intensive

and extended involvement in all factors of book production” during her brief tenure as a

bookseller in 1741 and 1742 and her participation in distribution and production networks.351

She certainly kept a close eye on the proofs of her work, as is suggested by Elizabeth

Woodfall who, in testifying to Haywood’s authorship in court, claimed that she recognized

Haywood’s maid from 1726, when Haywood’s maid servant “came very often” with revised

versions of “the proof sheets” for The Double Marriage (Spedding 753). These repeated

revisions create a marked contrast to the prevalent idea that she published her writings as fast as

she could scribble the words, leaving her bookseller or publisher to control the revisions, proofs,

and formatting of her work. Her close attention to proofs was part of her shrewd assessment of

her market, her ability to write to her audience, and her willingness to market her books to the

most appropriate demographic.

Working within these constraints Haywood asserted her identity and established her

reputation. Her first novel, Love in Excess, began as an anonymous octavo priced at the middle

of the range for popular productions at one shilling (Spedding 90). This was an ambitious

opening to her career, demonstrating confidence on the part of both Haywood and her publisher,

and she moved quickly to capitalize on her success, putting her name on the title page of the

second part of the novel and preparing to publish a new work with her name on the title page. At

350

Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, 119. 351

Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, 120.

177

this point, she was an author on the make. She had succeeded in placing her name in the public

eye, and she needed something to cement her reputation and establish herself as an author. She

may even, as Spedding argues and she hints in the opening of the Letters, have succeeded in

acquiring a patron who “encourag’d” her writing at this time (Spedding 99).352

At the same time,

she needed to produce a work that would repay her readers for their support. Finally, she needed

a publication that would signal her connections and place her among the writers who could

circulate within what she continually refers to as the court (Assemblée I.iv, v).353

To fulfill all these needs Haywood turned, as Pope and Dryden had before her, to

translation. She did not have the Latin or the Greek to attempt a translation from the classics, but

she chose a well-known story to translate. Her translation of Edmé Boursault’s 1700 Treize

Lettres amoureuses d’une dame à un cavalier joined the popular genre of epistolary romance

which, in England, was spurred by Sir Roger L’Estrange’s translation of the Portuguese Letters

as Five Love-letters from a Nun to a Cavalier in 1678. Ros Ballaster claims that these letters

were “taken to be the epitome of a natural rhetoric of passion” and that their effect “cannot be

overestimated.”354

Early eighteenth-century romances took up the Portugese Letters with an

eagerness similar to that with which a later generation embraced Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded,

creating numerous continuations, responses, copies, and imitations.355

By 1721, when Haywood

published her translation, the genre was established, popular, and respected.

Like Aphra Behn, whose politicized version of the same story first appeared in 1684 as

Love-Letters from a Nobleman to his Sister, Haywood chose a piece in the established and

352

Eliza Haywood, Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (London, 1720), iii. 353

Champion, March 18, 1742. 354

Ros Ballaster, “Preparatives to Love: Seduction as Fiction in the Works of Eliza Haywood,” in Living by the Pen:

Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 63, n. 355

Ballaster, “Preparatives to Love,” 63.

178

popular letter-writing tradition begun by L’Estrange, adding the legitimacy of tradition to her

writing, and like Behn she transformed the text. Haywood’s finished work, a love-story and

commentary on the uses and traditions of amorous letters, is very different from Behn’s intricate

political commentary, but both writers chose a recognized tradition and used its popularity to

drive their agendas. For Haywood, her immediate agenda was to establish her own reputation by

publishing her first translation by subscription. This meant that her work had to be attractive to

subscribers. Since her first book had been popular, she could hope that her name would draw

some interest, but she could not count on being enough of a draw to attract the titled patrons she

needed. Although Spedding points out that she did not gain enough subscribers to sell the final

book at the price and quality she and her publisher first planned (Spedding 101), she succeeded

in attracting 309 subscribers, many of whom had a title, and in realizing a profit, both great steps

for a new author. Her name was now, through her public subscription list and promotions,

advertisements, and publications, associated with the upper-class audience that she hoped to

attract.

The subscription list shows her high aspirations. Publication by subscription was a

popular contemporary method of gaining both money and reputation. This type of publication

often relied on existing contacts. Pat Rogers argues that Mrs. Stanley, publishing by subscription

only four years after Haywood’s Letters, “was not aiming at a general book-buying public, least

of all one for works of literature,” but building on existing contacts in an attempt to rebuild the

family fortunes.356

As Adam Budd shows, however, while Stanley used family contacts and

356

Pat Rogers, “Family, Kinship, and the Evidence of Subscription Lists: Dorothy Stanley and Arcadia Moderniz’d,”

The Review of English Studies 66.275 (2015): 517.

179

authors like Pope and Dryden played on existing reputations in their subscription publications,

authors like Mary Barber attempted to use the same method to begin a literary career.357

Subscription publication required the author to be closely involved with the audience of

her books, and the surviving letter soliciting subscriptions for this work demonstrates the

immediacy of Haywood’s involvement with her noble readers (Spedding 100). In the final

publication the names in the Letters are divided alphabetically rather than by rank. This ploy

allows a smaller number of titles to be spread out over a longer series of pages, and also serves to

conceal the lack of eminent names. If Haywood, like Stephen Duck, had the royal family on her

list she would probably have imitated him in placing them at its head.358

Instead, although more

than half of her subscribers had some sort of title, these were primarily courtesy or military titles

and there is no evidence that she retained a supporting patron after this publication. She

continued to seek aristocratic patronage in her dedications for some years, but her first

translation was her only attempt at subscription work.

The price her bookseller, Chetwood, set on this work underscores the importance

Haywood placed on the Letters. While her initial, anonymous, publication of Love in Excess was

sold at only one shilling and her publicly attributed second and third volumes, after the first had

garnered applause, were priced at 2s, the publication of the Letters attempted to improve this

price. Advertised at 3s “in Quires” or 5s “Bound in Calf, Gilt Back” (Bib 104), the book was

finally issued at 2s, a significant drop from the ambitious plan for a 5s calf and gilt production.

The high quality and price of the initial advertisements reflected the class of clientele she and her

publisher hoped to attract.

357

Adam Budd, “‘Merit in distress’: The Troubled Success of Mary Barber,” The Review of English Studies 53.210

(2002): 209. 358

Budd, “‘Merit in distress,’” 206.

180

The belief that translation would sell better than original work is further revealed in the

pricing of her next two publications. The 1721 play The Fair Captive, printed for Jauncy and

Cole, and the 1722 novel The British Recluse, published by Browne, Chetwood, and Woodman,

were both priced at 1s 6d. Although Haywood’s publisher raised the price on her third novel, The

Injur’d Husband, which was part of the series on the Danger of Giving Way to Passion which

she had promised would follow Love in Excess, the price on the next of these books, the 1723

Idalia, had dropped back to the 1s 6d that quickly became Haywood’s average sale price. This

average remains relatively consistent during her career, although she moves from bookseller to

bookseller and even publishes her own books for a short period. While this certainly

demonstrates, as Spedding suggests, that she found it difficult to attain the kind of popularity or

patronage that she desired, her repeated attempts to produce works for a higher-end market show

her desire for increased prestige. Her trajectory from an anonymous publication that, while it

was, as Kathryn King points out, bound and made handsomely, was no larger and priced no

higher than the majority of her early works, to an “even more elegant” subscription work shows

that she viewed translation as the type of work that would help her to break into the upper levels

of the literary world to which she aspired.359

Haywood’s preface to the Letters offers yet more evidence of her high hopes for this

work. Her claims of an “insignificant lowness” carry little conviction when followed by the

assertion that the “unquestionable Judgement of those Persons who encouraged me to undertake

the Translation” is “a sufficient Protection from whatever Malice or Ill-Nature might suggest.”360

Here she not only insists that the translation is good enough and supported by powerful enough

359

Kathryn King, “New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the

Hillarians, 1719–1725,” in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula

Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005), 266. 360

Haywood, Letters from a Lady of Quality, iii-iv. Cited as Letters.

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patrons that its only criticism could come from “Ill-Nature,” but also turns her “lowness” into

praise of the unknown patrons who had the wit to recognize her merit and exercise their

judgement on her behalf.

In this context, Haywood’s assertion that she has taken so many liberties with her text

that it would “appear to be more properly call’d a Paraphrase than a Translation” appears to be a

boast, inviting her readers to examine the language of the text more closely (Letters iv). Her

discussions of her work to “retrench” and “heighten” the “Beauties” of her text echo the

conventional images that Pope uses when he speaks of Virgil “working up a more intractable

language” to create the Aeneid from Homer’s Odyssey or his own “chimerical hope” of “raising

and improving” the text.361

At the end of her preface, she clinches her position by assuming the

same tone of lofty self-sufficiency that Pope increasingly used as he collected more enemies over

the course of his career. It is telling that she concludes her short preface by saying that “If those

few I wish to please are satisfied” she will not “be Sollicitous [sic] what Opinion the rest of the

World may have of it altogether,” not trying to persuade the readers of her text to support her in

the lowly position her opening words imply but inviting respect for her inferred connections and

her self-sufficiency (Letters vi).

Her “Discourse Concerning Writings of this Nature,” which she appended to her

translation and which formed an important part of her advertisement for the book, showcases the

steps she took to present her translation as an addition to the works of the learned. James

Sterling’s later inclusion of Haywood in the so-called “fair triumvirate of wit,” a group of female

writers which also included Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, demonstrates a public

361

Haywood, Letters, v; Alexander Pope, Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, Maynard Mack, et al. (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1939-67), VII.11, 19.

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recognition of the primacy of wit and femininity.362

These women all wrote novels of passion,

but the collective title Sterling gives them emphasizes their desire to join the ranks of

philosophical and political writers who shaped public opinion and taste. For Haywood, this

group of wits would have included not only Pope, Swift, and Addison but also the commissioned

writers and newspaper editors whose writing, while often produced quickly and at the orders of a

bookseller or patron, had a national influence which the government was unable to fully suppress

and which led Walpole’s administration to spend tens of thousands of pounds on propaganda

during the 1720s and 30s.363

Haywood did not have the literary connections of Aphra Behn, whose mid-career

inclusion in Dryden’s multiple hands edition of Ovid’s Epistles demonstrates an acceptance by

polite society which Haywood seems never to have attained. Behn’s birth may have been

unexceptional, but she had noble friends, connections to the government due to her time as a spy,

access to the libraries at Penshurst and other noble seats, and a relationship with Dryden, who

was “conspicuously kind” to her in his public writing. Haywood, without any of these

advantages, reached for fame as soon as she had published one successful book.364

There is no

evidence that she attempted to join a multiple hands translation or to submit to one of the

Miscellanies that were still popular throughout England, but she was not a classicist nor,

although several of her works include poetry, was she a popular enough poet to earn a living

through her verse.

362

James Sterling, “To Mrs. Eliza Haywood on Her Writings,” quoted in Nancy Cotton, Women Playwrights in

England: c. 1363-1750 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 204. 363

Tone Sundt Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets: The Use of Literature as Pro-Government Propaganda, 1721-

1742 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 107. 364

Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 28, 128-9; 369.

183

In an attempt to gain something like the same cachet that a classical translation would

have given her, Haywood advertised the Letters as being written by “the Famous Monsieur

BOURSAULT,” one of “the most celebrated WRITERS of that Nation” (Spedding 103). In fact,

her work appears to be a loose translation of a text by the minor writer Edmé Boursault. While

Boursault insists that the letters are from a lady who sent them to him after they had been refused

by a publisher, thus questioning the worth of the letters even in his own preface, Haywood puffs

up the importance of both writer and work. Her “DISCOURSE concerning Writings of this

Nature, by the TRANSLATOR, by way of ESSAY” (Spedding 103) shows her treating this form

of letter-writing as an important genre and as worthy of study.365

Her discourse focuses on the

dangers of letter-writing for women and the impossibility of securing one’s reputation when

sending letters. Here she rehearses many of the themes which she explores later in her career,

lamenting women’s unstable position in the world, how easily men discard women, and how

often women are taken advantage of. This whole “Discourse” is mingled with relationship advice

and ends with a claim that her writing “may be of so general a Service to my Sex” in their

relations to the other that it will help them to mend the “Extravagance,” “Deceit, Inconstancy,

and Ingratitude” of men.366

These themes are typical of the lifelong concern for women’s matters that has made

Haywood’s current reputation as a proto-feminist author, but the discourse also includes a subtler

bid for women’s place in the literary sphere. She does not make the same move as Bluestockings

or feminists like Wollstonecraft, who insist that women should be allowed to participate in the

365

Donna Kuizenga, “Writing in Drag: Strategic Rewriting in the Early Epistolary Novel,” in Studies in Early

Modern France Volume 8: Strategic Rewriting, ed. David Lee Rubin (Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 2002),

157. 366

Haywood, “Discourse Concerning Writings of this Nature,” in Letters from a Lady of Quality, 29, 25. Cited as

“Discourse.”

184

masculine sphere. Instead, she argues for a different but equal position for women, claiming that

“There is certainly an Influence in an artful, tender, and passionate Way of Writing, which more

sensibly affects the Soul, than all the Tongue can utter” and which women should beware of

despite their intrinsic suitability for such writing (“Discourse” 6).

Writing novels, Haywood’s “Discourse” suggests, is a way for women to escape the bind

of being most suited for an unseemly way of writing. She claims that “what a Woman gains by

her Condescension [in writing letters to a man] (besides the Reputation of a Talent which had

better be eternally concealed, than made use of this way) I cannot find out,” but insists that a

novel or a translation offers the same scope for talent without threatening her reputation

(“Discourse” 2). Her opening bid for reputation in the “Discourse” is reminiscent of Dryden’s

insistence on the quality of his audience in the prefaces to his translations. She claims that her

discussion of letter-writing “may perhaps be looked on as impertinent by Ladies, who boast of a

Superiority of Discernment” and who should already know of the dangers inherent in writing

letters to men, but insists that “it is by those [ladies] only [that] I am ambitious to be read”

(“Discourse” 1). While Haywood is not as consistent in her focus on a specific readership as

Dryden, she reveals a similar preoccupation with her audience when she opens her “Discourse”

with an address to “ladies,” assuring them that she knows their rank, respects their abilities, and

has something interesting and important to offer.

Instead of making references to the titles of her readers as Pope does or directing them to

read works available only to the learned as does Dryden, Haywood flatters them. She assumes

that the majority of her readers will be women, and she offers these women advice on how to

maintain their position in society. At the same time, she refuses to directly accuse men of any

fault. Although she describes a world in which a woman’s reputation rests on the number of her

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admirers, but in which they are penalized for performing the practices that gain them admirers,

she refuses to attribute this unfairness to the men who are the benefactors of society’s double-

standards. In this discourse, she describes several occasions in which “Gentlemen” seduced and

abandoned or destroyed women, but in no case does she blame the man.

In the first of these stories, Haywood introduces her characters with an excuse, claiming

that the Gentleman in question must have “either loved, or had some potent Reasons to feign a

Passion for” the lady who is really at the bottom of his sinister plot. Only after having first

excused him and then thrown the culpability on another does she admit that his actions were

“base to the last degree.” She immediately declares that “we cannot imagine there are many Men

. . . who would, in this manner, sacrifice one Woman to the Resentment of another,” thus

simultaneously insisting on the moral fibre of the majority of men and repeating her insistence

that this action was the fault of a woman. In another inserted story, this time dealing with an even

clearer account of masculine perfidy in which women played no mitigating role, Haywood

begins by insisting that the gentleman in question is “the nearest to Perfection, of any that yet

graced Humanity: and yet this lovely, this most charming Man, had an Inconstancy, and

Ingratitude in his Nature” which she deplores. Instead of admitting his failure to live up to his

apparent perfection, she attributes his imperfection to women who encourage him through a

“Correspondence” of amorous letters (“Discourse” 28, 29).

These stories serve several purposes. They connect her to the genteel world, showing that

she is at least enough one of them to hear their gossip, know their secrets, and enter their

chambers. They allow her to show her abilities as a writer, displaying her talent for love stories

and affecting letters. They flatter men, who are portrayed as capable of gaining and keeping

women’s affection but as only partially responsible for their unwillingness to follow through on

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their promises and their inability to be faithful to a single woman. They reinforce her claim that

even witty, intelligent, beautiful women can fall into danger because of the practice of writing

letters, serving her didactic purpose. And they display her concern for her own reputation,

establishing her as the type of woman likely to warn others away from writing letters such as the

set she has just translated and establishing novel writing as a more moral and acceptable pastime

by contrast.

This need to justify her writing helps to explain the way that Haywood directed her works

toward an apparently female audience.367

The femininity of her audience must be suspect from

the beginning, as readers remember the subscription list in which nearly two hundred out of her

three hundred and nine subscribers are male. In fact, it might surprise readers, a hundred pages

into the book, to discover that Haywood is only “ambitious to be read” by “Ladies” (“Discourse”

1). Perhaps it is the dangers Haywood warns of in her “Discourse,” where she declares that

“Letters from a Woman” are “so great and valuable a Token of her Regard” that they can never

be safe in the hands of a man, which drive her abrupt shift from a general to a specifically

feminine audience (“Discourse” 1). If she is not writing to men, which might be dangerous, or

making promises or protestation of love, which might ruin her, she can retain her claim to be

decorously following social rules by enforcing social conventions.

She follows the conventions of moral literature, from conduct books to adventure stories

like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, by portraying herself as a teacher, displaying the concerns with

jealousy, reputation, and promises which inform her writing from her early amatory fiction to her

late political and educational periodicals. She sprinkles both quotations and original poetry

throughout, connecting her discourse to the larger world of discussion and claiming a place

367

Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 40.

187

amongst the poets who were still read as moral authorities. Her anecdotes are mixed with general

moralizing and she directs several of her remarks against the writer of the letters she has just

translated, using them to show the force of her claims and using the “Discourse” to ratify her

position in response. Finally, she claims to have “touch’d” on “the several Causes which lead to

this Extravagance and pointed out some few of the Inconveniencies which attend it” in the hopes

that her message will be “of Service” to an audience attempting to follow moral and societal

guidelines (“Discourse” 29).

Internal advertising confirms her self-identification as a moral writer. Whether the copy

was chosen by Haywood or her publisher, Chetwood, the focus on her forthcoming works

displays both a hope for her future career and the moral pretensions under which she wrote.

There are several pages of advertisements for novels published by Chetwood, including what

appears to be a complete list of extant and forthcoming titles at the beginning and end of the

volume, but the book also includes a single page promoting her next project. She promises to

write “Five Exemplary Novels” on the “Danger of giving way to Passion,” the same subject that

she examines in both Love in Excess and the “Discourse” she has just finished. These novels

were never collected in the form she and Chetwood suggest here, and in fact Chetwood slowly

relinquished control of the series, being joined by Woodman, Browne, and Chapman. Browne

and Chapman replaced Chetwood in the final two books, but Haywood completed her series,

successfully bringing the books to print both separately and as part of her 1724 collected Works,

which were themselves a bid for an improved literary reputation (Spedding 55).

By publishing her own Works, she followed in Pope’s self-aggrandizing footsteps,

publicly declaring her importance. Haywood, who published her collected Works only four years

after her first novel appeared, may have hoped that her Works would jumpstart a career that had

188

thus far not been as rewarding as she had initially hoped. Pope was criticized for his hubris in

publishing his Works so early in his career, and Haywood’s published Works, given her lower

social standing, demonstrates comparatively greater ambition.368

She also designed her collection

to continue the work that Letters from a Lady had begun, establishing her as a moral, reputable,

well-connected lady. Unlike Pope, who excluded his longer translations from his Works,

Haywood includes her translation of Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier in her Works

as well as her original Love in Excess, the “Five Exemplary Novels” she had promised in her

earlier advertisement, and a play written by request and which she implies was supported by

Viscount Thomas Gage (Spedding 104). This combination shows her focus on her reputation as a

literary writer with ties to the aristocracy and to moral teaching. At the beginning of her career,

she hoped that she could gain patronage and a position by connecting herself to peers and to the

court, and she saw her translations as moral, virtuous books that would help her to achieve that

position.

Translation as Intervention

Although Haywood never reached the social heights of Pope or Dryden, she took pride in

the part she played in making foreign literature into English literature that was not only beautiful

but also virtuous and instructive. Her novels are both sexually explorative and cautionary,

acknowledging the pleasures of transgression while warning women of the dangers of pregnancy

and abandonment. She experimented with many different forms and styles throughout her career,

368

Dustin H. Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 93-9.

189

but, as Mary Schofield discusses in her 1985 biography, Haywood’s entire career “was interlaced

with her translating efforts.”369

Although her translations, like all of her works, appeared at

different prices and formats, the translations rarely appeared below the quality of the surrounding

novels, and they were integrated into her larger oeuvre. She used her translation of La Belle

Assemblée, one of her most popular works (Spedding 162, 167-8, 775-6), to promote not only

her books but also her appearance in a sexually innovative play. One of her later translations, the

1742 Virtuous Villager, marked a movement down the social scale both in its price and its

presentation of a girl who began as a peasant, but it also allowed her to experiment with a new

form, responding to existing market pressures. In addition, by beginning her movement into the

Richardsonian novel with a translation from the French, she stressed the continuity of her oeuvre,

making a silent argument for the singleness of her creative vision.

This singleness is especially important in light of a modern tendency to interpret

Haywood as a writer who, as Karen Hollis says, “exploited the commercial popularity of the

erotic, and then the sentimental” novel.370

In fact, while she certainly experimented with form,

there is surprisingly little variation in her main subjects. These subjects, as King points out,

include a demand for “justice for men and women in the middling and lower social rank,” a

condemnation of “power-seeking,” and a powerful “feminist dimension” in her support for social

and political change.371

Haywood examines women both as authors and as readers,

demonstrating the literary and physical dangers of eighteenth-century femininity. What she is

perhaps best known for, however, both in her own time period and today, is her intense

emotionality.

369

Mary Anne Schofield, Eliza Haywood (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985), 36. 370

Karen Hollis, “Eliza Haywood and the Gender of Print,” The Eighteenth Century 38.1 (1997): 44. 371

King, Political Biography, 37, 83, 74.

190

In order to maintain these trends, she took ownership of her translations. From the

beginning of her career, she added descriptive passages and expanded emotional scenes in her

material in order to maintain the passionate, emotional intensity for which she is now known.

Her first translation, Letters from a Lady of Quality, whose subscription publication, driven both

by newspaper advertisements and a letter campaign, clearly shows her attempt to establish her

reputation was, like her first publication, Love in Excess, written while she was a part of Aaron

Hill’s literary circle, “a major unifying force in British literary culture” which aided in the

promotion of women’s literature.372

Earla Wilputte’s book shows how Haywood’s introduction

to “Hill’s literary circle” encouraged her emotional, sublime language and formed the style for

which she became known.373

The passionate, almost erotic intensity of feeling that readers found

so compelling in Love in Excess was an important part of her early style, and becomes especially

evident when comparing her translated material to its source. In the Letters from a Lady of

Quality, Haywood’s “emotional heightening” alters what Séverine Genieys-Kirk calls

Boursault’s “minimal” aesthetic which downplays the “expression of one’s feelings.”374

Although Marina Grossi argues that Boursault’s focus on individual action and her style of

cascading punctuation already displays “l’accavallarsi caotico dei pensieri e delle emozione” (the

chaotic overload of thoughts and emotions) which Haywood’s translation echoes, she agrees that

this is “accentuano nella parafrasi della Haywood” (accented in Haywood’s paraphrase), which

372

King, “New Contexts for Early Novels,” 264; Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685-1750

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 67-71; Spedding, Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, 99-100. 373

Earla Wilputte, Passion and Language in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of

Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 55. 374

Séverine Genieys-Kirk, “Eliza Haywood’s Translation and Dialogic Reading of Madeleine-Angélique de Gomez’

Journées amusantes (1722-1731),” in Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700-1900, ed.

Gillian E. Dow (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 40.

191

shows increased description of emotional response.375

These changes both connect the Letters to

her previously published book and prepare the reader for the didactic essay with which she

concludes her text.

Her movement toward increased emotionality appears throughout Letters from a Lady of

Quality. Where Boursault’s heroine merely says “elle m’a coûté des larmes en la lisant . . . et je

la garde” (it has cost me tears in the reading . . . and I retain it), Haywood’s heroine declares

that “I keep it in my Bosom—— press it to my Heart, which, while it bounds with tender

Transports to meet the welcome Treasure, upbraids, in bursting Sighs, the niggard Bounty of

injurious Fate, which, for substantial, gives but imaginary Joys.”376

The constrained admission of

an emotional connection which in the original acts to supplement a description of the man’s

letter becomes, for Haywood, a display of female emotionality. This increased physical response

highlights the warnings against passion, especially as expressed through the written and spoken

word, that run throughout her works and that forms the subject of her concluding “Discourse.”

Most interestingly, Haywood’s revision alters the subject of the passage. Instead of

showing a woman writing about a man’s ability, her character writes about a woman: the narrator

herself. This pattern continues throughout the text, as Haywood shifts quickly away from

Boursault’s concentration on the addressee of the letters, and is especially visible in her revision

of Boursault’s condemnation. Boursault’s “Si vous m’aimiez avec autant de désinteréssement

que je vous aime, mettriez-vous ma pudeur à cette épreuve; et vous serviriez-vous du pouvoir

que vous avez sur moi, jusqu’à trouver du plaisir à en abuser?” (If you loved me with as much

disinterest as I you, would you put my decency to this test; and serve yourself with the power you

375

Marina Grossi, “La Retorica Della Passione,” in Sheherazade in Inghilterra: Formule Narrative Nell’evoluzione

del “Romance”Inglese (Milano: Instituo Editoriale Cisalpino, 1983), 23. 376

Edmé Boursault, Treize lettres amoureuses d’une dame à un cavalier, ed. Bernard Bray (Paris: Editions

Desjonquere, 1994), 95; Haywood, Letters, 52.

192

have over me, until you find pleasure in the abuse?) focuses on the actions of her selfish lover.377

Haywood’s version of this passage, “Lovely Encroacher! Can you expect yet more?” is

immediately connected to the lady’s feelings. Far from being skeptical of the value of an

unselfish love, her lady cries that she “know[s] too well the boundless Wishes of that Passion,

and the Pangs, the burning Pangs it suffers when restrained,” suggesting that, although she still

recognizes that her lover “seek[s] to ruin” her, she is in sympathy with him because of their

shared desire (Letters 45). This revisionist interpretation of Boursault’s original, which brings the

female experience to the forefront, continues in varying degrees throughout Haywood’s

translations.

This is especially evident in her 1727 Love in its Variety, translated from Matteo

Bandello’s Le Novelle. In this translation, Haywood not only offers her usual heightening of both

male and female emotions throughout but also adds a story at the end for which, as Spedding

demonstrates, no Bandello original has been found (Spedding 287-8). It is difficult to be certain

of Haywood’s source text, as both French and English translations and adaptions of the 1554 and

1573 Novelle had been popular since the sixteenth century and it was common for writers to

follow an intermediary French translation rather than working with an Italian source. Regardless

of her immediate source, Haywood’s alterations clearly modify the misogynist, androcentric,

vision of Bandello’s original text. In doing so, Haywood encourages readers to subscribe to her

idea of feminine sexual morality, not the traditional conduct-book image of removed,

disinterested chastity, but a vital, enthusiastic fidelity which accepts and encourages women’s

sexual desire within the context of faithful love.

377

Boursault, Treize lettres amoureuses, 87.

193

While all of the stories in Love in its Variety are emotionally-charged romances, the last

of these offers the most female agency. Bandello sometimes shifts to the female perspective in

other stories, but it is the desires and intentions of the male protagonists which shape the stories

and drive the plots. In the final story, “The Witty Reclaimer: Or, a Man made Honest,”

contrarily, we see hero Fabritio’s emotions only briefly and the story turns on the plot devised by

Christiana, his jilted lover, to oust his wife and take her place at his side. Bandello’s stories often

turn on men discovering the unfaithfulness of their wife or lover and putting them to death, but in

this story not only Christiana but Fabritio’s wife, Villaretta, are satisfied by the ending. Rather

than wait for her rival to die, Christiana puts on man’s dress to persuade Villaretta that Fabritio

does not love her, seduces her, and arranges to be found in bed with her. Although her romance

with Christiana is disappointed, Villaretta leaves triumphant, not only free of an unwanted

husband but also claiming that “she doubted not but to find Friends who shou’d oblige him to

return her dower,” giving her both monetary and sexual freedom.378

This story’s sexual freedom and agency change the way that readers must view the other

texts, putting previous revenge narratives into a new context and challenging readers’ acceptance

of androcentric views of marriage. “The Witty Reclaimer” upturns the world of “Female

Revenge,” the third of the six stories in the book, which shows a woman who takes ‘revenge’ on

her husband, who has remained faithful despite his love for another woman, by sleeping with

another man. Her husband discovers this, bests his rival in a duel, uses the affair as an excuse for

divorce, and leaves her, abandoned by husband and lover, to swallow poison and die “truly

repenting her ill Conduct.”379

By ending the collection with a proto-feminist text, Haywood

378

Eliza Haywood, Love in its Variety (London, 1727), 248. 379

Haywood, Love in its Variety, 139.

194

forces a revised interpretation of infidelity, implicitly comparing male to female infidelity and

demanding that lovers who are equally guilty should be equally punished or equally unpunished.

If the unfaithful woman in “The Witty Reclaimer” ends her story “truly repenting” the wrong she

has done to her husband, Fabritio concludes “Female Revenge,” and the novel, by recognizing

“how ungrateful” he has been and by doing penance in the form of telling “the whole Story of

this Adventure to as many as knew them.”380

While Haywood did not, as Pope and Dryden did, explicitly highlight these changes in

prefaces or notes appended to her translations, she did use her dedications to stress her ability to

maintain and heighten the “beauties” of the original (Letters v). Moreover, while her real

translations do not contain the kind of scholarly apparatus other authors in this study use,

Adventures of Eovaai (1736), one of her more interesting but less successful anonymous secret

histories and pseudo-translations, did include a full scholarly apparatus, highlighting the function

of the supposed translator. By showcasing the translator’s incompetence, Haywood’s footnotes

call attention to the variety and scope of change, adaption, and interpretation which translation

entails. In this novel, as Ros Ballaster argues, “The instability of the act of ‘translation’ is central

to the narrative machinery of the novel.”381

The foregrounding of translation in this novel invites Haywood’s readers to question

what changes have been made to her other translations, demonstrating a meta-textual awareness

that goes beyond the standard insistence on stylistic and linguistic improvement. From the

beginning of the book, the figure of the translator is suspect, as a foreigner translating a text into

English for a nation he admits to not understanding. Haywood’s translator claims to be working

380

Haywood, Love in its Variety, 249-50. 381

Ros Ballaster, “A Gender of Opposition: Eliza Haywood’s Scandal Fiction,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza

Haywood, 158.

195

from a translation made by a “Cabal” so useless that after “Ninety and seven Moons,” or eight

years, these seven scholars were “able to translate” only “three, out of twenty one” books.382

As

Wilputte explains, “An ambience of intrigue which makes the reader suspicious of the

Authorities with which she is presented is . . . part of Haywood’s point,” and she calls readers to

be suspicious not only of her fictitious translator and the political figures she satirizes but also of

the process of translation.383

The translator’s partisan, politically-charged, and suspect authority is evident in his

Scriblerian interventions, which appear in footnotes throughout the book. From the first note,

which purports to place Eovaii’s kingdom on the globe, both Cabal and translator are implicated

in the political message of this pseudo-translation. The kingdom of Ijaveo is “near the South

Pole” so “it must be,” the translator says, “the Antipodes to England” and the perfect political

example (Eovaii 1). Continual references to the Cabal, which “differ’d very much” on many

important points, emphasize the untrustworthiness of both levels of translation within the text

(Eovaii 7). The translator underscores the ridiculousness of both the cabal and her own decisions

in the footnotes, in one declaring that “it would be unmannerly to doubt [the cabal’s] Veracity on

this Point,” and thus the text accepts an understanding of women’s sexuality that, she insists, is

“very different from the present” (Eovaii 75). This note not only highlights Haywood’s teachings

about the proper place of female sexuality, but demonstrates the ability of the translator to make

judgements about the text in light of contemporary ideas.

Although The Adventures of Eovaii was not one of her more commercially successful

works, the methods she uses within the text to talk about the process of translation and her means

382

Eliza Haywood, Eovaii (London, 1736), xiv-xv. Cited as Eovaii. 383

Earla Wilputte, introduction to The Adventures of Eovaii, by Eliza Haywood (Peterborough: Broadview Press,

1999), 28.

196

of calling attention to and devaluating the translator speak to the working of translation in the

literary world. The Adventures of Eovaii shows a Haywood who is aware of the importance of

the translator to the finished text and the way in which translations exposed their writer to both

praise and ridicule. Her notes highlight both textual and stylistic changes, demonstrating the

interconnectedness of style and function in notes discussing “the Meaning of [a] Word” and the

ease with which readers can discover the political leanings of a historian or translator even when

the events of the original are faithfully reported (Eovaii 156, 126). In combination with her

discussion of ownership in The Virtuous Villager, her awareness of translation as revision gives

an indication of how she saw translations working in the public sphere and why she used

translation as such an important part of her work to establish her reputation.

The Virtuous Villager, the only Haywood translation that includes both a dedication and a

preface, and also the only translation dedicated to a patron who is not a member of the nobility,

provides useful insight into how she and her publishers positioned her translations in the literary

marketplace. Despite its smaller size and lower quality production comparative to her other

works, The Virtuous Villager was a more expensive version of the anonymous 1740 translation,

The Fortunate Country Maid (Spedding 367). Its preface demonstrates Haywood’s feelings of

ownership over both her translations and the originals that she translated. She not only defends

herself against accusations of having copied the earlier translation, she also insists that she was

not translating from “the same Original, but from the real Manuscript.”384

This is in part a puff

for her translation, suggesting that is closer to the original than the previous version, but it is also

part of a discussion of ownership. Although translators had no legal claim on their source, she

admits that it would be “scrupulously just” to “imagine a second Translation, [as] a kind of

384

Eliza Haywood, The Virtuous Villager (London, 1742), vii. Cited as Virtuous Vllager.

197

Invasion on the Property of the first,” and insists that she began hers before the other was

published, thus giving her at least an equal right to the work (Virtuous Villager ix).

Not only does she claim to have begun her translation first, Haywood suggests that she

has a better source and is a better writer. Although she does not claim great artistry, she insists

that the manuscript was sent to her because she “is qualified to do it justice, both as to the Spirit

and Expression” (Virtuous Villager ix). This phrasing emphasizes her declaration in the

dedication that “The noble Authoress has doubtless done her part, and as I have taken the utmost

care that none of her beauties shall suffer by being put into an English Dress” her patron should

be pleased with the work (Virtuous Villager v). While Haywood spends much of her dedication

in praise of her source, the phrasing here subtly denigrates the original author, raising the spectre

of doubt with the word “doubtless” and dismissing her contribution with the phrase “done her

part,” which suggests “her part” was less important than Haywood’s. Contrarily, Haywood

describes her own involvement as requiring “the utmost care,” suggesting that she saw her “part”

as just as important as, if not more important than, that of her “Authoress.”

Establishing a Career: Haywood’s Respectability

Her early fiction, perhaps in an attempt to avoid the scandalous implications which she

was quick to see and point out in her 1741 Anti-Pamela, is set in the polite world. The few

exceptions to this are commissioned pieces such as The Dumb Projector, though it is impossible

to be certain that her novels and translations were not commissioned, and responses to

contemporary publications, such as her Anti-Pamela. Many of her known commissions are also

directed to a respectable audience, including her provocative 1723 play, A Wife to be Lett.

198

Moreover, while many of Haywood’s works evoked eroticism and would certainly have been

criticised by stern moralists, the only publication that we know to be Haywood’s that is clearly

too erotic for women to be comfortable reading it openly is The Sopha, one of the works whose

provenance was so well hidden that her authorship was only discovered in 1999.385

While it is

quite possible that more erotic titles will come to light in the future, the difficulty encountered in

finding this publication and the fact that it was not widely known to be hers suggests that she did

not want her name to be associated with this type of writing. The difference in her treatment of

this work suggests a difference in respectability that appears to have been lost today. In fact, I

argue that even in her stylistically eroticized early texts, Haywood predominantly used her

books, and especially her translations, to portray herself as a moral figure, attempting to establish

women’s sexual desire as part of a socially-acceptable understanding of femininity.

Unfortunately, through a combination of the willful misinterpretation of her detractors and later

confusion about the complex world of eighteenth-century morality, this purpose has been lost.

From her first racy publication, Haywood’s novels are surprisingly concerned with proper

behaviour, especially that of married women. It is easy to overlook, amidst a plot full of sexual

intrigue, girls in their nightgowns, and midnight meetings, that Love in Excess uses Alovysa to

offer the same very practical advice about jealousy and letter-writing that she addresses in

Letters from a Lady of Quality. When Alovysa intercepts a letter to her husband’s former lover,

her “Impertinent Curiosity and Imprudence” drive him away, allowing him an excuse to abandon

her in favour of his younger, prettier, mistress.386

In the context of Haywood’s late advice books,

The Wife and The Husband, both published in 1756, which advise wives to turn a blind eye to

385

David Brewer, “‘Haywood,’ Secret History, and the Politics of Attribution,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza

Haywood, 217-39. 386

Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (London, 1719), II.23.

199

their husband’s infidelities, and husbands to keep only lower-class mistresses and to keep them

quietly out of sight, this scene takes on a new importance. While Alovysa has reason to be

jealous of her new husband, her failure to trust him and her betrayal of her jealousy to the

servants demonstrate her unfitness to be a wife and she suffers exactly the fate The Wife predicts:

first, it would expose her to his contempt; – secondly, it would give him a pretence for

absenting himself from home more than ever; – and thirdly, it would make her rival, who

perhaps always receives him with a smile, still dearer to him.387

Love in Excess acts as a dramatization of Haywood’s insistence that jealous women drive their

husbands away when they most wish to draw them closer. It also offers a demonstration of the

reward of virtuous behaviour in Melliora, whose attempts to resist her beloved even when she is

“in his Arms” in a state of “Sweet Confusion” and he is “gathering Kisses from her soft Snowy

Breast,” demonstrate the sexual temptation she undergoes, the susceptibility to emotion that

marks her as one of Haywood’s heroines, and the virtue that leads to her happy marriage.388

Eighteenth-century texts taught moral lessons in two very different ways: through

portraying a bad character as a negative exemplum and through showing a good character who

was rewarded. Haywood always framed her novels and translations as moral tales of one sort or

another, even the erotic translation of The Sopha. This was not a universal practice, but was a

common one, proven in the omission as much as the practice. Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of

Pleasure, for instance, does not describe itself as a moral tale and does not discuss morality

except in the final paragraphs, where it moves immediately from a sex scene to Fanny’s marriage

“where, in the bosom of virtue, I gathered the only uncorrupt sweets,” but it does excuse itself

387

Eliza Haywood, The Wife (London, 1756), 263. 388

Haywood, Love in Excess, II.49-50.

200

with a brief preface insisting that “those scandalous stages” of the life it describes are only

included at the insistence of the friend who asked for the book to be created.389

The practice of

disguising erotic books with a thin veil of morality was common during the period and can be

seen even in the shockingly violent and sexually adventurous books of the Marquis de Sade,

whose Misfortunes of Virtue begins by promising “to cast light upon the mysterious ways in

which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man.”390

The “punitive tendency” of

erotic literature makes it difficult for both historians and contemporaries to judge whether they

are reading a moral tale with a few titillating pieces for verisimilitude and delight or an erotic

tale with a few moral sentences thrown in for form’s sake.391

Something of this confusion is evident in the varied initial responses to Richardson’s

Pamela, whose lower-class heroine and amorous adventures connect him to the sexual novels

which he condemns in his insistence on her virginity and its reward. Modern scholars recognize

Haywood’s tendency to punish characters who step outside society’s moral guidelines and to use

“eroticism for pedagogic ends” by teaching them to manage “aesthetic pleasure,” but are much

slower to recognize her positive moral exemplars.392

By recognising Haywood’s innovative

responses to social and moral conventions and reading her books in conversation with each other

and with other popular novels rather than attempting to interpret them through the stringent

moral declarations of religious texts and conduct books, we can trace Haywood’s punitive

tendencies to a consistent understanding of marriage and sexuality.

389

John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Wagner (London: Penguin Books,

2001), 239-40, 39,. 390

de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and other Early Tales, translated by David Coward (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1992), 1. 391

Alexander Pettit, “Adventures in Pornographic Places: Haywood’s Tea-Table and the Decentering of Moral

Argument,” Papers on Language and Literature 38.3 (2002): 246. 392

Kathleen Lucy, “Eliza Haywood’s Amatory Aesthetic,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.3 (2006): 310.

201

Part of the modern uncertainty about Haywood’s sexual mores derives from the

amorphous nature of eighteenth-century marriage. As Martin Ingram explains, any promise of

marriage or declaration of marriage in front of witnesses could be considered as binding under

law.393

In fact, as Lawrence Stone dramatically declares, “as a result of the glaring defects in the

laws of marriage, very large numbers of perfectly respectable people in the seventeenth and early

eighteenth century could never be quite sure whether they were married or not,” an ambiguity

which Haywood exploits in her narrative depictions of innocence and trust.394

Haywood’s stories must be read within an atmosphere in which, as Matthew Kinservik

claims, premarital sex was a “widespread practice” and “clandestine marriage itself was very

common” as a way to legitimize this practice among both the lower and upper classes.395

These

facts are generally known, but often scholars fail to apply them to the morality of contemporary

novels. Unlike Richardson, whose heroine’s insistence on a narrow idea of virtue invited satire,

or Fielding, whose Tom Jones both insists on a virtuous heroine and presents a realistically

fallible hero, Haywood examines the pitfalls of eighteenth-century sexual culture from the

perspective of realistically fallible women.396

Even as she immerses readers in the pleasures of

sexual desire, I argue that she foregrounds not only sexual temptations but also the temptation of

clandestine marriage and the ways in which this legitimate act could be used by unscrupulous

men to destroy innocent victims who believe men’s claims that they will honor the private vows

they exchange.

393

Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 15701-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1987), 189-218; R. B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500-1850 (London: The Hambledon

Press, 1995). 394

Lawrence Stone, Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660-1753 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),

3. 395

Matthew J. Kinservik, Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2007), 43. 396

Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, ‘Pamela’ in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in

Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 83.

202

Her heroines are often carried away by passion, and those who act on purely sexual desire

outside of marriage are punished, even Fantomina, the most sexually adventurous and least

socially-constrained of her heroines. Fantomina, like many of Haywood’s women, becomes

pregnant as a result of her sexual experiments, demonstrating the immediate physical dangers of

sexual activity. When this is discovered, she is banished from society and spends the rest of her

life in confinement.397

Although Fantomina’s banishment to a foreign monastery appears less

drastic than the death many of her characters face, the loss of character she suffers in her

mother’s final declaration that “The Blame is wholly her’s” establishes Haywood’s method of

judgement.398

Beauplaisir may have introduced Fantomina to sexuality, and he was certainly the

only man with whom she had carnal relations, but Fantomina’s choice to put herself in the

position of a prostitute and her failure to ask for any mark of permanence exonerate him and

leave her with neither freedom nor reputation.

Haywood’s credulous heroines do not suffer the same fate as women like Fantomina. In

none of her books does she require the proper church wedding and crowds of witnesses that

Richardson’s Pamela insists on before she will allow her master to touch her. On the other hand,

she is very careful about the promises that her characters make and accept. In La Belle

Assemblée, as Séverine Genieys-Kirk notes, Haywood transforms the story of Orsame and

Fatyma, both inserting a story of Fatyma’s past to create one of the earliest black heroines in

English fiction and refusing to allow her hero to promise himself to her in marriage when she

intended him for another woman.399

Her French original was content to have him break his

promise in response to Fatyma’s violent actions and his own aversion, but Haywood is more

397

William Beatty Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 195. 398

Eliza Haywood, Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems (London, 1725), III. 290. 399

Genieys-Kirk, “Eliza Haywood’s ... Journées amusantes (1722-1731),” 41.

203

concerned about promises. For her a promise, which is by English law contractually binding, is

at least as important, if not more important, than the kind of church ceremony that Pamela

desires.

In The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone, a 1725 translation of de Castra’s La Pierre

Philosophale des Dames, ou les Caprices de l’Amour et du Destin which was published

anonymously but advertised as part of a collection of Haywood’s novels only three years later,

we see several examples of marriages that take place outside the proper structure of English law

and tradition. There are several tragic love affairs, spanning several generations, but the story

which most clearly reveals Haywood’s conception of proper sexual morality is the story of the

love of Semigarbus for Bellacaris. She takes many liberties in translating this story. Most

importantly, while the story of their courtship and exchange of letters is very similar in the

translation and the original, Haywood significantly changes the circumstances of their marriage.

Both authors describe a meeting in the garden that is interrupted by her father and his chosen

suitor who, without seeing the lovers, discuss their desire to marry her immediately. De Castra,

however, has them flee outside the garden to escape, returning “jusques à la porte du jardin pour

la faire rentrer chez elle; mais nous trouvâmes que l’avoient fermée” (to the garden gate in order

to return home, but found that [her father and fiancée] had made it fast) while Haywood’s

Semigarbus “lock’d the Door as softly as [he] could and took the Key on the inside” so that the

lovers were safely ensconced within the walls.400

While de Castra’s lovers hesitate outside the walls, Bellecaris accuses her lover of

arranging to dishonour her. In response, he insists that “vous penetrez mal mes intentions,” (you

400

L’Abbé de Castra, La Pierre Philosophale des Dames, ou les Caprices de l’Amour et du Destin. Nouvelle

Historique (1733), 110; Eliza Haywood, The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone (London, 1724), 47. Cited as

Philosopher.

204

misunderstand my intentions) which “sont legitimes & pures” (are legitimate and pure).401

Haywood’s Semigarbus declares that

It was now my time to plead, and as she saw the Necessity she was in of being mine that

Moment, or never being mine; she yielded to the former, to avoid the latter: and after she

had received my solemn Vows of making her my Wife in the Morning ... suffered me to

conduct her into [my house] (Philosopher 48-9)

This single sentence replaces de Castra’s several pages of recriminations, pleadings, and

promises of virtuous intentions and demonstrates Haywood’s very different concerns. Both

writers establish the virtuousness of their heroine, but Haywood’s Bellacaris is satisfied with a

vow while de Castra, writing in France with its much stricter marriage laws, cannot allow his

heroine to be so easily satisfied.

When they finally are married, the wording of the different descriptions further

emphasizes the differences in the two country’s laws and how this affects authorial perceptions

of virtue. De Castro describes how “Dés le lendemain nous fumes mariex en secret dans le

Temple d’Amide, & cette puissante Deesse fut la depositaire sacrée de l’amour mutual & de la

foi que nous nous jurâmes” (on the next day we were married in secret within the Temple of

Amide, and this powerful Goddess was the sacred depositary of the mutual love and of the faith

that we swore).402

This description emphasises the power of the church, or temple, and its

“puissant” Goddess, focusing on the sacredness of their love and faith. Haywood, contrarily,

focuses on the legal and human side of their marriage, describing how “early in the Dawn, we

401

de Castra, La Pierre Philosophale des Dames, 111. 402

de Castra, La Pierre Philosophale des Dames, 124-5.

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went, with all the Privacy imaginable, to the Temple of Erathis: where a holy Priest confirmed

that happy Union which our Souls had made before” (Philosopher 49).

Secrecy is important to both writers, as is making their vows in a temple rather than in

their own home, but Haywood’s description shows a greater concern with the presence of a

witness and of the character of the priest who witnesses their vows, while de Castro’s phrasing

does not actually necessitate the presence of any human at all. Moreover, Haywood says that the

priest “confirmed” their marriage, emphasizing the veracity of Semigarbus’ earlier vows. This is

a theme that she takes up in other works, stressing men’s responsibility to honour their vows

whether made in church before witnesses or alone with a lover. Her insistence on these vows

goes beyond common law, which required at least two witnesses to make a marriage legal, but

highlights the uncertainty of that law and the importance of private practice.

Haywood’s alterations show her moving to establish the morality of her heroines, but

they also show how the different cultures of eighteenth-century England and France encourage

different views of marriage. After de Castra’s heroine is finally persuaded to return to her lover’s

house to be married she loses her restraint, and her lover “counduisis mon amiable maîtresse

dans une chambre, où par mon ordre Bremusoal venoit de préparer un lit” (conducts [his]

amiable mistress to a chamber where, by [his] orders Bremusoal has prepared a bed).403

Haywood, more conservative or more cautious, avoids mention of beds entirely. Her lovers

spend “the few remaining Hours, till Morning,” and their wedding, “in reiterating [their] mutual

Vows” (Philosopher 49). While there is certainly room to interpret this sexually, Haywood

removes de Castra’s several references to privacy, to a chamber, and to a bed prepared for them,

403

de Castra, La Pierre Philosophale des Dames, 124.

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and instead emphasizes their “Vows,” hearkening back to the “solemn Vows” that Semigarbus

had made to marry his beloved.

Underscoring the morality of her heroine, Haywood edits this text to make it more

acceptable to her audience and to remove the titillating suggestion of what might have happened

in those hours before marriage, very unlike her sensual descriptions in both Love in Excess and

the last love affair in The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone. By emphasizing the purity of this heroine,

Haywood creates a greater shock in the final story, where translator and original are united in

describing the stratagem by which Tristant tricks his beloved into first sleeping with and then

marrying him in order to save her from the greater evil of a credulous and irreligious faith in the

Philosopher’s Stone. This subjugation of sexual to religious morality expands the story from

considerations of love, romance, and marriage to discuss authority, religion, innocence, and

greed, and parallels Haywood’s continual insistence on the subjugation of sexual purity to

fidelity. In the final story, we see how Haywood portrays virtuous innocence as a shield against

all moral stain, a theme she returns to in stories of women ravished, abandoned, and finally

triumphant. This type of moral story, with a virtuous heroine triumphing over a scoundrel, as in

The City Jilt, or triumphing with a virtuous hero, as in The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone, is just as

prominent in Haywood’s canon as the more commonly-discussed form of immorality punished

that we see in Fantomina and Love in Excess. These two types of moral teaching appear

throughout her works, even her more scandalous commissions, which focus on the punishment

of vice.

In 1748 when, with Life’s Progress through the Passions, she discovered a formula for

the long, three-part novel, her pattern changed. She began a new style of moral presentation,

beginning with The Virtuous Villager, a translation that also acted as a test for the style of

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virtuous book which she continued in her later novels. Although she attributed this work to ‘the

author of La Belle Assemblée,’ its physical quality is remarkably lower than both of the other

books connected to the Gomez name and the internal advertisements suggest its confused

history. Inside the book, J. Hodges promotes first The New Atalantis, Manley’s famous scandal

novel; then a series of humorous Miscellanies in Prose and Verse co-written by Oxford and

Cambridge dons; then another secret history “Interspersed with Moral and Instructive Incidents;”

The Devil Hermit, which appears to be an early gothic piece translated from French; then The

Compleat Gamester . . . the Art of Riding, Fowling, Archery, Cocking, and Bowling. Written for

the Use of the Young Princesses; a Polite Correspondence, or Rational Amusement, and finally

Haywood’s Eovaii, under the title of The Unfortunate Princess (Virtuous Villager [332]). This

confused mass focuses on light amusement and scandal, an amusing contrast to the “Virtue” and

“Morals” that the novel announces on the title page.

Despite its confused internal advertising, this book is an important step in Haywood’s

self-fashioning. The Virtuous Villager begins an increased attention to positive and overt

morality, showing her moving from moral tales which warn against evil by showing what

happens to immoral villains to moral tales which promise good things to virtuous heroines. Many

scholars believe that this text was a response to Richardson’s Pamela, and Christine Blouch even

calls it “an imitation” of Pamela.404

But while the book certainly responded to the new moral

story which Richardson popularized, Haywood was not yet ready to give up her stories about

aristocrats and write about a mere commoner as Richardson had. Although The Virtuous

Villager’s heroine begins as a villager rather than a lady, her rise to the court is clearly

404

Christine Blouch, introduction to The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, by Eliza Haywood (Ontario: Broadview

Press, 1998), 11.

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anticipated in the advertisements for the novel which call her “a very great Lady at the Court of

France,” a claim which is repeated on the title page of the printed book.405

Moral instruction is an important part of the book’s presentation beginning with the title,

which is a moralising version of the original. Although she maintains the alliteration, she

transforms Mouhy’s La Paysanne Parvenue, (the Upstart Peasant), to The Virtuous Villager, a

title which foregrounds both moral and class-based distinctions.406

Within the text, the moral

applications of her story are foregrounded by the “Lessons” given to her heroine by her mother,

who “related ... many Examples of young Maids, who from a low Degree, had been raised to

Greatness, by a strict Adherence to the Rules she laid down for my Behaviour; and of others who

had fallen into extreme Misery and Infamy by swerving from them” (Virtuous Villager 3). Janet

Todd argues that “a new respectable image” began to be important to the female writer in this

period, and Catherine Craft-Fairchild insists that the “explicit sexuality that . . . early woman

writers built their romantic fictions upon was no longer possible,” suggesting that her 1746

biographer’s view of this period of her life as a reformation might reflect contemporary literary

trends.407

Despite the increased attention to propriety in books like Haywood’s Virtuous Villager

and 1753 History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, however, the morality of the period when she

published The Sopha as well as Betsy Thoughtless is questionable, and her position as a writer

who espoused moral behaviour, even if not quite according to the strict standards of

contemporary conduct literature, was not a new one.

405

Champion, March 18, 1742; Haywood, The Virtuous Villager, vii. 406

le Chevalier de Mouhy, La Paysanne Parvenue (Rouen, 1788), i. 407

Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1989), 3; Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-

Century Fictions by Women (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993), 11; David Erskine Baker,

Biographia Dramatica (London, 1746), II, Q1r.

209

Haywood’s greatest change in this book is her response to the triumph of the new

Richardsonian mode of writing in the first person to promote virtue by presenting a virtuous,

ideal, model for readers to imitate. Neither of these, notably, appear in her most popular moral

work, Betsy Thoughtless, which returns to her early strategy of offering a heroine who, as

Betsy’s name suggests, is flawed. In the first of her late moral books, The Virtuous Villager,

Haywood follows Richardson’s virtuous model more closely, but this book also shows her

resistance to many of Richardson’s ideas. While she copies the emphasis on virtue in the subtitle

of Richardson’s blockbuster novel, Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, Haywood insists on the agency

of her main character. In order to do so, in fact, she gives her book two different subtitles, each

of which carries strong ideological implications, in contrast to her source text, which uses the

neutral subtitle Les Memoirs de Madame la Marquise de L. V. The Virtuous Villager, like

Richardson’s title, displaces agency. But Haywood is less willing to allow agency to another

figure. While Richardson’s title claims to show virtue rewarded, presumably by the all-powerful

hand of God, Haywood’s half-title sub-title, Fortunate Country Lass, makes Jeanetta’s fortune a

personal characteristic rather than a reward given by an outside force. Even this much agential

displacement is more than she wishes, however, and the sub-title that appears on her

advertisements and in her running title is Virgin’s Victory, which gives Jeanetta responsibility

and agency.408

Haywood’s differences from Richardson and her unwillingness to let go of her existing

mode of moral instruction continue within the novel itself. While Richardson’s story is told

almost entirely from the point of view of his main character, Haywood often includes

digressions. Even in those stories which focus on a single heroine, she gives her readers personal

408

Champion, March 18, 1742.

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insight into the thoughts and feelings of all her characters. This tendency is evident as early as

Love in Excess where she examines the passions of each of her characters in turn, and continues

throughout her career. In Betsy Thoughtless, Haywood uses this technique to emphasize the

vanity that Gayland shares with her heroine by she that “he resolved to continue his visits” after

Betsy had scorned him “because miss Betsy would plume herself” if she thought she had “by her

scorn triumphed over his audacity and drove him from the field of battle.”409

Later in the book,

she concentrates on Betsy’s suitors, comparing “how much it rejoiced the sincerely devoted heart

of mr. Trueworth” to see Betsy and the “tender sentiments with which his soul overflowed” to

Betsy’s own carelessness.410

In The Virtuous Villager, where Haywood’s experimental new style

requires her to offer an unfallen heroine, she uses digressions to return to her preferred, multi-

voiced style.

Haywood not only, as Beatrijs Vanacker points out, “frequently inserts intradiegetic

narrations” where “Mouhy only infrequently interrupts his plot to insert stories,” the printing of

her book also calls attention to these stories as separate from the larger plot. The first of the

interpolated stories in the novel provides a good example of this emphasis.411

Haywood moves

this story earlier in the novel and, unlike Mouhy’s original, sets it clearly apart from the text with

a thick border and its own title, “The History of Charlotta” (Virtuous Villager 8). Within this

interpolated story, she offers a different view of correct social and moral behaviour than the

French. Mouhy emphasises Charlotta’s wilfullness and unwillingness to obey the dictates of her

family, saying that “Son père, qui les sentoit, la pressoit vivement de sa déclarer, & de choisir un

mari” (her sensible father pressed her strongly to decide and to choose a husband) which she

409

Eliza Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (London, 1751), 35. 410

Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, 227. 411

Beatrijs Vanacker, “‘On the Inconstancy, the Perfidy and Deceit of Mankind in Love Affairs’: Eliza Haywood’s

Translation of La paysanne parvenue,” in Translators, Interpreters, Mediators, 58.

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refuses and therefore causes the events that made him “regretter, mais trop tard, de ne s’être pas

soumise aux volontés des siens” (regret, but too late, not having made her submit to the will of

the people).412

Haywood, on the contrary, attributes the fault to Charlotta’s father. While she

certainly blames Charlotta for her “Vanity and Credulity,” faults which she warns of throughout

her writing career, even before she describes Charlotta’s beauty Haywood shows her father’s

fault. For Haywood, his fault is not that he failed to force her into a good marriage but that he is

greedy. Although “Every body blamed him for sending young Charlotta on such Errands, which

cou’d not fail of laying her under dangerous Temptations,” his greed leads him to send her alone

and unprotected to the houses of strange men to sell fruit and thus leads directly to her downfall

(Virtuous Villager 8). This alteration emphasizes her warning that women should avoid places

where they could be exposed to temptation or assault, reinforcing the continuity of her moral

vision.

Haywood’s overt intention in both her didactic late text, The Virtuous Villager, and her

most respectable early translation, the 1725 La Belle Assemblée is to “improve in general the

Ladies of my Country,” an aim similar to the desire to warn of “the Foibles Youth and

Inexperience is [sic] likely to fall into” that she expressed in the 1722 The British Recluse, one of

her early amorous novels.413

In fact, although scholars are eager to discuss the scandalous nature

of Haywood’s oeuvre, very few of her novels fit easily within such simplistic categorization and

writing novels and translations which appeared respectable and which shared important moral

characteristics clearly interested her as much as the emotionality and sensuality she infused into

much of her writing. Although the means by which she spread her moral messages and her

412

Mouhy, La Paysanne Parvenue, 19-20. 413

Haywood, La Belle Assemblée, I.vii; Eliza Haywood, The British Recluse (London, 1722), 1.

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warnings about proper female behavior changed, she presented a stable position as a moral

instructor. Her discussions of the proper means of communication with men, her warnings about

letters and private speech, and her simultaneous enforcement and denunciation of the strict rules

laid on women remain consistent throughout her career.

From her 1721 Letters from a Lady of Quality to her 1742 The Virtuous Villager,

Haywood used her translations to create connections between herself and writers whose works

were read by members of the French and English courts. She foregrounded her agency as a

translator in Eovaii, demonstrating the power to alter and interpret which she exercises in

translations such as The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone and Love in its Variety. And, whether

writing sensual, erotic adventures like Love in Excess or straightforward, didactic prose like The

Wife, she retained her strong sense of behavioral integrity and her focus on female

empowerment.

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Chapter 4 Elizabeth Carter: Hidden Fame, Subtle Teaching

I want my works to have “the comfort of sneaking quietly through the world, and being

read by nobody,” Elizabeth Carter declared more than once in her lifetime.414

The care that she

took to establish and maintain her reputation, however, gives the lie to her modest desire to be

unknown. What she wanted was not anonymity, but a controllable circle of readers. Writing in

the context of her coterie where, as Betty Schellenberg explains, her writing could function “as

an extension of the social self,” helped her to avoid the misinterpretations that Haywood is still

struggling against.415

Carter wanted to present herself as a moral teacher within the conservative

elements of eighteenth-century society, working from within to challenge the normative

educational limits that were considered suitable for her sex. Although she rejected some church

doctrines and many patriarchal norms, in order to establish her ability to teach what women were

culturally supposed to learn, she had to create a reputation as a good Christian and a traditionally

feminine woman. She could not, as Dryden had, use her source texts as an excuse for sexual

content. Her translations had to come from a place of moral superiority in order to establish the

reputation she wanted, a reputation which would encourage her audience to accept her changes

to and commentary on the pieces she translated.

To convince others to follow her example, she needed to build a public persona for them

to copy. Unlike Dryden, whose reputation-building focused on his literary status, Carter’s self-

presentation asserted her right to her education and worked to establish her within the social and

414

Montagu Pennington, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter (London, 1807), 123. Cited as Memoirs. 415

Betty A. Schellenberg, Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture 1740-1790 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2016), 98.

214

moral limits of her society. Her focus on morality as the centre of both her private life and her

public reputation is an important force in her writing and one that has been too often rejected or

misunderstood. Carter’s moral and religious focus must be read as something more than the

submission to dominant masculine ideals which Carolyn Williams sees as an attempt to “avoid

the bitterness which might otherwise have accompanied the thought of so much wasted female

talent.”416

It must be understood as more than what Lisa Freeman views as a half-conscious

cover for a rebellious “vision of freedom for the female mind that was less than commensurate

with Christian piety.”417

Instead, her staunch belief in her own rectitude gave her the confidence

to stand up for her own interpretations of texts, even against the advice of bishops and the

opinion of theologians.

Carter’s nephew, Montagu Pennington, tells one such story in his Memoirs, remembering

that she used to enjoy speaking about an argument she had with an archbishop. She had read 1st

Corinthians in the Greek and was complaining that the modern translation supported the

superiority of the husband over the wife by telling the husband “let him not put [his wife] away”

if she does not believe in Christ, but saying to the woman “let her not leave” her husband.418

Thomas Secker, the Bishop of Oxford, refused to believe that the words used for the actions of

man and wife were the same, but she insisted until he consulted the original and admitted that

“‘tis I that must be confuted and you are in the right” (Memoirs 110). This charming story

demonstrates both her refusal to give up a point that she was certain of, even when her opponent

416

Carolyn Williams, “The Consistency of Elizabeth Carter,” in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal

Texts, and the Eighteenth- Century Canon, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1996), 23. 417

Lisa Freeman, “‘A Dialogue’: Elizabeth Carter’s Passion for the Female Mind,” in Women’s Poetry in the

Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon. 1730-1820, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (New York, St.

Martin’s Press, 1999), 56. 418

1 Corinthians 7:12-13 KJV.

215

was a high-ranking clergyman, and the satisfaction that she gained from believing herself in the

right. By using Biblical phrasing to argue for equality between men and women, Carter used

Christian texts and beliefs, supported by her linguistic study, to create social acceptance for her

ideas.

Her insistence on the primacy of reason is one of the factors that led her to write

translation as well as her more traditionally feminine personal and religious poetry. Paula

Backscheider argues that friendship, domestic and common life, and religious poetry were

particularly associated with women’s writing during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and

Carter’s poems are carefully structured to fit within these forms.419

Her religious poetry fell

within the standard narrative of Christian feminine duty, in opposition to her learned writing and

her “working through religious controversy,” which fell within a more masculine realm of study

and which, as Kathryn Steele argues, contemporary conduct manuals prohibited.420

As part of the

Bluestocking circle, Carter participated in contemporary debates on feminine education, agreeing

with fellow writer and friend Hester Mulso Chapone in recommending a course of mental

improvement, but demonstrating a wider range of languages and supporting a more interpretative

reading of Anglican theology. Carol Percy demonstrates that perceptions of women as illiterate

and unable to learn either vernacular or foreign languages continued throughout the century

despite the increasing availability of grammar books aimed specifically at women.421

Carter’s

knowledge of languages, which included not only English, French, Italian, Greek, and Latin but

also Arabic and Hebrew, made her exceptional, and Chapone, writing several decades after

419

Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), xviii. 420

Kathryn L. Steele, “Hester Mulso Chapone and the Problem of the Individual Reader,” The Eighteenth Century

53.4 (2012): 474; 480. 421

Carol Percy, “J. Matlock’s Young Ladies Guide to the Knowledge of the English Tongue (1715): Contextualising

the First Grammar of English for Ladies,” Transactions of the Philological Society 111.2 (2013): 237.

216

Carter’s final publication, worried that women following in her footsteps would become pedants,

unable or unwilling to conform to normative conversational practices or to submit to patriarchal

instruction.422

In many respects, however, Carter and Chapone agreed on proper educational practice.

Both women were part of the Bluestocking circle which formed in the 1750s, “dedicated to

intellectual conversation,” and grew over the following decades to create a network which, as

Anni Sairio argues, both demonstrated and influenced eighteenth-century linguistic and

grammatical structures.423

Although some scholarship broadens the definition of the

Bluestockings to include any woman known for her writing, the term used throughout this paper

and in most studies of the eighteenth century refers to a group which Harriet Guest describes as

“well-educated but not aristocratic women linked through correspondence as well as social

interaction . . . from around 1750 to the early decades of the nineteenth century” and who

Elizabeth Child defines as “that informal circle of learned, literary eighteenth-century English

women and men who gathered in person at London salons hosted by Montagu and her friend

Elizabeth Vesey, and who also maintained an epistolary network.”424

This group, as Gary Kelly

argues, was committed to a “progressive-aristocratic” program which promoted the middle-class

values of egalitarian sociability and created a forum for the proto-feminist movement.425

Despite

the radical nature of these ideas, Deborah Heller suggests, the Bluestockings were “judged by

standards of femininity that potentially constrained them,” internalizing these judgements to

422

Steele, “Hester Mulso Chapone,” 488. 423

Anni Sairio, “Language and Letters of the Bluestocking Network. Sociolinguistic Issues in Eighteenth-Century

Epistolary English,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 110.4 (2009): 526. 424

Harriet Guest, “Bluestocking Feminism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65.2 (2002): 60; Elizabeth Child,

“Elizabeth Montagu, Bluestocking Businesswoman,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65.1 (2002): 153. 425

Gary Kelly, “Bluestocking Feminism,” in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger,

Charlotte Grant, Cliona Ogallchoir, and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 167.

217

become a conservative group like those domesticating groups Lisa Moore views as “willing to

serve a hierarchized ideology” which reifies existing power relations.426

Carter and Chapone were both members of the Bluestocking circle, and their different

opinions on education demonstrate the conservatism of the circle alongside its internal divisions.

Chapone argues that “learned languages” such as Greek and Latin are not necessary for women

because England and France have “tolerable translations of all the most valuable productions of

antiquity,” and Carter’s actions show her sympathy with this idea, as she worked to translate

foreign works for women rather than to encourage them to read the originals.427

Moreover, she

shares Chapone’s worries about the “danger of pedantry and presumption in a woman,” insisting

that her domestic duties are at least as important as her literary work and that “The true post of

honour consists in the discharge of those duties” given by “Providence,” whether in the world or

in the home. Although Carter insisted that she had no special gifts, declaring that her abilities

came from persistence and struggle rather than genius, she maintained that her duty called her to

the abstruse languages and sciences (Memoirs 165). Through her religious poetry and

commentaries, and her translations of literary criticism and philosophy, she entered into the

world of learning and encouraged other women to follow her example. Uncertain about her

reception, Carter, like Eliza Haywood, published her first works anonymously and allowed her

identity to be leaked to the public only after she had been reassured by her initial reception.

Again like Haywood and the other authors examined in this project, Carter used

translation to shape her public image. Edmund Cave, a friend of her father, supported her by

426

Deborah Heller, “Bluestocking Salons and the Public Sphere,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 72; Lisa

Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham: Duke University Press,

1997), 3. 427

Hester Mulso Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (London, 1773),

II.121.

218

publishing her early poems, and once he realized her abilities, he commissioned her 1739

translations of Jean-Pierre Crousaz’ Examination of Mr Pope’s Essay on Man and Algarotti’s

Newtonianismo per le Dame and suggested other translations, assisting her transition to the form

that would dominate the rest of her career. In fact, with the exception of the individual poems she

published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1730s, every publication of Carter’s included

translation. Translated poems appear in the twenty-four page private printing of her 1738 Poems

Upon Particular Occasions and her last publication, the 1762 Poems on Several Occasions, but

her reputation rested on her longer translations, particularly her Epictetus.

Although she had been writing poems for the Gentleman’s Magazine and engaging in

public correspondence in the form of riddles and poems through the magazine for some time, and

already put her name to a private edition of these poems for presentation to the queen, the first

published book that was widely attributed to Carter was her translation from Crousaz. As

Pennington relates, her Examination of Mr Pope’s Essay on Man was generally seen as “her

launching into the world” (Memoirs 29-30). Despite this early publicity, it was not until late in

her career, after she had retired to Deal, that Carter put her name on the title page of one of her

works, the 1758 Works of Epictetus. The length of time between publications and the number of

works published without direct attribution encourages me, in the chapter that follows, to track

Carter’s ideas through their interaction with societal norms rather than using a chronological

structure. Many of her works revealed their authorship through social connections which slowly

filtered through coterie groups and into public consciousness, making it difficult to date

revelations of authorship and creating an illusion of concealment.

This combination of publicity and personal privacy can be compared to that of Eliza

Haywood, who, despite her many publications, left so little personal information behind that

219

scholars still struggle to determine even the most basic facts about her life. Although Haywood

and Carter worked in entirely different areas, both writers share important characteristics. Both

women worked in a narrow and clearly gendered sphere, and both used translation as a means of

creating a positive reputation. While Haywood wrote primarily romantic fiction, and used

translations from modern French texts to reach the upper levels of polite female society, Carter,

like her fellow Bluestockings, focused on expanding the range of knowledge available to

women. Both writers aimed at an explicitly female audience, but through her subject matter and

genre Carter worked to create a more individualized form of education.

Carter’s writing draws on a tradition of female educational reform beginning in the late

seventeenth century with Mary Astell’s 1694-7 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and An Essay in

Defence of the Female Sex. Moving away from the traditional focus on what Hilary Brown calls

“women’s decorative accomplishments or moral conduct and duties,” women such as Catherine

Talbot, posthumously published by Carter, Hester Chapone, Hannah More, Elizabeth Montagu,

Stéphanie Genlis, and Catharine Macauley created an environment in which calls for literature,

science, and philosophy to be added to women’s education became socially acceptable.428

These

women reacted against Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s image of the girl whose main motivation is

vanity and who uses her education only in the service of her husband. Connie Titone argues that

these women saw an equal education as “the first thing” in the progress toward more

independent, creative lives.429

Kathryn Sutherland describes the new curricula these women

designed as “neither unrigorous nor merely auxiliary,” claiming that they created “a tradition of

female intellectual inquiry” which allowed women to participate in eighteenth-century literary

428

Hilary Brown, “The Reception of the Bluestockings by Eighteenth-Century German Women Writers,” Women in

German Yearbook 18 (2002): 114. 429

Connie Titone, “Chapone, Genlis, and Macaulay: On Human Nature and the Purposes of Education,”

Counterpoints 171 (2004): 84.

220

culture.430

Carter’s advocacy of female classical education positions her within this tradition, as

she argues for a female education that paralleled that of an upper-class gentleman.

A firm believer in the power of reason and the necessity of training the minds of both

men and women, she was not, as her nephew and biographer Matthew Pennington suggests, a

staunch and uncritical supporter of all female writers. Melanie Bigold shows that Carter

“frequently confesses ignorance” of “contemporary female writers” and refuses to contribute

laudatory poems to writers such as Mary Leapor, who was not part of Carter’s close social

group.431

She was as critical of female authors, especially those “in the last” age, before the

appearance of moralists such as Mrs. Rowe, as she was of any authors that she felt failed to

adhere to Christian standards, complaining that the Gentleman’s Magazine failed to live up to

her standards of morality.432

Despite these criticisms, Carter wished to associate herself with the

female authors of her century who shared her beliefs and goals, and she used her writing to

encourage women’s education and authorship. Insisting that no one could properly serve God in

ignorance, Carter’s translations, poems, and religious commentaries present education as a

religious duty, justifying her education and participation in public debates as obedience to God’s

commands. In this chapter I argue that Carter stood up for her beliefs when necessary, bowed to

social conventions when expedient, and used existing beliefs about God, reason, and piety to

argue for a broad-based classical education for both women and men.

430

Kathryn Sutherland, “Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvements,” in Women and

Literature in Britain 1700-1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 29; Anna

Miegon, “Biographical Sketches of Principal Bluestocking Women,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65.1 (2002):

34-5. 431

Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 175, 180. 432

Bigold, Women of Letters, 174

221

Contesting Beliefs

Both Carter’s choice of subject and her translation style are heavily influenced by her

religious focus. While Haywood’s principles were shaped by the realities of life for women,

which led her to argue against some of the strict boundaries and sexual standards of eighteenth-

century England, Carter’s father sheltered her from the style of sexual transgression that is

Haywood’s focus. Carter’s ability to choose her own company allowed her to shelter herself

further, and her often harsh moral judgements on anyone who stepped outside social boundaries

prevented her from attaining empathetic sympathy toward sexual desire that Haywood

demonstrates. Instead Carter, to whom conformity to contemporary standards of sexual morality

came easily, condemned those who transgressed, both privately in her letters and publicly in her

poem to Mrs. Rowe, which condemned the “lawless Freedoms” of amorous verse.433

Her

declaration that “beauty much admired and caressed by the world often chokes better feelings”

shows how her condemnation stemmed not from seeing sexual morality as a priority but from

her belief that this type of transgression was part of a larger and more problematic fault – failing

in one’s religious duties.434

Between a father in the church and her many friendships with bishops and preachers,

Carter was immersed in a religious way of life and her poems and translations show her focus on

piety. Her poem “Written at MIDNIGHT in a THUNDER STORM” accepts that there are many

“diff’rent Ways” to pursue God, but insists that God should be the most important part of life,

and found the focus on frivolous worldly things she saw in other women to be the worst possible

433

Elizabeth Carter, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1772), 10. Cited as Poems. 434

Elizabeth Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, to Mrs. Montagu (London, 1817), 55.

222

fault (Poems 37). Claiming that the entertainments of the town encouraged “a perverseness of

head and corruption of heart,” she performed “the utmost contempt and detestation” of worldly

matters.435

From a focus on frivolous pleasure, she insisted throughout her letters and poetry,

came biases, spite, discontent, envy, and malice. Her solution to these problems was to spend

time in prayer, read the Bible and the sermons of great pastors, meditate on God, and remove

herself from the “deplorable slavery to the world” which she saw in the women around her.436

Although these ideas conform to contemporary social standards, and she uses Biblical

teaching and references to support her claims, she does not accept limitations on her independent

judgement. Her emphasis on morality is not only, as Jennifer Wallace suggests, due to the

boundaries of female propriety in the eighteenth century. Wallace argues that the stresses on

female writers meant that Carter was “constrained” to write in a moralizing tone, and that this

socially-enforced piety negates many of the potential benefits of reaching the public eye.437

Ignoring the broad concern with translating classical authors into acceptable, moral forms that

appears in the works of prominent male poets, including Pope and Dryden, Wallace simplifies a

general eighteenth-century practice in order to make it fit within feminist stereotypes. Carter’s

emphasis on piety in her translations shows her idiosyncratic response to the same pressures that

led Pope to stress courage and masculinity or Dryden to transform Lucretius’s nihilistic elements

into celebrations of sexual pleasure. Moreover, she fails to recognize the changes that Carter

makes to her texts in order to reinforce her wider messages about education, responsibility, and

reason.

435

Elizabeth Carter, A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from the Year

1741 to 1770 (London, 1808), I. 229. 436

Carter, A Series of Letters, I.298. 437

Jennifer Wallace, “Confined and Exposed: Elizabeth Carter’s Classical Translations,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s

Literature 22.2 (2003): 327.

223

Carter certainly wrote within a system of rigorous moral restraint. Nevertheless, the

narrative of masculine persecution that Wallace offers is not reflected in Carter’s writing or the

responses of her contemporaries. In fact, the cultural forces which Wallace highlights as creating

“exoticising” constraints offered Carter the opportunity to create and shape a public persona

which was just as self-assured and as ready to defend her position against official Anglican

theology as her male contemporaries.438

She came by her stubborn assurance of her own moral

and intellectual rectitude honestly. Her father was one of the churchmen who found it impossible

to believe fully in the Athanasian Creed, one of the founding documents of the church which

teaches that the three beings who make up the Holy Trinity are co-equal. He believed strongly

that God the Father was superior to God the Son and to the Holy Spirit, and refused to speak the

established prayer in front of his congregation. This caused dissension within his parish and he

was called before the corporation of Deal, but the parish eventually accepted his offer to hire

someone else to say the words he found it impossible to believe.439

Following her father’s example, Carter took her moral and religious beliefs into the

public sphere. Her criticism of the Athanasian Creed, published in 1752, joins a group of

Anglican reformers, both men and women, who questioned the creed’s Trinitarian statements.440

Importantly, although Carter’s attack on the Athanasian creed aligned her with her father, it set

her against Secker, the Bishop of Oxford and one of Carter’s most influential patrons. Secker

was a radical in some ways, beginning his career as a radical Presbyterian and subscribing to

Arianism, the belief that Jesus is human and not divine. Robert G. Ingram demonstrates,

however, that after he joined the Anglican church he became a firm supporter of the orthodox

438

Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 320. 439

John Laker, History of Deal (Deal: Dain & Sons, l921), 269. 440

Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2000), 136.

224

church and producing “a detailed, systematic defence of the Apostle’s Creed,” the basis of the

Athanasian Creed in his 1769 Lectures on the Catechism of the Church of England.441

Bishop

Secker’s belief in the Creed brought him into conflict with reformers like Francis Blackburne,

whose anonymous support of John Jones’s 1749 Free and Candid Disquisitions against the

Athanasian Creed was a major source of disagreement.

For Blackburne, like John Locke, and the Cambridge Platonists who based their

philosophy on Protestant doctrine, the Bible was the only source of religious doctrine, an

argument that Carter picks up in her use of Biblical passages to support her argument against the

Athanasian Creed. Carter’s insistence on women’s right to rationally interpret theology using

scripture is, as Julie Straight demonstrates, in line with the concerns of Chapone, who “asserts

women’s need to find rational bases for their religious beliefs, advocates their awareness of

religions other than Christianity, and invites them to study scripture in ways that inevitably

expose them to disputes regarding its translation and interpretation.”442

Such invitations to

controversy demonstrate the heterodoxy of Christian belief during the tumultuous eighteenth

century, but also encouraged the government to stricter measures to support orthodox teaching.

Although rarely used in small-scale cases like that of Nicholas Carter and his daughter, the

Blasphemy Act of 1697, not repealed until 1967, declared that the penalty for denying the Holy

Trinity, as Carter and her father did in rejecting Jesus’ equality with God the Father, was being

rendered incapable of holding office. Repeat offenses could lead to denial of legacies or

guardianship and eventually to imprisonment without bail.443

More immediately, clergymen, like

441

Robert G. Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of

England (Woodbridge: Boydell Publishing, 2007), 103. 442

Julie Straight, “Religious Controversy in Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind,” Nineteenth

Century Contexts 27.4 (2005): 316. 443

R. K. Webb, “From Toleration to Religious Liberty,” in Liberty Secured? Britain before and after 1688, ed. J.R.

225

Nicholas Carter, could be forced from their posts for professing this heresy.444

While the

existence of other outspoken reformers may have encouraged Carter’s unorthodox stance, her

willingness to publish the 1752 Remarks on the Athanasian Creed must have been tempered by

caution.

Despite these factors, the anonymity of Carter’s Remarks on the Athanasian Creed is

only one layer deep. Although Carter does not sign her name to her critique, a closer look shows

her unfolding her identity like a riddle that was meant to be correctly interpreted by

contemporaries. Carter addresses herself against specific declarations made by her local rector,

beginning in her title “Remarks on the Athanasian Creed; on a Sermon preached at the Parish

Church of Deal, October 15, 1752; and on a Pamphlet . . By a Lady.”445

The title’s specificity

and focused address demonstrates a willingness to create a public dialogue. Moreover, despite

her apparent anonymity, this pamphlet would have been easy for contemporaries to attribute. In

1752, she had not yet published her Epictetus, which would bring her widespread public

recognition and financial stability, but she was already known as the writer of two translations

and of several poems, one of which had been printed, without her initial awareness or

permission, in Richardson’s prestigious Clarissa. In the small parish of Deal, where she was well

known as the daughter of the Reverend Carter, as a writer, and as a prominent intellectual

member of the Bluestocking circle, the signature “by a lady” would certainly turn her

neighbours’ thoughts toward Carter.446

In the wider circle of London, the focus on Deal would

have encouraged the same suspicion of authorship. Her arguments from the original Greek, later

Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 162.

444 Bigold, Women of Letters, 230.

445 Elizabeth Carter, “Remarks on the Athanasian Creed,” in A Letter to the Ven. and Rev. FRANCIS WRANGHAM, M. A.

F. R. S. Archdeacon of Cleveland (York, 1822), Appendix.1. Cited as “Remarks.” 446

Brigitte Sprenger-Holtkamp, “Miss Epictetus, or, The Learned Eliza: A Literary Biography of Elizabeth Carter,”

(PhD diss., University of London, 1996).

226

in the pamphlet, would have strengthened this suspicion, as ladies with knowledge of Greek were

rare enough that her knowledge of the language was several times called into question. Finally,

her father was already deeply invested in questioning the veracity of the Creed, a fact which

would have helped establish her authorship for interested readers.

Anonymous on paper, Carter would have been easily discovered by her readers. Given

the dangerously unorthodox nature of her speculations, it is unsurprising that Pennington

obscures any mention of this pamphlet, but his insistence that “She was warmly attached to the

Established Church” demonstrates his awareness that her orthodoxy was in question and needed

to be bolstered (Memoirs 302). Indeed, Carter herself recognizes this, insisting in her pamphlet

that she is “sincerely attached to the Church of England” and that she believes in “the principle

that the Holy Scriptures are the only rule of necessary faith,” a belief which separates her from

the Catholic reliance on tradition as a means of interpreting scripture. Only after she has thus

established her position within the church does she introduce her primary argument, and she ends

with a repeated insistence that “no one whatever can have a greater veneration for the Gospel

revelation than I have” and she wants “to speak and think of [her] Saviour Jesus Christ” just as

the Bible does (“Remarks” Appendix 1, 26).

All of these assurances are necessary because Carter’s next words are a blunt attempt to

overturn a major part of the doctrine of the church. Insisting that the foundation of the Church of

England is “the right of private judgement,” she demands that her interlocutor convince her that

“the Athanasian creed contains no difficulties” so severe that the Church of England ought “to

lay it aside” and give up this part of their doctrine (“Remarks” Appendix 2). In these words,

Carter sets herself up against both the reverend and the official doctrines of the Anglican church

– hardly the actions of a woman whose moralistic writing is an attempt to conform to society.

227

Although Randolph’s sermon was a local matter, Carter’s stance endangered her position

within the community and her good relations with her neighbours as she declares the sermon is

“wrote with so little connection, precision, or just reasoning, and intermixed with so many angry,

and indeterminate reflections,” that its “confusion and obscurity” make it impossible to reconcile

with common sense (“Remarks” Appendix 8). Only, she declares, once he has followed her

instructions and acted “like a Christian, a scholar, and a candid reasoner,” will she be willing to

answer his arguments (“Remarks” Appendix 9). She even criticizes “the great Athanasius,” who

she claims failed to properly understand the clear text of the scriptures (“Remarks” Appendix 24,

16). Although most contemporary Christian writers demanded respect for the church fathers, and

indeed Anglican theologians distinguished themselves from other Protestant denominations

partly by their respect for past authorities, Carter declares that “truth loses nothing by being

new,” aligning herself with contemporary Anglican reformers who wished to bring the church

into line with the strict Protestant focus on the Bible as the only source of religious truth.447

Moreover, the foundation of her argument lies in her translating abilities which she believes give

her a greater understanding of the Bible.

These examples show Carter’s self-certainty. By setting an unknown lady against a

reverend of the church, she places the power of reason above external authority, and insists that

reason does not cohere to one man more than another, or to a man more than a woman, but is

something that may be grasped by anyone. In doing so, she establishes her participation in

theological debates and reforms and a willingness to argue with established beliefs that echoes

her participation in the proto-feminist Bluestocking circle. Carter’s radical ideas are visible in the

447

Jean-Louis Quantin, “The Fathers in Seventeenth-Century Anglican Theology,” in The Reception of the Church

Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (New York: E. J. Brill, 1997), 987;

Carter, “Remarks on the Athanasian Creed,” Appendix.16.

228

subtle changes she makes to her translations and the even more subtle adherence to original

phrasing despite contemporary practice, something that is especially evident in her 1758

translation of the Works of Epictetus, which she began circulating in manuscript for the benefit of

her friend, Catherine Talbot.

Epictetus, who had been a popular author among both men and women because of his

“profoundly and pervasively theistic” moral focus, was an unsurprising choice for a pious

eighteenth-century woman.448 Despite the common Christian usage of Epictetus, however,

Wallace’s suggestion that Carter’s Epictetus is “Christian in all but name or, in other words, like

herself” is not borne out by the text, which is remarkably faithful.449

Carter chooses “to

undertake the cause of the poor heathen,” defending him against accusations which she finds

“too severe,” but she does this by insisting on his lack of Christian values.450

Far from believing

that Epictetus is almost Christian himself, she sees his lack of knowledge as an excuse for

following Stoic ideals rather than conforming to the Christian beliefs which were spreading

during his lifetime. Indeed, Wallace admits that “tensions” are evident “in the footnotes, where

the reader is repeatedly warned about the dangerous implications of the Stoic philosophy,” thus

showing Carter’s separation of Epictetus from Christian beliefs.451

Carter’s view of Epictetus responds to the popular upsurge in Christian stoicism during

the eighteenth century. This view narrowed traditional reverence toward classical writers by

seeing them as proto-Christians. By emphasizing similarities between the stoic disregard of

worldly pleasures and despairs and the Biblical command to view oneself as children of God and

not children of this world, Christian stoicism rewrote the historical view of classical philosophy

448

Gillian Wright, “Women Reading Epictetus,” Women’s Writing 14.2 (2007): 325. 449

Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 324. 450

Carter, A Series of Letters, II.228. 451

Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 326.

229

in an attempt to claim philosophers as part of Christian society.452

While supporting Christian

stoicism’s attempts to import Stoic ideals into Christian behaviour, Carter’s translation resisted

contemporary attempts to rewrite history by presenting classical writers such as Epictetus as

already Christian. In a continuation of her argument with Talbot, in which Carter insists that

Epictetus was not to be held accountable for not joining the Christian church, she uses her notes

to insist that Epictetus “knew little, if anything, about the Gospel itself,” although she sometimes

attributes his manners or tendencies to social principles that stemmed from Christianity.453

It is not only in her footnotes that Carter works to separate Epictetus from Christianity,

although she certainly points out “the Difference of the two Systems” of Stoicism and

Christianity in her notes throughout (Epictetus 168). Gillian Wright argues in “Women Reading

Epictetus” that the many prior English translations of the Enchiridion work to “homogenize and

familiarize” the text by rendering all singular forms simply as “God,” a practice which Carter

rejects.454

Not only does she refer to Epictetus’ god as Jupiter, she retains references to “the

Fates, who spun in His presence the Thread of your Birth,” showing how Epictetus splits the

powers of his deity between the several gods of the Greek religion (Epictetus 49).

This separation between Christian and Stoic principles appears most clearly when

Carter’s Epictetus is compared to contemporary translations. Although Epictetus’s Enchridion

had been translated into English many times, beginning with James Sandford’s 1567 edition, a

1610 version by John Healey, and a 1692 edition by Ellis Walker, the translation of which she

appears to have been most aware was Stanhope’s 1694 Epictetus his Morals, with Simplicius his

452

Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2009), 65. 453

Elizabeth Carter, The Works of Epictetus (London, 1758), 32. 454

Wright, “Women Reading Epictetus,” 325.

230

Comment.455

Indeed, Pennington claims that Carter’s dislike of Stanhope’s Enchiridion, which

found “much too vague and diffuse” for her purposes, was the primary motivation behind her

decision to translate the entirety of Epictetus (Memoirs 137-8). Unlike Carter, who presents a

relatively unadorned primary text with extensive footnotes, the text of Stanhope’s Epictetus is

enlarged several times over by the commentary of Simplicius, several pages of which follow

every paragraph from Epictetus.456

Stanhope’s translation also tends to regularize and Christianize Epictetus’ Greek. Lee

Behlman suggests that “The presumed hardness of Roman Stoicism in its purest form needed to

be translated in order to conform better” to the sentimentality of eighteenth and nineteenth

century ideals.457

A.A. Long argues that, in Justus Lipsius’ influential 1584 De Constantia,

“Stoicism loses its distinctive character and becomes a largely bland anticipation of Christian

theism” in the early stages of a revisionist bowdlerization that continued well into the twentieth

century.458

For instance, where Carter accurately renders “θεοὺς,” as “Gods,” Stanhope translates

this as “God,” making the passage directly applicable to his Christian readers.459

Again, when

Epictetus ends his Enchiridion with a quote from Plato, Carter renders the line “if thus it pleases

the Gods, thus let it be,” a reasonably faithful translation of “ἀλλ᾽, ὦ Κρίτων, εἰ ταύτῃ τοῖς θεοῖς

φίλον, ταύτῃ γενέσθω.”460

Stanhope renders the same line as “If this be God’s pleasure

concerning me, His Will be done,” a phrase that echoes the “Thy will be done” of the Lord’s

455

Wright, “Women Reading Epictetus,” 326. 456

For readers wishing to compare translations, note that Stanhope and Carter’s chapter numbers do not correspond. 457

Lee Behlman, “The Victorian Marcus Aurelius: Mill, Arnold, and the Appeal of the Quasi-Christian,” Journal of

Victorian Culture 16.1 (2011): 2. 458

A.A. Long, “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition: Spinoza, Lipsius, Butler,” in The Cambridge Companion to

the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 367. 459

Epictetus, Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, ed. Heinrich Schenkl (Perseus Project:

http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0557.tlg002.perseus-grc1:1); Carter, The Works of Epictetus,

435; George Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, with Simplicius his Comment (London, 1694), 52. 460

Carter, The Works of Epictetus, 464; Epictetus, Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae,

http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0557.tlg002.perseus-grc1:53

231

Prayer.461

Although at times Stanhope finds himself unable to convey Epictetus’ meaning

without reference to the Greek religion, wherever possible, he Christianizes the language. Thus,

“θεοὺς εὐσεβείας” (reverence to the gods) becomes the “most important Duty in Religion” while

Carter’s “essential Property of Piety towards the Gods” maintains a more literal phrasing and

makes her translation more consistently pagan.462

Philosophy is important to Carter because she believes that even without direct religious

instruction, philosophy leads people to God and to virtuous living. This is directly evident in her

translation from Epictetus, where her primary argument is that while Epictetus ultimately fails to

discover the source of happiness and while his doctrines are greatly inferior to the Christian

doctrines, the Greek philosopher shows how close heathen wisdom can come to true Christian

wisdom. She makes this argument, an extension of the Christian stoicism prevalent among the

Bluestockings and especially Talbot, for whom this book was written, most clear in her notes.463

In one such note, she compares Epictetus’ view of the body as “a Garment” to “the sacred

Writers.” Some of these writers, she points out, show the body as “a House, or Tabernacle,” but

Saint Paul “joins the two Metaphors together,” showing the body as both a house and a garment

“in a strikingly beautiful Manner” that builds on the image of the body as a garment and

improves on it (Epictetus 84). Although this note does not explicitly say anything about

Epictetus, her comments connect the Greek philosopher to Christianity by showing that, through

different routes, both the Christian and the non-Christian philosophers have come to the same

understanding about the body. At the same time, “How gloomy, how empty the Stoic consolation

461

Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, 550; Matthew 6:10 KJV. 462

Epictetus, Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae,

http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0557.tlg002.perseus-grc1:31; Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals,

346; Carter, The Works of Epictetus, 449. 463

O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 65.

232

is,” Carter says, reflecting that without Christianity the Stoics have nothing positive to hope for,

only the assurance that nothing can harm them (Epictetus 131).

Most shockingly to her Christian audience, Carter allows Epictetus to demand “what is

Jupiter to me, if he cannot help me: or, again; what is he to me, if he chuses I should be in the

Condition that I am?” (Epictetus 76). To a Christian who is taught, as she says in her

contribution to the Rambler, which she prints in her edition of her Poems, “patient Dependence

on that Providence, which looks through all Eternity . . . silent Resignation, [and] ready

Accommodation of his Thoughts and Behaviour to it’s [sic] inscrutable Ways,” such a

declaration would have been unthinkable, but when Carter’s Epictetus repeats the assertion only

a little later, she shows him going even further (Poems 113). Insisting that “unless Piety and

Interest be placed in the same Thing, Piety cannot be preserved in any mortal Breast,” Epictetus

proves that the Stoic doctrines were not “fitted to influence the Generality of Mankind,” because

they offer no sense of the heavenly reward which moral behaviour earns (Epictetus 91, xv). She

compares this section, in her notes, to the “blasphemous Impatience” of the Jews in Isaiah, who

cursed God because they had no food. By comparing the Greeks and the Jews, Carter displays

her conviction that the Greek philosopher has attained the same level as God’s chosen people

before the revelations of Christ. This creates a justification for her translation, but also clearly

separates the philosopher from Christian writers.

Contrarily, Stanhope’s translation Christianizes Epictetus, a practice which Carter

decisively rejects. Carter’s ability and willingness to Christianize classical poetry when it suits

her purpose is visible in her 1738 imitation of Horace’s Ode 22, Book I, a poem, which appeared

in the Gentleman’s Magazine signed by “EL” and which was only attributed to her after her

death by her nephew Pennington. This imitation closely follows Horace’s first two stanzas on

233

virtue, but then abandons Horace entirely and where the original poem turns into self-praise,

Carter’s moves toward generalities, examining the principles of virtuous men rather than looking

at a specific man. Guided not only by Horace’s “Virtue” but also by Christian “Providence,”

Carter’s verse argues that the man “whose acts and thoughts are pure,” remains steadfast against

all temptation in a mingled classical and Christian security.464

In Epictetus, contrarily, Carter may comment on the “Likeness to Christian Phrases and

Doctrines,” but she prefers to use neutral words and phrases to express this likeness (Epictetus

441). In some places, her desire to avoid making Epictetus sound Christian leads her to use

additional notes to explain her meaning. Where Stanhope says “As no Man sets up a Mark, with

a Design to shoot beside it, so neither hath the Maker of the World” created evil,465

Carter uses

passive voice to elide agency altogether and then adds a note explaining that “Happiness . . . is

the Mark which God has set up” and what we think of as evil is “a mere Negative” result of

missing the mark of happiness (Epictetus 448-9). Here, she supplies in her notes the context

which is not clearly given in the Greek, while Stanhope’s looser translation allows him to

incorporate his explanation into the text. Both writers agree in their interpretation of the passage,

but Carter’s desire to separate Epictetus from Christianity leads her to remove her interpretation

from the translated text.

Carter’s separation of commentary and original offers a strong contrast to the

contemporary practice of Christianizing texts. In an attempt to align Epictetus with Christian

doctrine, Stanhope uses “the Things of this World” in one place and “Humours of the World”

464

Elizabeth Carter, “Integer Vitae . . . Hor. Lib. I. Ode 22.: Imitated,” Gentleman’s Magazine VIII (March 1738):

159. 465

Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, 258.

234

elsewhere to render the idea that Carter translates as “Externals.”466

Epictetus’ language in this

section allows for interpretation, and both Stanhope’s phrase and Carter’s single word convey

Epictetus’ premise that men should not care about external things. But Stanhope’s translation

uses standard Christian phrasing meant to separate the things which please God from the things

that are pleasurable only to men. This phrasing is problematic not only because of its

Christianizing impact but also because the Christian standard which separates the things of this

world and the next does not exclude as much of this world as Epictetus’ division between things

which the individual can and cannot control.

In other places, Stanhope’s translation narrows the range of possibilities. When Epictetus

explains how keeping death in mind helps create a balanced perspective, Stanhope narrows his

view to “those Calamities which Mankind are most afraid of.”467

Neither Epictetus nor Carter

mention man in this passage, and in fact Carter reduces this line “Things which appear terrible,”

but Stanhope is so aware of the Christian world in which he writes that he feels the need to

exclude the things that God and his angels might find terrifying.468

After all, Stanhope does not

want his readers to believe that Epictetus has no fear of sin, shame, or immorality. Epictetus

certainly has a strong sense of right and wrong, good and evil, but he is also willing to accept

that different people have different principles and that “the Principles that they form, are to them

their supreme Rule,” as he shows in the Discourses (Epictetus 63). This may help to explain why

Carter was the first to translate the Discourses into English. Previous translators had rendered the

shorter Enchiridion into English, but Carter’s translation of the longer, more complex, and more

466

Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, 170, 218. Carter, The Works of Epictetus, 441, 445. 467

Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, 206. 468

Carter, The Works of Epictetus, 444-5; Epictetus, Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae,

http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0557.tlg002.perseus-grc1:21

235

obviously pagan Discourses was the first of its kind and opened a new window into the Stoic

philosopher’s pagan religion.

This view of the ancient philosophers as righteous heathens whose works were precursors

to Christianity is central to Western philosophical thought. Christianity was seen as “the

fulfillment of philosophy,” Cindy Vitto argues, and early Christian writers, including Aristides,

Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine, debated the place of the heathen philosophers in a

Christian afterlife.469

Carter explores this idea that philosophy leads to Christianity in several

places, including her early poem, the “Ode to Wisdom,” where she traces the history of wisdom

back to Greece. Here, “Plato’s sacred Spirit” teaches his hearers what “Perfect, Fair, and Good”

mean and leads both the ancient Athenians and Carter’s narrator to “Virtue’s soft persuasive

Charms” and the beginning of wisdom. Only after she has imbibed this wisdom from the

ancients and learned from them how to find virtue does her narrator learn to look for God, the

creator of wisdom (Poems 88-9).

Carter is eager to discuss the ways in which pagan philosophy prefigured Christianity and

the universality of ideas of good and evil, self and other, and moral behaviour. At the same time,

she works to clearly separate Epictetus from Christian philosophers. Although, as Wallace

highlights, Carter does bowdlerize her text in places, these alterations avoid social improprieties

and not religious doctrines.470

In fact, these changes are similar to those that Pope makes

throughout his Homeric translations. She removes Epictetus’ reference to the shame of carrying

out a chamber pot, declaring in a footnote that “The Translation here gives only the general

Sense, as a more particular Description would be scarcely supportable in our Language,” in the

469

Cindy L. Vitto, “The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature,” Transactions of the American Philosophical

Society 79.5 (1989): 9. 470

Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 325.

236

same way that Pope removes references to the “domestic practicalities” of Odysseus and

Telemachus, which he feels are equally unfit for the station of his epic heroes, but she leaves in

references to polytheism and to everyday activities.471

Carolyn Williams argues that Carter’s

translation shows an “unflinching brutality,” eliding only the chamber pot and a later reference to

castration, which Carter calls an “ignominious Amputation” of a “morbid part.”472

The most

surprising thing about her changes, in fact, is that there are not more of them.

Indeed, although Jennifer Wallace focuses on “the chastening tone of the reviewers,” and

claims that contemporary criticisms are delivered “in ways that would not have been used to

discuss a man’s translation,” the negative responses to Carter’s translation were surprisingly

similar to contemporary reactions to Pope’s Homer.473

The overwhelming public response to

both works was positive, and both authors made their fortunes by their translations. While

Carter’s Epictetus was not as lucrative as Pope’s work, she “earned £1000 from the publication,

enough to support her for the rest of her life.”474

Carter, most likely because of her less

combative public persona, received much more public praise than did Pope, who had made so

many enemies that only one well-known work remains which praises his greatest, most popular,

and most lucrative translations.

Criticism of both Carter and Pope focused on their beautiful language and their lack of

spirit. Although many reviewers praised Carter’s “pure and elegant language,” the Monthly

Review declared that her translation, though not completely “spiritless, is, in some few places,

rather languid, for want of using a liberty which the Writer seems well qualified to manage

471

Carter, The Works of Epictetus, I.8; Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness (New York: Routledge,

2014), 122-3. 472

Williams, “The Consistency of Elizabeth Carter,” 19; Carter, The Works of Epictetus, I.10. 473

Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 329. 474

Priscilla Dorr, “Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806) UK,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.1 (1986): 139.

237

discreetly,” a polite counterpart to contemporary claims that Pope’s “Softness and Harmony”

create a “a pretty poem” “with sound so gracious! and with sense so weak!”475

While these

responses to Pope can be placed in a tradition of using feminization as an insult, the similarities

demonstrate that Carter’s detractors responded to by her using language of softness and beauty to

both praise and detract from her poem in a way similar to Pope’s opponents. Her femininity may

have influenced responses to her person, but her reviewers responded to her text in the same way

that they responded to texts by men. Indeed, she is criticized not for taking more liberties than

she ought and pressing herself into the world of men, but for not doing so strongly enough. Her

translating style leads her to make only subtle changes, keeping her commentary external rather

than making the extensive alterations common to contemporary translations.

While this translation and its reception may show Carter’s socially-conforming beliefs, it

certainly does not show her constraining herself by following the example set by previous

translators or moralists. Far from attempting to make her author a Christian, she highlights his

non-Christian elements, ensuring that her audience could not miss the foreign, pagan nature of

the text she had chosen to translate. Her dedication, or rather, the lack of a dedication to this

work, further highlights her independence. While she refused to put her name to her translation

of Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le Dame without having a patron to whom she could dedicate

the book, Carter did not look for a titled patron to this, her most prominent public production and

the first work to which she publicly signed her name.476

It is true that by the time the book came to publication the list of subscribers, headed by

475

Anon, “All the Works of Epictetus, which are now extant, by Elizabeth Carter,” Critical Review: or Annals of

Literature, 6 (1758): 158; Anon, “Mrs. Elizabeth Carter’s Translation of the Works of Epictetus,” The Monthly

Review, 18 (1758): 588; Charles Gildon, Complete Art of Poetry (London: 1718), I.xii; Samuel Johnson, The

Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), IV.74, n;

Bezaleel Morrice, To the Falsely Celebrated British Homer (London, 1742), 15. 476

Bigold, Women of Letters, 171.

238

the Prince and Princess Dowager of Wales, was long enough to suggest that she had noble

patrons who could protect her work. But long lists of subscribers rarely prevented authors from

writing dedications and indeed Dryden, with one of the longest lists of subscribers in the long

eighteenth century, dedicated his Virgil to not one but several patrons. Carter had several options

from which to choose if she wished to write a dedication. Instead of asking the bishop who had

been helping her with her Greek, or any of the nobles or highly-ranked clergymen that she knew,

she wished to dedicate the Epictetus to the friend who had asked her to begin the translation.

When Talbot refused, Carter decided that she would do without a dedication entirely, and let the

work stand on its own terms.

Willingness to stand on her own terms and by her own logic, in fact, characterizes

Carter’s career as a translator and as an author. Her anonymous publications and her early

translations were designed to convince readers of their truth, to inspire imitation, and to begin the

process of her self-fashioning. Despite the sometimes radical nature of these publications, she

did not attempt true anonymity but instead, as she did in her Remarks on the Athanasian Creed,

left encoded hints for readers to interpret, or circulated her authorship in private letters to friends

and patrons. She never published her translations from Crousaz or Algarotti with her name on

them, for example, even though their authorship was well known by the end of her career. These

may be the indications of a cautious writer, but they do not show a personality constrained by the

overbearing demands of society into making declarations of which she was not convinced.

Social Acceptance

239

Although she claims that there is no “deference due either to the ignorance of trifling

heads, or the perverseness of worthless hearts,” and that she can therefore write what she likes,

bearing “with great tranquillity the scandle [sic] of absurdities I never committed, and of

nonsense that I never wrote,” Carter is careful of her reputation.477

In the increasingly strict

milieu of the late eighteenth century, she may have worried that her 1739 translations of Crousaz

and Algarotti, with their focus on masculine philosophy and science, would earn her a position

among the “unsex’d” women who were increasingly attacked in this period. Wollstonecraft and

her imitators, writing in the 1790s, were the final straw for the alarmed moral guardians who

troubled Carter from the 1730s onward, when rumors of a romance encouraged her to flee

London and declare herself in self-imposed exile in Deal.478

Carter wanted to be known for her

learning and her poetry, but she wanted to appear unconcerned with fame, a conflicted response

to her own publicity that is echoed by scholars. While most modern writers accept her reports of

an almost crippling shyness, enhanced by her self-presentation as retired from the world, there is

a simultaneous recognition of the care with which she approached her public persona. As

Melanie Bigold examines, Carter was “conscientiously image-driven,” working to shape public

perceptions of her life and work.479

This care for her reputation was necessary to Carter not only because of the potential for

hostile reaction, but also because her intended aim – to become a philosophical and moral

teacher to other women – required her to have the kind of reputation that she wanted her pupils

to imitate. Although Pope and Haywood were content to base their reputations on their own

works, Carter, like Dryden, wished to leave a dual legacy. Dryden, as I examine in Chapter 1,

477

Carter, Series of Letters, I.189. 478

Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London, 1798), 28. 479

Bigold, Women of Letters, 176.

240

saw himself as the father of a new generation of poets working to make English literature great.

Carter, more focused on people than on language, worked to create a legacy of confident,

competent, and educated women who could lead the nation toward a more religious way of

thinking and writing.

She and her father were deeply concerned with the value of her work, and she abandoned

at least one translation after discovering that it was “not highly regarded,” declaring to Edward

Cave that she had “laid aside all Thoughts of translating” a work by Joanne Maurocordato

because “it is in no very great Esteem.”480

Together, the Carters discussed whether scarcity

would make her more desirable, whether it was better that she circulate in manuscript or print,

and whether publication was worth the risk of being seen next to undesirable works. As she

reports later, her printer “had a hearty twinkation once for suffering” her poems to be printed

along with others that she considered “bad company.”481

Her coinage of the word twinkation

shows Carter’s ability to laugh at her own irritation, but her recognition of the folly inherent in

such worries doesn’t stop her from fretting about her reputation. Worst of all, she and her father

were faced with other contributors to the Gentleman’s Magazine who chose the same pen name

but whose writing she did not want to be associated with, and she and her father determined that

it would be “very right and prudent” to publish an advertisement insisting on distancing her from

these verses (Memoirs 25). This experience informed her uncertainty about print, and influenced

her attempts to control her reputation throughout her life.

480

Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-

Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 57; Elizabeth Carter, Letter to Edward Cave, Elizabeth

Carter, 1717-1806: An Edition of Some Unpublished Letters, ed. Gwen Hampshire (Newark: University of

Delaware Press, 2005), 77. 481

Carter, A Series of Letters, II.203.

241

Although she eventually published many of her works, Bigold has shown that Carter

often preferred the elite world of manuscript circulation. Pennington recollects that she had to be

persuaded to put even the poems which had already appeared in manuscript and in the

Gentleman’s Magazine into a published book (Memoirs 150). Publishing her poems reduced her

control over her readership and increased the chance of damaging her reputation. Later in life,

she was to claim that she had made a mistake in allowing her poems to be published in the

Gentleman’s Magazine, even anonymously. Her youth and her “personal acquaintance with and

esteem for Mr. Cave” had led her into an indiscretion that she was determined not to repeat.

When approached with a flattering request from Robert Dodsley, Carter declared that she

“should rather chuse to publish” her poems herself “than have them published by any body else”

who might link her name to other, undesirable authors.482

Dodsley’s miscellany Collection of

Poems was widely influential, but, like many publishers, he ran what Michael Suarez calls a

“low-budget publishing venture” and had no scruples about printing poems without consent of

their authors. In Carter’s case, her refusal to grant Dodsley permission to publish her poem, did

not prevent it from appearing in the Collection of Poems without her permission or her name and

in a less correct copy than the one she finally released.483

She complained that she has “had the

mortification” of her name several times appearing “in some trumpery advertisement or other,”

having been “stolen” by “miscellany mongers, magazine mongers, and roguery mongers” so that

her name appeared not only in the Gentleman’s Magazine, to which she had at least given

permission, even if she later regretted that permission, but in other magazines, miscellanies, and

collections.484

She furiously exclaims to Miss Talbot against “the person, whoever it was, who

482

Carter, A Series of Letters, II.203. 483

Michael F. Suarez, Introduction to A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (London: Routledge, 1997), I.5-7. 484

Carter, A Series of Letters, II.214.

242

gave away copies without my leave,” declaring that “to see it fluttering in two or three journals is

beyond all sufferance.”485

Here, her works become property that can be advertised, stolen, and

sold.

That this scene was repeated several times throughout her life infuriated Carter and

encouraged her careful control of her printed texts. Although she considered dedicating several

of her books, only one received a dedication, a fact attributable as much to Carter’s

determination not to offer her work to anyone unsuitable as to the refusal of her chosen

dedicatees. Even in Poems on Several Occasions, which does contain a dedication, she is sparing

of her praise. Although she wrote to Miss Talbot about Lord Bath’s “great politeness, his

sensibility, his constant cheerfulness,” and his kindnesses, she insists that she “should be as far

from putting it into a dedication, as he from suffering me to do it,” and in the end she allowed

Bath to write the dedication to himself, which resulted in a very reserved final text.486

Instead,

Carter structures her Poems on Several Occasions, to show off her classical education and her

abilities as a translator. The quotation on the title page is not the standard English or Latin, but

Greek, and the laudatory poem she includes highlights her classical and religious connections.

While many publications include such laudatory poems, Carter highlights her agency in choosing

this poem by prefacing it with a paragraph of introduction. Her introduction offers a standard,

self-deprecatory thanks to her patron, Lord Lyttelton, for writing these lines but her insertion of

her own words accepting the “Honour the Author of this Collection may derive from the

following fine verses” emphasizes her ability to choose, accept, and judge the verses that she

includes (Poems 61).

485

Carter, A Series of Letters, I.249. 486

Carter, A Series of Letters, II.390.

243

This laudatory poem opens by echoing a hymn, “Glory to God on high,” which

contemporary Anglicans would have recognized not only from the story of the birth of Christ in

the gospel of Luke but also from the Sunday service, where the hymn forms part of the Gloria.

After making this acknowledgement to religious propriety, the poem focuses on classical

connections. Lyttelton calls her poems “More pow’rful than the Song of Orpheus,” better than

“Lesbian Sappho,” and worthy of “A nobler Wreath” to crown her brows (v). These comparisons

link her to famously charming figures, glossing lightly over her scientific connections and

emphasizing her literary and classical focus.

This classical focus and desire for control were never more apparent than in her

translation of Epictetus. Carter’s friends, Secker, the Bishop of Oxford, and Miss Talbot,

provided the impetus for moving her translation of Epictetus from manuscript to print in part by

demonstrating the circulatory power of the manuscript. Although Carter asserted that her

translation was intended as a private gift for Miss Talbot, Talbot and Secker showed her work to

others. Secker’s declaration to her that “The Bishop of Norwich hath blabbed, that the translator

is a lady” shows the type of pressure her friends used in order to encourage Carter to publish. He

admits that showing her unfinished manuscript to others “is a little premature,” but requests that

she “be not grieved” that he has not asked permission, recognizing that she has a right to control

who sees her work, even as he consistently flouts that right.487

While Carter certainly appears to have been startled at the speed with which her

manuscript escaped her hands, this should not be taken to mean that she intended it to be read

only by Talbot, to whom she sent the translation. Talbot’s declaration to her that Secker, “the

Bishop of Oxford is an idle man, and has not read over your Epictetus” implies that Carter had

487

Secker to Carter, March 31, 1753, in Memoirs, 121.

244

expressed a desire for the bishop to read the translation.488

Carter’s argument with the Bishop

over translation strategies demonstrates worries about her readers which show that she intended a

wider readership than the circle of three with which she began. Sylvia Myers describes Carter’s

stubborn insistence on a more ornamented style than the bishop approved, an insistence which

turned on the question of whether anyone would “mind” a writer who was presented in “an easy

and natural style.”489

That this was the central argument demonstrates that, even at the beginning

of this supposedly private translation, Carter hoped for a wider readership.

Despite her hesitations about what to print and where and her worries about appearing

like Macaulay, who “suffered herself to be flattered, and almost worshipped” with what Carter

called a “farcical parade of foolery,” Carter nursed a powerful desire for fame.490

Her paired

poems on the laurel branch, published in the 1762 Poems on Several Occasions, use the trope of

advising another writer to show her struggle with a sense of unworthiness and the importance of

overcoming that struggle. When her first speaker approaches the laurel bush it accuses her of

being too “Weak and Vain” to aspire to the “Honours [which] to the Wise belong,” but her

“ANSWER” encourages poets to overcome these fears (Poems 42). Instead of listening to the

condemnations of the world, symbolized by Daphne, poets must remember that Daphne rejected

“Apollo, Pow’r of Wit and Verse.” Thus if the world rejects them, that is no reflection on them

but only on the world’s judgement.

Carter’s advice seems to contradict her insistence on her own privacy, but it is borne out

in her actual practice. Worried, as the first of her narrators is, about her own reputation and

especially about the accusation of vanity, she published the majority of her early pieces

488

Carter, A Series of Letters, II.31. 489

Myers, Bluestocking Circle, 161-3. 490

Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 88-9.

245

anonymously, including her first two lengthy translations. Famously, Carter found learning

languages difficult, but it is hard to believe in the inherent dullness of a woman who, in addition

to Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, taught herself German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and

Arabic.491

The emphasis which both she and her nephew put on her lack of inherent skill with

languages is part of a larger self-portrait of a woman without genius who supplies her lack of

brilliance with hard work. Her nephew recollects in his Memoirs that she was “determined to

overcome” her trials and to attain her goals (Memoirs 6). This determination inspires her

insistence on the culpability of the uneducated in her translation of Crousaz’ Examination and

led her to insist that fame answers not to genius but to perseverance.

After a visit to Pope’s garden in 1738 inspired friends to write a series of poems,

including a Latin epigram by Samuel Johnson and an “Englished” version which claimed that

“Phoebus himself” would give her the laurel crown of poetic fame, Carter hid her pleased

response behind a claim of modest denial.492

Her immediate public response, published in both

Latin and English in the same issue, was to insist that “Remov’d from Pope’s, the wreath must

face / On ev’ry meaner brow,” taking the same guise of humility that the speaker in her “To Miss

___.: In ANSWER to the foregoing” condemns. Declaring that she was a “climate” not suited to

genius, Carter wrote that poetic thoughts would “Lose all their lively bloom, and droop/ Beneath

[the] paler sun” of her mind after having flourished in Pope’s brilliant mind.493

Notwithstanding

this public demurral, she allowed herself to be painted standing in a garden, with a spray of

leaves and flowers in her hair that echoes the laurel crown being given to an allegorized female

491

Mirella Agorni, “Women Manipulating Translation: The Case of Elizabeth Carter,” in The Knowledges of the

Translator: From Literary Interpretation to Machine Classification, ed. Malcolm Coulthard and Patricia Anne

Odber de Baubeta (Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 136. 492

Samuel Johnson, “Ad Elisam Popi Horto Lauros carpentem,” Gentleman’s Magazine VIII (July 1738):327;

Alexis, “To Eliza plucking Laurel in Mr. Pope’s Garden,” Gentleman’s Magazine VIII (August 1738):429. 493

Elizabeth Carter, “Untitled,” Gentleman’s Magazine July 1738, VIII.429.

246

figure behind her.494

This image, like her answer to Johnson, refrains from explicitly claiming to

be Pope’s heir or his equal, but demonstrates an attempt to follow in his footsteps. The spray of

leaves in her hair and her position within a garden recollect the series of laudatory poems which

followed her visit to Pope’s garden. Moreover, as Peltz shows, Carter’s pose, with one hand up

as if she is about to rest her chin on it, recollects the positioning which Pope used to “represent

himself as a brooding genius” in his portraits.495

This painting offers a physical counterpart to her

admission that her “daring hand/ Usurp’d the laurel bough,” reaching for the fame that she

modestly refuses to demand.496

The paintings depict Carter’s literary and scholastic achievements without blatantly

demanding admiration. Pope’s high-profile arguments about his literary genius, and the public

fallout over his hubris provided an example of the devastating accusations of pride which open

self-satisfaction could incur. In order to avoid following in Pope’s embattled footsteps, Carter

encourages others to praise her but responds to this praise with modest demurrals. The portraits

which depict her as Pope’s rightful heir and as Minerva, goddess of wisdom, offer visual

examples of this tendency. By celebrating Johnson’s praise and Pope’s legacy, her garden

portrait displays submission to male judgement. This submission to masculine works is

emphasized by the Minerva portrait, where Carter displays Plato’s works rather than directing

viewers to her own writings or even to her translations.497

These portraits remind readers of

Carter’s genius and her translations, but they do so while retaining a pose of feminine modesty.

494

Peltz, “Living Muses,” 69-71. 495

Peltz, “Living Muses,” 69; William Kurtz Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope (London: Yale University

Press, 1965), 22, 61, 71, 72, 318. 496

Carter, Gentleman’s Magazine July 1738, VIII.429. 497

Peltz, “Living Muses,” 70, 72.

247

Her worries about vanity and her real shyness, which led her to declare that when

company came “I doubt [not] I shall feel frightened, and run into holes and corners like a wild

kitten” do not prevent Carter from wanting the fame that she writes about.498

Although she did

not put her name to her early translations she, like other writers of the eighteenth century,

divulged her authorship through other means. Her desire for recognition is evident early in her

career in her furious response to Richardson, who read her anonymous “Ode to Wisdom,” in

manuscript and inserted it in Clarissa. Feeling that he had no right to her text, Carter declared

herself “extremely surprized” that he has printed something that “no one had a right to publish if

[she] did not choose.”499

Calling his actions “ungenerous and unworthy,” she appears to have

caught him by surprise, and his response shows his uncertainty in the face of this challenge to his

masculine, print authority. While Richardson appears to believe that anonymous manuscript

pieces are free for public use so long as he does not claim to be the author, and seems aggrieved

at her not recognizing the “trouble” and “expense” of publication, Carter felt that her anonymity

should protect her and that her works, no matter under what name she sent them into the world,

were her sole property.500

Although anonymous published poems were often borrowed by

publishers of miscellanies, Schellenberg argues that manuscript authors expected more

consideration and that Richardson “broke the rule of respecting a scribal author’s wishes

regarding publicity.”501

The start of this poem’s career, unwillingly shoved into the spotlight,

may help to explain why Carter was later hesitant to accept even generous offers of publication.

498

Carter, A Series of Letters, I.288. 499

Bigold, Women of Letters, 181; Elizabeth Carter, “Original Letters of Miss E. Carter and Mr Samuel Richardson,”

Monthly Magazine 33 (1812), 533-4. 500

Samuel Richardson, “Original Letters,” 534. 501

Schellenberg, Literary Coteries, 65.

248

Near the end of her career, Carter was still showing the same irritated response to anyone

who seemed to infringe on her right to control her own works. Although she had established

herself as a learned woman, and despite the translation from Anacreon’s Greek with which she

had opened her career, some people were still skeptical of her ability to translate the difficult

Greek of Epictetus. In one letter, Chapone explains that the men around her “could no otherwise

account for the thing, or comfort themselves under it, but by attributing its excellence to the

archbishop’s [formerly the Bishop of Oxford’s] assistance,” and others gave the credit for the

translation to her father.502

Carter was deeply troubled by this lack of acknowledgement,

although she tried to show this unhappiness through circuitous routes.

In one letter to Miss Talbot, she exclaims against a story attributing her friendship to

Lord Bath to another lady, asking “Did my Lord B. ever take the very nosegay from its button

hole, and deliver it to the hand of my Lady A___?” Carter’s list of incidents involving herself

escalates until she ends with her most bitter complaint, that “when people are not allowed to call

their Greek their own, it would provoke the most dove-like patience to speak” (Memoirs 152).

By opening with a complaint about her friendship being attributed to another woman, she can

connect her socially acceptable and even laudable pride in her friends with her pride in her own

reputation.

Furious at her own works being attributed to others, Carter was nearly as unhappy to have

her friend’s work credited to her. When it was first suggested that Mrs. Montagu’s essay on

Shakespeare was Carter’s work, she retreated in horror, calling it “theft” to take on “any part of

the justly acquired reputation of my friend” (Memoirs 288). This reaction shows something of

the resentment that she felt on seeing her own works ascribed to other writers, as her

502

Hester Mulso-Chapone, The Posthumous Works of Mrs Chapone (London, 1807), 106.

249

encouragement of Montagu’s temporary anonymity shows her attitude toward her own. Cater

encouraged Montagu to publish anonymously in order to see the true reactions of the public,

unstained by partiality or politics, but after the work had been received, she declared that “it

seems to me to be downright affectation to conceal it any longer,” and encouraged her friend to

make her authorship known or, as she had done, to allow her friends to tell the world that she had

authored the book (Memoirs 287).

In the last years of her life, Carter was agreeably surprised to be presented with “a little

pamphlet, containing a French translation of some of my poems,” and hastened to spread the

news to her friends. Declaring that “the translation is excellent,” she desired Mrs. Montagu to

read the publication also.503

Her request for her friend’s opinion gave her an excuse to talk about

her own pleasure in her spreading fame. This submission to outside opinion is a common trope in

eighteenth-century publications, and one she uses several times with her Epictetus, writing to

Miss Talbot that she believes her translation is “a most intolerably bad one; and yet . . . from a

conviction that my Lord and you are much better judges than I am, out of an odd kind of

humility” she must look at her translation in the best possible light.504

This type of disclaimer,

like her earlier hope that another translator will take up the task so that her author “will appear to

more advantage than in my vile disguise” retains a guise of modesty and humility even as it

invites her readers to praise her writing.505

Unfortunately for her ambitions, while both of her early translations were immediately

popular, neither gained lasting fame and it was not until her translation of Epictetus that she

gained her reputation as a translator. Although they were well thought of, and the Algarotti went

503

Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 349. 504

Carter, A Series of Letters, II.82. 505

Carter, A Series of Letters, II.30.

250

through several editions, by the time Pennington wrote his Memoirs in 1807 the books were

already scarce. Indeed, he claims that Carter herself seems to have decided later in life that they

were unworthy of her reputation. She had chosen Crousaz and Algarotti in preference to several

other works suggested to her by her bookseller, among them a work by contemporary Greek

author Joanne Maurocordato, but later in life she preferred to be known as a translator of difficult

Greek and Latin texts rather than as a poet who worked with less respected modern languages

(Memoirs 31). There is little evidence for this outside Pennington’s Memoirs, but her choice to

focus on poetry in the last years of her life may show her worries about these earlier texts. She

was certainly worried about the reputation of the Bluestocking circle of which she was a part.

This circle offered several systems for the education of women and supported women with many

different talents, and some of these were coming under attack by the end of the century. While

Carter’s carefully-cultivated reputation earned her a place among the Bluestockings that was

almost universally admired, she knew that she was admired as much for her “Modesty and

Beauty” as for her “Sense and Genius.”506

Whatever her later sentiments, she was proud to acknowledge all of her translations at the

time of writing. Carter was especially pleased by her translation of Algarotti, which she sent to

several people, including Algarotti himself, who she asked friends to speak with, lamenting that

she could not “get a Book ready to be presented to him” as soon as she would like.507

Other

recipients included the Duchess of Hertford, to whom she wished to dedicate the piece and who

later became a friend and correspondent, and Mr. Rowe, who had sent her a copy of his deceased

wife’s works and biography (Memoirs 45). Both of these commented on the beauty of the

506

Monthly Review, or Literary Journal, XVIII (June 1758): 588. 507

Carter to Edward Cave, Some Unpublished Letters, 66.

251

translation as well as their inability to read the original, suggesting that Carter’s translation may

have succeeded in replacing the original for her readers and thus in hiding its problematic sexual

references. The widespread inability to read Italian may also suggest a reason why she was more

proud of her Italian than her French translation, including a pair of side-by-side Italian-English

translations from Pietro Metastasio in her Poems on Several Occasions.

Divinely Reasoned Education

Carter’s insistence on the importance of a wide education led her away from literature,

which she enjoyed but did not find as useful to a pious education, to philosophy and science.

These were subjects which were often untranslated because contemporaries viewed them as

unsuitable for women and for the lower classes. In 1787, the Reverend John Bennet declared that

studying “politics, philosophy, maths, [or] metaphysics,” was “unwomanly” and would “destroy

the ease and softness which are the very source of [women’s] grace,” a worry that Carter works

to alleviate.508

In a letter to Montagu on Montagu’s defence of Shakespeare, she explains that

“There is no doubt great merit in every work that helps to polish the understanding,” but that the

best works were those that were “consecrated to the honour and service” of God and that led

readers to learn about him, either directly or through learning about his creation.509

By defining

science as an attempt to understand and appreciate God, she redefines philosophical and

scientific works as religious texts. This allows her to claim that while she read voraciously, she

508

John Bennett, Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly in Relation to the Culture of the Heart (London 1787), 46. 509

Elizabeth Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu, Between the Years 1755 and 1800. Chiefly

Upon Literary and Moral Subjects, ed. Montagu Pennington (London, 1817), II.21-22

252

confined her reading to books whose primary focus was to improve the character or to inform the

mind. Her desire for authority led Carter to use the religious language of the day to justify and

support her desire for a philosophical and scientific education based on in-depth reasoning.

“Thinking,” she claims in a letter to Mrs. Vessey, “must always tend to peace, when it is

exercised under an awful sense of the presence of the Supreme Being,” and this twofold focus is

evident throughout her work (Memoirs 244). Her focus on reason as the path to religion shares

characteristics with many eighteenth-century religious works, including the “Shew of Reason”

that appears in William Law’s popular Dialogue Between a Methodist and a Churchman, but

Carter’s focus on reason was more inclusive, including pagan and scientific as well as religious

truths.510

The omnivorous nature of Carter’s reading may stem from the superficiality that Michèle

Cohen sees as the defining feature of women’s education. Although women were not encouraged

to read in the sciences, and were in fact counselled to avoid works that required “abstraction,

comprehensiveness,” and persistence to understand, women’s education was broader than men’s,

including a wider “range of subjects,” but examining these subjects only superficially.511

Rejecting this idea, Carter insists on the suitability of philosophy to women’s education, and

stresses persistence in her poetic injunctions to make “Repeated Efforts” to acquire “Happiness

and Fame” (Poems 43). Instead of ascribing poetic success to genius, she claims that

That beauteous Prize the patient Toils

Of Perseverance claim:

Whose Hand alone must weave the Wreath

510

William Law, Of Justification by Faith and Works. A Dialogue Between a Methodist and a Churchman (London,

1760), 65. 511

Michèle Cohen, “‘A Little Learning’? The Curriculum and the Construction of Gender Difference in the Long

Eighteenth Century,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.3 (2006): 329.

253

Of undecaying Fame (Poems 43-5).

By making Perseverance, not Genius, the price of fame and success for adherents of poetry,

Carter emphasizes the worth of fame, both as a prize which will reward the diligent writer and as

something that is inherently beautiful while also subtly reassuring readers that she does not

believe her fame makes her better than them. In letters to Miss Talbot she insists that she has

“nothing to assist me, but industry” and certainly no claim to “genius,” but this does not prevent

her from learning classical languages, reading philosophy, and translating scientific texts.512

Carter’s insistence on the feminine virtue of perseverance rejects the superficial education most

women received, including a wide variety of texts but choosing these texts from different sources

than standard female curriculums.

Carter, unlike her fellow Bluestockings, was uncertain about the importance of literature,

and her dubious response to even great literature that does not directly improve and inform the

mind is evident in her translation of Metastasio’s sonnet on truth, which she prints in side-by-

side Italian and English verses. This style of side-by-side translation is rare in longer works,

more prevalent in poetry than in prose, and in literary texts it seems to mark the author’s desire

for immediate comparison between versions. Here, the side-by-side translation emphasizes her

changes. While Metastasio writes that everything is folly, echoing the “all is vanity” of

Ecclesiastes, Carter focuses on specific examples of folly, expanding the fourteen-line sonnet to

eighteen lines in order to decry both earthly vanity and imagination. Although she insists that

people take personal responsibility for their actions in her translation of Crousaz, her image of

the imagination in this poem shows her worry that the imagination destroys control of the self.

Where Metastasio declares that “folle ch io son” (I go mad) because “prendo tal parte” (I take

512

Carter, A Series of Letters, I.95-6.

254

part) in creating fables and dreams, Carter describes her narrator as “Caught by their magic

Force” and unable to break free. Her image of the “inventive Head” which “betrays the simple

Heart,” is nowhere in her original and shows her concern over the imagination (Poems 48-51).

This worry causes her to expand the first stanza, translating “Che de mal ch inventai,

piango e mi sdegno,” (I cry and am outraged at the evils I have myself invented) as “Imagin’d

Woes with real Grief I mourn, / Imagin’d Wrongs resent with real Scorn,” emphasizing the

conflict between the real, tangible world and the real movement of the mind and the falsehood of

the imagination. All of these insertions make her first stanza the longest stanza of the poem at six

lines to Metastasio’s four, a significant comparison in light of the following stanza, where she

follows his numbers exactly.

Following Metastasio’s numbers, however, does not mean directly following his thought,

and she rejects his suggestion that “l’agitato Ingegno” (the working of genius) may be able to

offer tranquility. Instead of genius, she looks to “Wisdom” and to “calmer Thoughts” to

“compose” her “ruffled Mind,” to restore her to herself. Neither author answers the question of

whether these things can help bring people closer to Metastasio’s “vero” and Carter’s “Truth,”

finally achieved through a direct appeal to God, but Carter’s verse offers a greater possibility that

wisdom can. Her final stanza condenses Metastasio’s two-line address to God so that she can add

a warning about worldly “Cares” and “Starts,” ending not simply with his plaintive cry to God

for help but a description of how “from Folly’s fev’rish Sleep I wake.”

Carter’s juxtaposition of wisdom to folly, dreams, and imagination stems from her

lifelong focus on education. In this poem, she finds a simple solution in rejecting all fables, but

she found this a difficult value to live by. Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneis were idealized

portrayals of history, so she could enjoy these with a quiet conscience, poring over her maps of

255

ancient Greece to find where Homer’s heroes had travelled until, as Pennington claimed, she

“could give a better account of the wanderings to Ulysses and Æneas,” than of the modern

discoverers, and knew Greece better than England, but she was constantly confronted with novels

and plays that offered no such claim to historical or philosophical truth (Memoirs 11). In a letter

to a friend, she complained of “the vile practice of exalting some characters and abusing others,

without any color of truth or justice,” and insisted that telling the true story was more important

than even “the finest genius in the world” (Memoirs 85). Her fear of imagination and the effects

of the uncontrolled fancy may have encouraged her to accept Cave’s suggestion that she translate

Crousaz and show how Pope’s poetic imagination carried him beyond the boundary of Christian

thought. The desire to combat this focus on imagination with reasoned wisdom certainly played a

large part in her decision to translate Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le Dame.

Sir Isaac Newton’s PHILOSOPHY Explained for the Use of the LADIES, Carter’s second

translation, written shortly after her translation of Crousaz, is an educational treatise, but, as

Mirella Agorni explains, close reading of its source material “reveals that the appeal to ladies

was in fact only a decorative element in the structure of the original work” and that Algarotti

used education as “a pretext for denouncing the static nature of Italian culture.”513

Carter,

uninterested in Italian cultural criticism as a tool to learn about Italy, found Algarotti’s praise of

the English system congenial to her own beliefs but disagreed with his statements about Italian

culture, shifting his meaning to reify her own preconceptions about the country. Where his

introduction calls for “il Secolo delle cose venga una volta anco per noi” (the century of true

things [to come] some time also for us), she translates this as “let the Age of Realities once more

513

Mirella Agorni, Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: Women, Translation and Travel Writing 1739-1797

(Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2002), 72, 74.

256

arise among us,” recalling her favourite classical authors and rejecting Algarotti’s implication

that Italy had not yet enjoyed an age of reality.514

She is not interested in Algarotti’s view of

modern Italy as backward, but instead wishes to present Italy as more forward-thinking than

England, offering scientific education and enlightenment to women as well as to men.

Similarly, Carter rejects Algarotti’s hints that his book is intended for men rather than

women. Algarotti’s narrator uses a liberal, rakish style whose erotic allusions troubled Carter’s

view of proper educational material. In order to create a usefully educational work, which could

teach women philosophy without exposing them to impropriety, she needed to remove passages

which, as Agorni shows, put women in their “traditional position” as objects.515

She removes the

most egregious of the erotic references to women’s bodies and alters the remaining text to

emphasize Enlightenment ideas of reason and sensibility. Thus when Algarotti uses a blind

sculptor to demonstrate the importance of using the senses to understand reality, Carter not only

cuts out Algarotti’s mocking remark that the sculpture would have preferred to make portraits

that included women’s busts as well as their head, she changes his “uno scultore, che benché

cieco scolpiva però palpando” (a sculptor who, although blind, sculpted through touching) the

body he was to recreate to “yet, by help of his Feeling made” recognizable sculptures (Algarotti

I.153).516

Her change removes the gross physicality of “palpando,” in order to apply the lesson to

a greater variety of tasks. Using the neutral words “Feeling” and “made,” Carter expands on the

initial lesson, encouraging students of words and of painting to also use more than one sense in

their rendering of likeness.

514

Francesco Algarotti, Il Newtonianismo per le Dame Ovvero Dialoghi Sopra la Luce e i Colori (Naples, 1737), xi;

Elizabeth Carter, Sir Isaac Newton’s PHILOSOPHY Explain’d for the Use of the LADIES (London, 1739), I.xvi.

Cited as Algarotti. 515

Agorni, Translating Italy, 78. 516

Algarotti, Newtonianismo, 94.

257

She continues this process, both removing sexual imagery and increasing the scientific

rigour of her text, throughout the translation. In discussing how women understand the world,

she describes them as preferring to “perceive than understand,” rendering Algarotti’s “sentire”

(to feel) as “perceive” in order to give women more scope for scientific understanding (Algarotti

I.v).517

This type of increased focus on science rather than sexuality is especially evident in a

passage about microscopes where Algarotti refers to “Un certo umore, in cui è riposte l’origine

de’ vivente, e per cui si rinovella tutto dì dolcemente la Natura,” (A certain humour, in which

resides the origins of life, which renews itself through this in the sweetness of Nature) as an

example of the wonders which microscopes can explore.518

Although this reference to sperm is

indirect and quite tame by modern standards, Carter replaces the whole passage with a discussion

of philosophy, discovery, and its uses. “The Microscope,” she says, “is the Compass of

Philosophy,” but while the Compass has been used to destroy the things that it finds, the

Microscope furthers “the Discovery of new Worlds” without encouraging greed or destruction.

The new worlds that the Microscope reveals, she continues, show that “all Art and Curiosity”

can be aroused and satisfied by something as small as a grain of sand (Algarotti I.176, 177).

Carter’s additions here, as in her translation of Crousaz, encourage a more holistic

worldview, asking readers to apply the lessons that they learn from the science of optics to other

sciences and philosophies. Her discussion of “how little a Compass” of space and material is

needed to inspire and encourage scientific inquiry creates a subtle reference to and rebuke of

other female scholars who complained of the limited scope for learning. If even a “Grain of

Sand” provides enough scope for all the world’s sciences, then her readers have no excuse for

517

Carter, Newton’s PHILOSOPHY, I.xiv; Algarotti, Newtonianismo, v. 518

Algarotti, Newtonianismo, 109.

258

failing to learn and profit by nature and by the many books available for them (Algarotti I.177).

She argues with Algarotti, in one of her few critical notes on the text, when he criticises classical

writers, declaring that “the greater part of those, who are acquainted with the Character of

Socrates, will think Signor Algarotti has passed too severe a Censure,” in believing that he and

the other Greek philosophers tried to stamp out rather than improve philosophy of a kind that

Christians can approve (Algarotti I.22).

Carter’s approbation of science appears in her poem to Miss Montagu in which she

reminisces about the time they spent together, claiming that those hours will last for ever because

they were spent “in Life’s great Task” and saved “from the Waste of Time” not by religious

meditations or domestic duties but by “Science.” Although she never specifies what type of

“Improvement” this science is meant to create or even whether she is speaking of the physical

sciences, of philosophy, or even of the gaining of knowledge, Carter’s poem shows that learning

is an important part of women’s lives. Learning, she claims, both improves the mind and aids

religion, and she declares that the hours they spent in study “shall fly to Heav’n, / And claim the

Promise of eternal Years” (Poems 74-5). Her belief that studying science improves the mind is

visible in the introduction to Algarotti’s text, where she translates his “a moda di coltivarsi lo

spirito” (a fashion of cultivating the spirit) to refer to her favourite subject, the “Mind.”519

At the

same time she enlarges the opportunities for learning, assuring her readers that philosophy is not

only, as Algarotti suggests, a pastime for the “Tolette delle Dame” (toilets of the ladies) but also

for their “Circles” and places of discussion (Algarotti I.ii).520

Because she herself was a copious

letter-writer and found great enjoyment in being part of a group of educated women with whom

519

Algarotti, Newtonianismo, x. 520

Carter, Newton’s PHILOSOPHY, I.ii; Algarotti, Newtonianismo, iii.

259

she could discuss politics, literature, and philosophy, she alters Algarotti’s text so as to

encourage other women to find similar circles of learned women.

Wishing to make philosophy attractive, Carter strengthens Algarotti’s declaration that

“Nè cognizioni, nè piaceri a noi mancheranno purché buon uso di que sensi facciamo” (We miss

neither knowledge nor pleasures as long as we make good use of the senses).521

While the

original suggests that the senses can offer pleasures additional to those of common life, Carter’s

translation speaks of being “destitute of either Knowledge or Pleasure” without the philosophy

which teaches how to “make a good Use of the Senses” in learning more about the world

(Algarotti II.246). She feels more strongly than Algarotti the importance of philosophy and the

negative consequences attendant on neglecting to spend one’s time and senses to good

advantage.

In both her translation of Epictetus and her “Remarks on the Athanasian Creed,” Carter

shows her belief in the primacy of reason. Her opening to the “Remarks,” in which she declares

that her goal is to understand how to interpret the Creed “consistently with the principles and

deduction of reason” shows her belief that religion must be conformable to reason (“Remarks”

Appendix 1). At the same time, she condemns Jean Jacques Rousseau for expecting “that every

thing is to give way to his reason” and for rejecting “all authority, human and divine, unless he is

able to account for every thing by his own faculties.”522

This willful refusal of authority, she

declares, “will soon reduce his mind to a state of confusion, error, and extravagance” which more

reasonable people will avoid by careful study of the scriptures.523

While she insists that no

521

Algarotti, Newtonianismo, 299. 522

Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 180. 523

Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 180.

260

“necessary Doctrine of Scripture” can be beyond the power of the common man’s reason, she

bows to the primacy of the Bible and allows a need for authority (“Remarks” Appendix 24).

The original poem that opens both her first published book of poetry and her last, “In

Diem Natalem” (On the day of birth), shows how she sees reason in relation to religious

devotion. This poem appears in English in the books that she published, but Pennington includes

a Latin version of the poem in his Memoirs, showing that here as elsewhere in her life, Carter

worked in two languages at once although she refrained from publishing the Latin version

herself. Instead, she publishes the piece in English so that her lesson about how best to serve God

may be clearly understood by her readers. After praising God for creating her, Carter asks him to

“Increase my Faith, and rectify my Mind,” connecting faith and reason as two of the most

important ways to show her love for God. When she speaks of her need for guidance, she does

not mention virtue or morals, but asks that God “point [her feet’s] Motions to the Paths of

Truth.” In her image of the soul on the path to God, it is imperative to “My Reason strengthen,

and my Passions still” so that she can follow the paths of truth that will lead her to her heavenly

reward (Poems 2-3). In her “Ode to Wisdom,” she calls God the “Supreme, all-perfect Mind,”

from whom all the “Force” of wisdom and “intellectual Light” is derived (Poems 89). This image

of God as a mind is echoed by her use of the mind, in other poems, where most writers would

talk about the soul.

By connecting the mind to the Christian notion of the eternal soul, which is the most

important part of the human being, Carter can discuss the exercise of the mind as the most

important duty of humankind. This connection between religion and the mind, which Carter

holds in common with many religious texts of the period, especially dissenting texts that used

reason and biblical exposition to argue against established beliefs, informs her relationships with

261

other writers and her willingness to engage in intellectual debate. Although she does not

explicitly comment on the argument of Crousaz’ An Examination of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man,

her translation shows a delicate balance between her firm intellectual and religious support for

Pope’s poetry and her respect for the orthodoxy and authority of Crousaz. Her respect for Pope is

particularly evident in synergy between the comments, which point to places in Pope’s text

where he answers Crousaz’ objections, and the close translation of the original, which leaves

Crousaz’ argument intact, demonstrating the rational philosophy which Crousaz supports.

Like many works by well-connected authors, the completed translation owed debts to

many scholars. Carter certainly worked more independently than Pope did in his Homeric

translations. She did not, as both Pope and Dryden did, rely on other writers to translate

important secondary or even primary documents. But like these authors, Carter sent her

translations to literary friends or connections for correction and revision. She sent her Epictetus

to the Bishop of Oxford to receive his corrections, and even allowed Lord Bath to write the

dedication to himself that prefixes her Poems on Several Occasions (Memoirs 127, 160-1). In

light of this, it is likely that she accepted corrections to her Examination from Johnson, a great

friend of hers at the time of its writing and one whose comments and help with her translation

she mentions in letters to her father.

Johnson may also have helped her to write the footnotes for her Epictetus. While

Pennington believes the notes to be Carter’s, O M Brack suggests that Johnson supplied the

scanty footnotes to Carter’s translation. Brack’s argument rests on the basis of Cave’s

withdrawing his claim that the book would contain remarks by the translator, of Johnson’s

familiarity with the text, and of some stylistic echoes that appear between these and “that used by

262

Johnson in his Commentary” translated from the same author.524

The evidence Brack presents is

not conclusive, and the stylistic similarities that drive his declaration that it was Johnson who

“revised Carter’s manuscript” and “rewrote the text to accommodate the verses” are of uncertain

value.525

Some similarities would be expected due to their friendship and Carter’s declaration

that she has shown the piece to him for criticism and comment. Nevertheless, the infrequency of

the notes and their generally factual rather than critical character suggests that she was not

invested in annotating this text. She may have accepted suggested annotations to supplement her

own observations, as she did in her Epictetus, or even have permitted Johnson, as Brack

suggests, to write annotations in her place (Memoirs 137).

More important than their authorship, the infrequency and minimalism of the annotations

and the lack of a translator’s preface to the work are of a piece with Carter’s translation of

Epictetus, to which she only reluctantly allowed herself to be convinced to add an explanatory

preface. To Talbot, Carter claimed that she believed “none but very good Christians” would read

her translation of Epictetus because she believed that no “infidel” would enjoy “finding himself

obliged to practice the morality of the Gospel without its encouragements and supports” to that

morality (Memoirs 128). This claim shows both her belief that any scholar who understood the

classical authors would become a Christian and her assurance that right reasoning would lead

others to Christian morality, as she believed it had already led the unwitting stoics. Unwilling to

accept arguments from authority herself, she refuses to force a similar argument on her readers.

In part because of this willingness to allow her readers to learn for themselves, her

translation of Crousaz’ Examen de l’essay de Monsieur Pope sur l’homme is remarkably faithful

524

Pennington, Memoirs, 29; O M Brack, Jr. “Samuel Johnson and the Translations of Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s

‘Examen and Commentaire,’” Studies in Bibliography 48 (1995): 81. 525

Brack, “Johnson and the Translations of Jean Pierre de Crousaz,” 84.

263

to her original – much more faithful than the translations of many contemporary authors. While

Carter and Johnson may have agreed that Crousaz was too harsh on Pope, Crousaz’

philosophical ideas strongly appealed to her. Like her, he emphasized the importance of reason

and learning, and one of his main objections to Pope is that Pope does not place enough

importance on the necessity of training the mind. This is especially evident in Crousaz’ lengthy

retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, where he declares that “Adam & Eve avoient été créés

dans innocence, leur esprit étoit sans prévention, & leur cœur sans mauvais penchant, mais leurs

lumiéres étoient bornées, ils n’avoient pas encore eu le tems de les étendre par l’exercices.”526

Adam and Eve were created without sin and, in his view of the story sinned without intending

disobedience, but their “Understanding was bounded,” as Carter translates the passage, and so, as

she believes, they were easily led into sin.527

Crousaz’ belief that even those created without sin or prejudice need to “enlarge [their

minds] by exercise” foreshadows Carter’s claims in “While Clear the Night” about the

importance of allowing “curious Thoughts” and “active Contemplation” the freedom to explore

the world around them (Crousaz 86, Poems 5, 6). In keeping with her belief that “the fashionable

world in general” was a “dreadful school of profligacy,” she presented herself as removed from

it, but in fact, while she may have lived in the country, she had perfect freedom of motion and as

much of society as she cared for.528

Famously declaring that she could not work on her

translation of Epictetus because she had “a dozen shirts to make,”529

Carter enjoyed presenting

herself as a country-woman, safely removed from the pleasures and temptations of the city and

busy with purely domestic duties. But even among the less educated country people, she was

526

Jean-Pierre Crousaz, Examen de l’essay de Monsieur Pope sur l’homme (Lausanne, 1737), 79. 527

Elizabeth Carter, An Examination of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man (London, 1739), 86. Cited as Crousaz. 528

Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 297. 529

Carter, A Series of Letters, II.202.

264

rarely without congenial company and had “often as much Business upon [her] Hands” and “as

good a Title to the Epithet of Gossiping” as anyone in town.530

As her nephew recalls, she “lived

with much hospitality, visited all her neighbours, saw a great deal of tea and dinner company,”

and as she admitted herself, was “much more frequently in society than in solitude.”531

The choice to move from Crousaz’ Examination to Algarotti’s text on Newton rather than

to follow Johnson’s oft-cited suggestion that she translate Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy

confirms Carter’s focus on expanding knowledge in all circles rather than focusing on religious

texts.532

She viewed religion and reason as inseparably linked, so that studying any text would

improve one’s belief in God. Her fellow bluestocking Hannah More was led by her concern for

social stability to declare that women’s sphere is “not in that wider range of distant prospects,

which he who stands on a loftier eminence commands” but in home scenes and charities which

make allowance for her lesser “integral understanding,” “deep and patient thinking,” and “faculty

of comparing, combining, analysing and separating” ideas, which distinguish men, but Carter

disagreed.533

Her priorities are clear in her poem to her father, where the first thing that she finds

to thank him for is not her life, or even her religious instruction, but the “Hand” that guided her

“infant Mind to Science” (Poems 62). This primacy is echoed in the attachment to her will that

Pennington includes in his Memoirs, where she claims to be “indebted to my father for his

kindness and indulgence . . . and especially in the uncommon care and pains he has taken in my

education” (Memoirs 446). More than any of the indulgences and the freedoms that her father

offered her throughout her life, she insists on the importance of the education that he passed on

to her.

530

Carter to Miss Highmore, Some Unpublished Letters, 137. 531

Pennington, Memoirs, 269; Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 242. 532

Brack, “Samuel Johnson and the Translations of Jean Pierre de Crousaz,” 70. 533

Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London, 1799), 27, 28.

265

Although Pennington’s Memoirs claims that “she advised her friends never to read

books” which raised objections to the Scriptures, she felt no such compunction about books

written by heathen philosophers or pieces which offered varying interpretations of the Bible

(Memoirs 13). This is shown by her translation of Epictetus, her own religious pieces, and in her

translation of Crousaz’ Examination, which is primarily concerned to explain and refute the

philosophies of Leibniz and Spinoza. In a letter to Miss Talbot, she wrote that the “Wise and

good men in all ages, who sincerely applied their hearts to the discovery of their duty” must have

reached some success, despite their lack of the “proper authority” and “sufficient

encouragements” which the Christian religion offered.534

Carter believed that, because reason always led to God, therefore all forms of study

which strengthened the reasoning faculties were not only acceptable but praiseworthy. It is, as

she says in her imitation of Horace’s Ode 10, Book II, “wisdom’s precepts” that render a soul

“great,” and to learn these it is necessary to reach for the widest possible education.535

She

worried that “long habit” and lack of attention to educating the mind could make her readers, like

one poor girl she knew, “totally incapable of application, except by such a strictness and

regularity of discipline as cannot, at her age, be exercised by a governess.”536

Although usually

strict in condemning immoral behaviour, she believed that when a person has not “met with any

restraint from a regular education” then even the “very best dispositions of heart are no defence

against” mistaking “a moral appearance” for true morality.537

Their lack of sufficient education

leaves them incapable of maintaining moral discipline.

534

Carter, A Series of Letters II.229. 535

Elizabeth Carter, “Hor. Lib. II. Ode 10,” Gentleman’s Magazine VII (November 1737):692. 536

Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 175. 537

Carter, A Series of Letters, I.82.

266

Carter’s belief in the primacy of mind, thought, and reason and their inability to lead men

away from Godly and moral truth is visible in her presentation of Crousaz. Her title page

emphasizes Crousaz’ titles and authority, showing the international character of his scholarship

and his connections. She calls him a “Member of the Royal Academics of Sciences at Paris and

Bourdeaux; and Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at Lausanne,” highlighting his secular

and scientific studies. Crousaz’ position as a member of the Académie royale gave him authority

to comment on the combination of scientific, philosophical, and religious ideas in Pope’s “Essay

on Man,” but it was his theology that Crousaz most wanted to criticize. Despite this, Carter

emphasized his mathematics and philosophy rather than stressing his position as a rector at

Lausanne or his theological credentials. While she adds to the titles granted to him in the French,

which calls him only a “Membre des Académies Royales” and does not mention his

Professorship at Lausanne, the focus on mathematics and philosophy shows her preoccupation

with reason.538

In her translation, Carter emphasizes the importance of reason and of sharing knowledge.

Crousaz, in his preface, claims that men who think like him “répand avec plaisir ses biens

extérieurs, & on fait part avec encore plus d’empressement de ses biens interieurs,” (give with

pleasure their exterior goods and share with even more eagerness their interior goods).539

Carter

translates this passage as “they distribute with Joy their external Goods and with still greater

Earnestness those of their Mind” (Crousaz vii). Although she closely follows the sense of

Crousaz’ French in this passage, as she does throughout the book, her movement away from the

symmetry of Crousaz’ “biens extérieurs” and “biens intérieurs” highlights the importance of the

538

Crousaz, Examen, title page. 539

Crousaz, Examen, xv.

267

mind to her conception of the world. In the context of the preface, this specification draws

reader’s attention away from the emotional and social enjoyments which Crousaz has been

discussing and toward Carter’s focus on intellectual pursuits.

In order to strengthen this focus on education and reasoned examination, Carter alters

Crousaz’ conclusion on Pope’s first epistle. Unlike Crousaz, who suggests in this text that even

to read a work which suggests un-Christian doctrines can be enough to lead people astray, and

blames Pope for making a text capable of being wrongly interpreted, Carter blames the people

who allow themselves to be led astray by wrong doctrines. Crousaz worriedly insists that the

men who are capable of truth are “capables aussi d’embrasser avec précipitation des opinions

favorables à des penchans qu’il leur est pénible de combattre” (capable also of embracing with

precipitation the opinions favourable to the penchants that it is difficult for them to fight),540

but

Carter changes the implications of this conclusion. Her translation, “capable too of hastily

embracing those opinions which favour the Inclinations they find it troublesome to resist” makes

those who do not fight against their desires more culpable. Instead of the French “pénible,” with

its implications of pain and suffering, she uses “troublesome,” a word which suggests irritation

rather than real difficulty. This focus on the culpability of the unlearned echoes her insistence

throughout her writings that “the stubborn and invincibly prejudiced” remain in “wilful

blindness” that neither the ancient philosophers nor the teachings of the Gospel can penetrate.541

Taken together, the changes that Carter makes to this passage heighten the importance of

study in many different fields. She suggests that it is not only dangerous for men to be without a

breadth of knowledge and study but also that they are responsible for the results of their failure

540

Crousaz, Examen, 103. 541

Carter, “Objections against the New Testament, with Mrs. Carter’s Answers to them,” Memoirs, 583.

268

to make the “attentive Examination” which would save them from being duped by false ideas.

She insists on the importance of a wide range of study, refusing to accept the solution Crousaz

implies, that Pope should only write and men only read things which conform to Christian

doctrine and cannot be misunderstood or misapplied. Carter denies this idea both by establishing

the fault of those who do not educate themselves and by insisting on the neutral “instructing” in

place of Crousaz’ “s’éclairer.” By refusing to limit her studies to a predetermined truth, Carter

opens more opportunity for exploration.

Her work shows her eagerness to learn about different philosophical systems, to find the

ways in which each connects to her own Christian beliefs. In several of her poems, as well as her

responses to Biblical objections, she declares her belief that God’s “watchful Providence” gives

“Divine assistance to secure [the heart] from falsehood,” so that it is impossible that a man who

truly and earnestly seeks the truth should be deceived (Poems 58).542

Although she claims in her

Remarks on the Athanasian Creed that “all Men are not required to be Scholars, and Subtle

Disputants,” she does believe that all knowledge is good and that all writing should be clear

enough to be understood by the common mind (“Remarks” Appendix 25). In a letter to Mrs.

Vesey, she declares that “all truths unnecessary for us to know are involved in uncertainty and

darkness, and the search must end in disappointment and confusion” but that in all “points

essential to our present state and condition, the powers of the understanding are invariably

adequate to its subject” (Memoirs 245). In another letter to Mrs. Montagu, she speculates that it

is only in “countries ignorant of all information” that people can be totally alienated from God.543

542

Carter, “Objections against the New Testament,” 583. 543

Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 354.

269

Because she believes that all of the things which are essential to the mind and to religion

are capable of being understood, Carter sees it as a duty to attain the reasoned education that

creates that understanding. It is this ability to reason that sets the educated man or woman apart

from “vulgar Minds,” she declares in “Written at MIDNIGHT in a THUNDER STORM,” and frees

them from the “fantastic Terrors” that assault the minds of the uninformed (Poems 37). Virtuous

behaviour, she believes, stem from a good education, and when she hears of sexual immorality,

she worries that “there was some great original error in the young lady’s education, for had she

early had right and proper principle [sic] instilled into her mind, she would not, at the age of

eighteen, have disgraced herself and family so completely” but would have known the correct

way to act.544

She warns in “To ___.: On his Design of cutting down a SHADY WALK” against

sacrificing “to sensual Taste, / The nobler Growth of Thought,” encouraging instead

contemplation and study in imitation of Plato, Aristotle, and Virgil (Poems 41). Her belief in the

universal applicability of knowledge is most evidence in her translation of Epictetus, whose stoic

philosophy she believed would help to strengthen religious beliefs.545

Epictetus is not the only

ancient philosopher who Carter found useful. Her poetry is sprinkled with references to “Plato’s

Thought” and “soaring fancy,” and the Aristotelian idea of the Prime Mover or the “first Great

Cause” (Poems 17, 21). In deference to these pre-Christian philosophers, her early teachers, she

refused to follow Crousaz in saying that the study of their writings led men astray. Instead, she

encouraged women to read widely, both in her poetry and through her translations of Crousaz’

theological criticism, Algarotti’s science, and Epictetus’ philosophy.

544

Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 121. 545

Myers, Bluestocking Circle, 160.

270

Cautioning readers about the dangers of education, Carter nevertheless saw these dangers

as present only for minds that are “obstinately set against conviction” and “full of wicked

prejudices.”546

She warns in “While clear the Night” that without the “soft’ning” virtues of a

generous heart and a willingness to listen to others, “Science turns Pride, and Wit a common

Foe” (Poems 7). These social virtues help men to avoid bias and conceit and prevent them from

losing sight of important things, as they might if they focus only on study. In the “Morn of

Reason, and the Prime of Thought,” her readers are to cultivate their minds, but she warns in “To

___. On a WATCH” against forgetting that their ultimate aim should always be to improve “the

undecaying Soul” through “Integrity of Heart” and refusal to boast in foolish things (Poems 30,

31). Philosophy led her to a greater belief in God, and did the same for her friends but, she

admits, this is only true for a “mind undisturbed by passion, and unbiased by prejudice,” while

no matter how “speculative and philosophical” a man is, if his mind is prejudiced, vain, or

dissolute, his learning will only tend toward that which will justify his own actions (Memoirs

293).

Believing that anyone who is open to truth will find it, and that reading the works of past

philosophers is the best way to come to God, Carter places education first, both figuratively and,

in one translated paragraph, literally. When Crousaz discusses the most important factors in

shaping a man’s character, Carter rearranges his paragraph to focus on the primacy of education.

The original began by declaring that “Le temperement a moins de part aux inclinations

dominantes que l’education,” but Carter opens her paragraph with “EDUCATION,” putting first the

part of a man’s life and character which she considers to be of primary importance.547

Although

546

Carter, “Objections against the New Testament,” 577. 547

Carter, Examination of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man, 119; Crousaz, Examen, 110.

271

it is impossible to be certain that typographical choices are Carter’s rather than her publisher’s,

the small capitals, inconsistently applied to the first word of many of the paragraphs in the

second epistle but consistently used for proper names in the first, lend this word additional

impact on the printed page. Carter’s rearrangements and revisions alter Crousaz’ argument so

that it appears that Crousaz supports her view of education. This alteration takes advantage of the

way that translation adds authority by adding the weight of tradition to individual interpretation.

By using translation to create a sense of authority, Carter acts out the tenets of her

educational beliefs. Because she sees learning as rooted in classical and philosophical authority,

translation is an ideal method of teaching. Translation connects her to respected figures and gives

her the space to make her own judgements, alterations, and suggestions about what these figures

say. By coming to her public through the medium of translation and to print through the medium

of the manuscript, she follows in print the same strategy that she used in public by coming to

London only to visit her friends. She did not, as many still think, actually isolate herself, but she

gained the appearance of isolation. She was not, as some argue, primarily a feminist author but

she used the dialogue of femininity to her own advantage, stretching the limits of what women

could and should do not only for herself but for her imitators. She was not bound by social

convention, nor did she submit blindly to either secular or religious authority, but she used her

connections to figures of authority to her own advantage in order to argue with social narratives

and conventions. Working through translation gave Carter the ability to simultaneously publicize

her ideas and modestly disclaim her ownership. By apparently submitting to the authority of her

source, Carter invented a community of moralists, scholars, and educators for whom she could

speak and whose voices she could use, subjugating masculine voices to her own while appearing

to accept her own subjugation.

272

Conclusion

When John Dryden writes of “my meanness” which has “traduced” the “full strength and

vigour” of Virgil’s Georgics, he sounds very different from Alexander Pope, who insists that

readers will prefer his “uniform and bounded walk of art” to the Iliad’s “wild paradise.”548

Rejecting both Dryden’s praise and Pope’s divisions, Eliza Haywood insists that her goal is to

equal the authors she translates. 549

Elizabeth Carter takes a different approach entirely by

refusing to write prefaces to any of her translations except her Epictetus, where she insists that

she has been “strictly literal,” that her translation still has “great faults,” and that she expects her

readers to look for the “intrinsic Beauty and Excellency in moral Goodness” which her

translation displays rather than at her literary abilities.550

Claiming different priorities and priding themselves on different qualities, these authors

nevertheless share important approaches to translation. While many authors focused either on

one or the other, these four writers created both original and translated works throughout their

careers, offering an important opportunity to examine the unique role translation played in their

self-creation and self-presentation. Whether they viewed translation as the kind of “pleasing” fit

or “Paroxism” that Dryden describes in the preface to Sylvae, or as menial drudgery, as Pope

continually describes the work in his private letters, each author used translation to perform self-

promotion.551

Each of them published their most eminent translation by subscription, a form

548

John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, H. T. Swedenburg, Alan Roper, et al. (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956-90), V.137; Alexander Pope, Poems of Alexander Pope,

ed. John Butt, Maynard Mack, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939-67), VII.3. 549

Eliza Haywood, La Belle Assemblée (London, 1724), ix. 550

Elizabeth Carter, Works of Epictetus (London, 1758), xxxiii-iv; xvi. 551

Dryden, Works, III.3.

273

which both uses an author’s reputation to create an audience for a work and gambles that

reputation on the work’s reception. Each writer highlighted the similarities and differences

between their work and that of their source author in order to create relationships of affinity that

tied them to an existing canon or group.

For Dryden, translation offered a space where he could compare himself favorably to

canonical authors. In the preface to his Fables, Dryden claims he “may say without vanity” that

few poets can create “the same turn of verse” as their original, thus proclaiming superiority to

others in the same breath as he claims equality with his source.552

In order to encourage

comparisons, Dryden created and promoted a style which incorporated intentionally Latinate

words and elements. This played an important part in Dryden’s self-presentation as part of an

elite group which consisted of both producers and consumers of literature and which he

addressed in and through his translations and their prefaces. Dryden used this readership to

extend his literary genealogy, using the combination of original and translated material in his

poetic Miscellany volumes to establish a line of descent from the glories of the classical ages to

Chaucer, who Dryden saw as the father of English verse at “the Beginning of our Language,” to

himself, as the improver and polisher of modern poetry, giving “his Thoughts their true

Lustre.”553

It was this position as a reformer, through translating and improving “imperfect”

works, through introducing new and beautiful works into the English language, and through

supporting future generations of poets, that Dryden hoped to establish his name and to position

himself in literary history.554

552

Dryden, Works, VII.24. 553

Dryden, Works, VII.30. 554

Dryden, Works, VII.2.

274

Compared to Dryden, Pope demonstrates a conflicted and often hostile relationship with

his sources and other writers. Recognizing that his strength lay in his editorial capabilities, Pope

nevertheless longed for the “great and fruitful” originality of being, like Homer, the first to write

about plots, characters, and ideas.555

Envious and striving to achieve what he portrayed as a

virile, masculine invention, Pope simultaneously celebrates and deprecates originality, using

translation as a stepping-stone to publicity as Dryden did but refusing the attitude of

uncomplicated admiration which Dryden performed. Pope demands where Dryden suggests, and

his quasi-autobiographical adaptation of Horace insists on Pope’s superiority to Horace’s “sly,

polite, insinuating style.”556

Pope never escaped the reliance on the ideas and writing of other authors that was both

his greatest strength and his final enemy, but while he struggled to differentiate himself and his

ideas from his classical background and court friends, Haywood encourages conflation between

herself and the authors she translates. She often structures advertisements and prefaces to stress

the aristocratic nature of her sources, assuring her upper-class readers and the recipients of her

dedications in The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone that as she “need not apologize for the Author,”

of the work, she as its translator should also be accepted.557

When Haywood reinvented her

career late in life, she changed many elements of her style, but maintained her primary moral and

proto-feminist concerns. She also continued to present herself and her heroines as members of or

in dialogue with the English and French court, a position which is most evident in her translation

The Virtuous Villager where Haywood insists that the book really is the memoir of “a very

GREAT LADY at the Court of France,” the main character in the story, and not merely an

555

Pope, Poems, VII.3. 556

Pope, Poems, IV.298. 557

Eliza Haywood, The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone (London, 1725), vii.

275

invention. Haywood then declares that she is in possession of “the real Manuscript of the

Marchioness.” She traces the manuscript through a list of aristocratic personages to the “English

Lady of Quality” who gave “Permission to send it over to a Person,” which Haywood leaves her

readers to infer is meant to be herself, “who she is pleased to think qualified to do it justice.”558

This imagined history connecting Haywood, through her abilities as a translator, to the

aristocracy of both England and France, shows how she used her texts to create the illusion of

belonging to a class which was, physically and financially, out of her reach.

Morality and femininity were central to Carter’s use of translation to make classical

learning an acceptable pastime for respectable women. Rather than choosing authors whose

careers or reputations she wished to identify herself with, Carter chooses authors who wrote

philosophical texts and whose works placed her, as the translator, clearly within the world of

higher learning. Avoiding the self-referential paratexts that Pope, Dryden, and Haywood used to

establish their literary bona fides, Carter relies on the reputation she established in her letters, her

poems, and her choice of source material to support her claims to respectability. Combined with

her apparently unassuming competence, her reputation for feminine, Christian, and socially

acceptable scholarship allowed her to use her remarkable linguistic abilities to promote female

learning.

While these authors used translation in order to promote and popularize their original

ideas, it is difficult to claim that they are truly representative of the average eighteenth-century

writer. Each created and maintained a reputation as an important figure in the literary world.

Haywood’s marginalized position was predetermined by her class and gender, Carter’s writing

was circumscribed by her desire to maintain the role of a good daughter and housewife, and Pope

558

Eliza Haywood, The Virtuous Villager (London, 1742), ii, vii, ix.

276

and Dryden were restricted by religious and political affiliations, but each was a well-known

figure whose writing provided them with a form of monetary success. Carter, who used

translation to move from the coterie world of anonymous and manuscript circulation to a wider,

more public arena, offers a link to another set of translators: those whose career began with,

rather than moved toward, translation. The primacy of translation to her public persona, in

contrast to the other authors in this study, who used translation to support a career based

primarily on original material, suggests several further avenues for scholarly exploration.

Further studies could examine other authors of both original literature and translations,

such as Samuel Johnson, who happily abandoned early attempts at translation to make a living as

a literary critic, and Tobias Smollett, who hid or downplayed the authorship of his translations

throughout his life, using them, unlike the four authors studied here, primarily for monetary gain.

Other possible avenues for future research include writers who are remembered only for their

translation, such as Charles Jervas, the painter whose posthumous edition of Don Quixote

became a standard eighteenth-century text. His translation, like his friend Pope’s Odyssey and

Iliad, insists on finding and enhancing “pious reflections and ejaculations.”559

Often dismissed

by readers as a posthumous and potentially unplanned publication, I believe that closer attention

to the translator’s preface will demonstrate Jervas’ desire to join, and indeed to supersede, the

extensive list of translators that he gives the reader. Finally, although space constraints have

encouraged this study to focus on how translations affected reputation and positioning within a

marketplace, an underlying theme of this study has been the belief that translation should be

studied as a creative form in its own right. Rather than seeing translations only or primarily as

559

Charles “Jarvis,” The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha (London, 1747),

vi.

277

influencing authors’ original literature, this study insists on viewing them as an essential part of

an author’s canon and encourages close attention to their creativity, style, and literary qualities.

This project will necessarily encourage the continual expansion of the canon to include writers

such as Jervas, who currently appears in bibliographies of Cervantes and in art-historical

scholarship but is not considered an important literary figure, and broaden our understanding of

canonical figures such as Johnson and Smollett.

Translation Strategies

For the authors in this study, beginning with original work signalled their creative powers

and the modern relevance of their literary ambitions. Both Dryden and Pope were household

names by the time they began their major translations, and Carter had established a supportive

coterie audience. Haywood is the only one of these authors to publish a book-length translation

without first establishing a stable social position, and she suffered for it, forced to lower the

intended price of her Letters from a Lady of Quality and to sell her subsequent novels at a still

lower price. Samuel Johnson fell into the same pattern of over-ambition in his initial

publications, attempting to break into publishing with a translation of Jerónimo Lobo’s Voyage

to Abyssinia. His 1738 formal imitation, London, shows a second, and more ambitious attempt to

use translation to break into the literary market, imitating a respected classical author rather than

a modern writer and using a form that was enormously popular at the time. Not only did Pope’s

“Epilogue to the Satires,” the final piece of his imitations of Horace, appear on the same day as

Johnson’s London, James Boswell points out that “Boileau had imitated the same satire” and

“Oldham had also imitated it.” These versions, both published in the latter half of the previous

278

century, show both the work’s enduring value and its contemporary currency.560

Johnson’s

intent, as Baird explains, was to use London to gain a literary foothold which he intended to

capitalize on with a translation of Paolo Sarpi’s 1619 History of the Council of Trent. This he

proposed to his bookseller, advertised as an impressive subscription volume “on a large paper, in

three volumes, at the price of three guineas,” and abandoned only in the face of strong

opposition. 561

Johnson appears to have been attached to this project, engaging in what Boswell

describes as “light skirmishes” with another would-be translator before admitting defeat and

retiring from London in despair.

Johnson’s attempt to catapult himself to literary success failed, but the fact that two of his

initial attempts used translation to bring him to public notice demonstrates an awareness of its

importance to eighteenth-century authors. William Diaper’s version of Oppian’s Halieutica, the

Halieuticks, which was interrupted by his early death, appears to follow a similar pattern. Diaper

first came on the literary world with a book of original poetry: Nereides, or, Sea-Eclogues. This

book and his two subsequent books of original poetry brought him to the attention of Jonathan

Swift, and Diaper dedicated a 1715 imitation of Horace to Swift in thanks. From there, he turned

to translation in an attempt to capitalize on the attention of Swift and his circle and to cement his

reputation. Although he died before the book could be published, Diaper follows the same

progression as Johnson’s early career, moving from original work to imitation and finally to

classical translation.562

Joseph Addison similarly, as the first chapter shows, was brought to

public attention by Dryden’s praise and support of his translation.

560

James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. C. B. Tinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 86. 561

John Baird, “Boswell Exploded and the Secret History of the Publication of Johnson’s London Finally Revealed,”

Paper presented at CSECS Secrets and Surveillance, Kingston, Ontario, October 2016; Boswell, Life of Johnson,

98. 562

Richard Greene, “Diaper, William (1685–1717),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G.

279

Other authors, such as Aaron Hill and Peter Motteux discovered the darker side of

translation’s attention-getting nature. Hill, despite his wide range of plays, poems, and essays,

was known, as Arthur Murphy explains, “chiefly by his translation of the Zaire and Alzire of

Voltaire.”563

Similarly, although, as Shaun Regan explains, Motteux saw his translation as part of

a respectable, protestant discourse and indeed provided “suggestions for how a modern

readership might engage with Rabelais's text without compromising its own literary and cultural

values,” he suffered by being identified primarily with his “vulgar” translation of Rabelais.564

Translation could help authors to establish themselves with the public, but it could also be

dangerous.

The Trap of Translation

For women, translation could be even more important, and even more dangerous, than it

was for men. While translation was, as Mirella Agorni declares, “one of the few genres open to

women in the early modern period” it was also limiting, forcing them to work within the

confines of another author’s thoughts and, as Sherry Simon claims, condemning them “to the

margins of discourse.”565

One aspect of this study has been to examine ways in which authors

used translation creatively, subverting or contradicting the meanings and intentions of their

source’s author. Unless the original was known to the audience, however, these creative

Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004).

563 Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, Esq. (London, 1801), 106.

564 Shaun Regan, “Translating Rabelais: Sterne, Motteux, and the Culture of Politeness,” Translation and Literature

10.2 (2001): 176; Stephen Ahern, “Prose Fiction: Excluding Romance,” in The Oxford History of Literary

Translation in English ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005-11),

III.329. 565

Mirella Agorni, Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: Women, Translation and Travel Writing 1739-1797

(Northampton: St. Jerome Publishing, 2002), 45; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the

Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 46.

280

subversions would not be attributed to the translator’s creative talents. The primary difficulty

with using translation as a source of reputation was the ease with which translators could be

identified with their source authors. For this reason, many of the paratexts which this study

examines focus on the differences between translation and original, highlighting the

improvements authors have made and the importance of the translator in editing a work for a

new audience and in conveying emotion and style. For translators who worked with modern

languages rather than the highly-valued classical translations, there was often little paratextual

space available. While dedications were common, and provided a space for translators to discuss

their own work under the pretext of praising their dedicatee, few modern translations include the

kind of lengthy introduction that Dryden and Pope used.

Publishers hesitated to commit expensive paper and labour to producing paratextual

material that would directly contribute neither to the sale nor the profits of the book. Haywood’s

“Discourse Concerning Writings of this Nature,” at the end of her Letters from a Lady of Quality

to a Chevalier, offers an example of how authors and publishers justified exceptions to this rule.

This long discourse on letter-writing, female authors, and novels appears in the newspaper

advertisements as a form of essay, suggesting to prospective customers that they will receive two

products, a novel and an essay, for the price of one book.566

While a high-quality production,

however, including a list of subscribers that stretches over eight pages, the Letters only allows

Haywood four pages for her “Preface,” in which she defends her translation and insists on the

creative liberties that she has taken with the text.567

566

Patrick Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 103. 567

Eliza Haywood, Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (London, 1721), ii-xiv.

281

This four-page preface is more than many modern-language translations received and the

majority of Haywood’s translations include no prefatory material beyond their dedication. This

lack of space was of minimal importance to original works but offered considerable restrictions

to translators, for whom prefatory matter was the only space in which their own ideas could be

conveyed directly to the reader. This restricted the ways in which authors could shape readers’

understandings of the text, and encouraged readers to identify the translator with the author of

the source texts, an identification which creates an important challenge to the image of

translation as a reputation-building device that I have constructed in this project, and which must

be taken into account when reading translations as authorial projections.

Even translations that did include lengthy paratexts and which did clearly separate

original author and translator posed difficulties for writers. The most visible of these difficulties

is the stereotype of the Grub Street hack. The Grub Street stereotype originated in a proliferation

of writers and publishers working on a literal Grub Street who, as Brean Hammond claims,

established a “primordially generated” form of literary energy by “developing forms that could

succeed in the literary market-place.”568

This idea of a group of professional authors unsupported

by aristocratic patronage offered a threat to the power of the aristocracy and the dominance of

existing literary figures, and professional authors soon found themselves operating under the

label of the Grub Street Hack. The ideological Grub Street writer, whether English or French, is

stuck on Grub Street, unable to gain the patronage he needs to move to a better-class

neighborhood, and unable to take advantage of the opportunities offered by “the republic of

letters.”569

Although, as Pat Rogers explores, Grub Street itself was in a historically poor

568

Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670-1740: 'hackney for bread' (Oxford:

Clarendon, 1997). 569

Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),

282

neighborhood, the negative image of the Grub Street hack, which first appeared in the 1640s, is

based more on stereotypes than on the actual indigence of writers.570

Scholars like Elizabeth

Eisenstein argue that there were many lucrative options for these writers, that many of the writers

associated with Grub Street were financially secure, and that some even had court connections,

but the negative stereotype which existed during the eighteenth century encouraged writers to

dissociate themselves from Grub Street and the implications of writing on demand for a

bookseller.571

The prefaces of many modern-language translators focus on defending themselves

against this stereotype, often accepting the very biases they attempt to combat by working to

establish their own cases as exceptional.572

Tobias Smollett offers one example of the lengths to which authors would go in order to

avoid the taint of Grub Street. Smollett began his career in prose fiction with a translation of The

Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, but published this secretly, needing the money it brought

him but unwilling to deal with the negative ramifications of writing what he called a

“Bookseller’s Job.”573

He only admitted his authorship, after a hugely popular first print run,

giving his identity in the second edition as “the author of Roderick Random,” thereby subsuming

his translations under his original works.574

Smollett’s example raises the problem of how the actual or perceived audience of a work

might affect the reputation of a writer or translation. Future research is needed to determine

23.

570 Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1972), 30; Paula McDowell, The

Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730 (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1998), 10. 571

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis

XIV to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 142-156. 572

Agorni, Translating Italy, 46-49. 573

O. M. Brack, Jr. and Leslie A. Chilton, introduction to The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, by Tobias

Smollett (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), xvii. 574

Brack and Chilton, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, xvii-xix.

283

whether translation becomes, as Smollett appears to fear, less viable as a reputation-building

strategy as the source moves from classical to modern authors and the target audience shifts from

the upper to the middle classes, and what role gender played in this distinction. This project has

looked only at one writer who wrote for a popular audience, and Haywood was continually

trying to move up the social scale, which problematizes any use of her career to examine popular

writing aimed at a middling or lower-class audience. Indeed, although Haywood is often

considered in terms of lower-class consumption, personalized by Ann Lang, commonly

identified as a “servant-girl” based on her ownership of Haywood’s books, we have, as Christine

Blouch argues, very little direct evidence regarding Haywood’s readership.575

Both Haywood

and Dryden were popular across a broad social spectrum, and both writers worked to establish a

perception that they were patronized by an upper-class audience.

Translation helped Haywood and Dryden to connect themselves to the audience and the

social circles they wished to be associated with, and Smollett could have followed the same path

that Haywood did. Gil Blas of Santillane was written by Alain-René Lesage, whose decidedly

middle-class origins had not prevented him from gaining patronage and an admiring audience in

the French court.576

In this situation, Haywood would likely have stressed the work’s audience

while downplaying the status of the author, but Smollett absented himself entirely from the

book’s publication and promotion. He feared the negative implications of being hired by a

bookseller to write, and this fear outweighed the potential for gaining a reputation as a writer and

translator.

575

Christine Blouch, “‘ What Ann Lang Read’: Eliza Haywood and Her Readers,” in The Passionate Fictions of

Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work, ed. Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington:

University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 300-325. 576

Roger Laufer, Lesage: ou, Le Métier de Romancier (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 15-17.

284

Smollett’s fear, expressed in his description of translation from both modern and classical

sources as “a mere drug” written by authors in “the Grub Street manner” and read only by

“chairmen, draymen, hackney-coachmen, footmen, and servant maids,” is exaggerated, but it is

also supported by contemporary descriptions.577

Elizabeth Griffith, a prolific translator of the

1770s, called Grub Street translators “Hackneys,” who “are paid so much per sheet for

translating” and create “horrid Stuff” which more conscientious translators like herself were

unable to compete with because “there are but Few People nice enough to go to the Expence of a

good Edition, after having paid for a bad one.”578

Henry Fielding is even harsher in his depiction

of hack translators in The Author’s Farce, where his translator declares that “I understand no

language but my own,” having translated Virgil by reading Dryden’s English translation, and

being prepared “to translate books out of all languages, especially French, that were never

printed in any language whatsoever,” to invent as much as translate and steal as much as write.579

These examples suggest that for gentlefolk with literary pretensions writing for money

was perceived as shameful, but many women took the opposite course in defending themselves

against the stereotype of the Grub Street Hack. Indeed, some women used their need for money

as an excuse for taking the immodest step of publication. In her translation of the Death of Abel,

for example, Mary Collyer claims to have “taken up the pen” to support her family, a common

prefatory conceit which presented writing as a feminine, and even domestic, occupation.580

These claims, now often dismissed as a way for women to excuse their entry into a masculine

realm by reference to their accepted feminine duties, must be re-examined in light of the culture

577

Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. James G. Basker, Paul-Gabriel Boucé, Nicole A. Seary,

and O. M. Brack, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 327. 578

Elizabeth Griffith, A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances (London, 1789), IV.30. 579

Henry Fielding, Plays, ed. Thomas Lockwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004-2014), I.248-9. 580

Mary Collyer, The Death of Abel (London, 1761), iv.

285

of professional authorship led by Samuel Johnson, whose famous praise of his bookseller as the

“Maecenas” of his age was part of a rebellion against the patronage system.581

After establishing

himself as London’s foremost critic and arbiter of good taste, Johnson created what Lawrence

Lipking calls a “new authorial identity” which reified the commercial status of authorship.582

If

Johnson’s assertion that he can fund his lifestyle with his writing is a claim of individual power,

then the claim of these women that they have taken the place of the primary breadwinner must

also be closely examined. These claims, like Johnson’s glorification of professional authorship,

subvert the denigrating narrative of translator as plebeian worker, using that image of translation

as a job in order to claim the power and position of the worker and to showcase their own

position within the family.

Translation, then, could be used to build a literary reputation, but it is also implicated in

literary failure and stereotypical images of eighteenth-century translators include both cultural

icons like Pope and Dryden and the starving Grub Street hack. By examining the many ways in

which both men and women used translation, and especially by expanding the focus of our

studies from authors who wrote both translation and original work to include authors who never

wrote original material, such as Charles Jervas, we will discover more about how translation

worked in the literary marketplace and why someone like Jervas, whose friendship with Pope

would have familiarized him with the pitfalls of literary production, would have viewed

translation as both desirable and within his reach, or at least, worth trying for after his death,

when the publication was unlikely to harm him. Translation was not an easy route to fame.

Translators had to fight the tendency to identify the translator with the original author, and they

581

Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1200; Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 297, note 2. 582

Lawrence Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 109.

286

had to establish their literary focus, showing that they cared about their production and were not

churning out substandard material in an attempt to win fame and money. Yet many writers,

particularly women, still used translation in order to create and establish a reputation, creating

new discourses around translation as a hobby, a profession, and a genre.

Reputation consists of many factors, and no one strategy serves all writers. Some writers

fail to achieve literary fame because they do not have the literary ability to command

recognition. Others fail due to lack of funds, or lack or cultural capital, or public scandals that

destroy their reputation, and Adam Rounce, who argues that “literary failure is a necessary

concomitant to our understanding of artistic success,” demonstrates the provocative possibilities

opened by the study various styles and “types” of failure.583

The vast majority of writers never

have a chance to reach the status which these four authors attained. But for those authors with the

talent, the drive, and the connections to succeed in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace,

translation was an important strategy for building a reputation, a source of creative energy, and a

method of forging connections, implying relationships, and demanding equality with other

literary figures.

583

Adam Rounce, Fame and Failure 1720–1800: The Unfulfilled Literary Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2013), 8; 3.

287

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