The Restoration and the 18th Century :

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1 The Restoration and the 18th Century : HISTORY OF THE PERIOD. The England to which Charles Stuart returned in 1660 was a nation divided against itself, exhausted by twenty years of civil wars and revolution. Early in Charles s reign, the people were visited by two frightful calamities that seemed to the superstitious to be the work of a divine Providence outraged by rebellion and regicide: the plague of 1665, carried off over seventy thousand souls in London alone, and in September 1666, a fire that raged for four days destroyed a large part of the City (more than thirteen thousand houses), leaving about two-thirds of the population homeless. Yet the nation rose from its ashes, in the century that followed, to become an empire. The Glorious Revolution of established a rule of law, and the Act of Union of 1707, a political alliance, under which England was transformed into Great Britain in fact as well as name a large country to which people of widely differing backgrounds and origins felt they owed allegiance. Full article: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century In the 18th century, Britain was as powerful as France. This resulted from the growth of its industries and from the wealth of its large new trading empire. Britain had the strongest navy in the world, the navy controlled Britain's own trade routes and endangered those of its enemies. Britain became wealthy thanks to trade. This wealth made possible both an agricultural and an industrial revolution which made Britain the most advanced economy in the world. However, there was an enormous price to pay, because while a few people became richer, many others lost their land, their homes and their way of life. Families were driven off-the land in another period of enclosures. They became the working "proletariat" of the cities that made Britain's trade and industrial empire of the 19th century possible. The invention of machinery destroyed old "cottage industries"-and created factories. The development of industry led to the sudden growth of cities like Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool and other centres in the north Midlands. The 18th century could also be called a century of wars. From the beginning to the end of the century the great rival, the enemy was France. At first the struggle was for European supremacy, but by the middle of the century the struggle with France was for overseas empire. Here Britain had an advantage because she had the better navy and knew how to use her sea-power. It was during these years that the huge British Empire, ranging from Gibraltar to India and Canada was built up. Full article: The 18th century (The Enlightenment)

2 The most striking political feature of the times was the rise of constitutional and party government. The Revolution of 1688, which banished the Stuarts, had settled the king question by making Parliament supreme in England, but not all Englishmen were content with the settlement. No sooner were the people in control of the government than they divided into hostile parties: the liberal Whigs, who were determined to safeguard popular liberty, and the conservative Tories, with tender memories of kingcraft, who would leave as much authority as possible in the royal hands. On the extreme of Toryism was a third party of zealots, called the Jacobites, who aimed to bring the Stuarts back to the throne, and who for fifty years filled Britain with plots and rebellion. The literature of the age was at times dominated by the interests of these contending factions. Even before the great newspapers appeared, the press had become a mighty power in England, and any writer with a talent for argument or satire was almost certain to be hired by party leaders. Addison, Steele, Defoe, Swift,--most of the great writers of the age were, on occasion, the willing servants of the Whigs or Tories. So the new politician replaced the old nobleman as a patron of letters. Period Introduction Overview The Restoration period begins in 1660, the year in which King Charles II (the exiled Stuart king) was restored to the English throne. England, Scotland, and Wales were united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union. The period is one of increasing commercial prosperity and global trade for Britain. Literacy expanded to include the middle classes and even some of the poor. Emerging social ideas included politeness a behavioral standard to which anyone might aspire and new rhetoric of liberty and rights, sentiment and sympathy. Source: Check the Norton Anthology, vol. 1 for more details. Age of Reason, Neoclassicism, Enlightenment etc. The Eighteenth Century in England is called the Classical Age or the Augustan Age in literature. It is also called the Age of Good Sense or the Age of Reason. Though John Dryden belonged to the seventeenth century, he is also included in the Classical or Augustan Age, as during his time the characteristics of his age had manifested themselves and he himself represented them to a great extent. Other great literary figures who dominated this age successively were Pope and Dr. Johnson, and so the Classical Age is divided into three distinct periods the Ages of Dryden, the Age of Pope and the Age of Dr. Johnson.

3 1- RESTORATION LITERATURE, ( ): also known as The Age of Dryden, saw John Dryden as its most influential writer. - He wrote in every form important to the period occasional verse, comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, odes, satires, translations of classical works and produced influential critical essays concerning how one ought to write these forms. - His works include: All for Love and Essay of Dramatick Poesie - Restoration prose style grew more like witty, urbane conversation and less like the intricate, rhetorical style of previous writers like John Milton and John Donne. - Simultaneously, Restoration literature continued to appeal to heroic ideals of love and honor, particularly on stage, in heroic tragedy. - The other major dramatic genre was the Restoration comedy of manners, which emphasizes sexual intrigue and satirizes the elite's social behavior with witty dialogue. 2- The Age of Satire ( ): a.k.a. The Age of Pope was dominated by writers like Swift, Defoe, Pope, Addison, and Steele. - It was rich in satire and new prose forms that blended fact and fiction, such as news, criminal biographies, travelogues, political allegories, and romantic tales. - Early eighteenth-century drama saw the development of "sentimental comedy" in which goodness and high moral sentiments are emphasized, and the audience is moved not only to laughter, but also to sympathetic tears. - The theatre business boomed; celebrity performers flourished; less important were the authors of the plays. - James Thomson's poems on the seasons, beginning with "Winter" (1726), carried on the earlier poetic tradition of pastoral retreat and began a new trend of poetry focused on natural description. 3- The Age of Johnson ( ): witnessed the emergence of new literary modes and themes. - Novelists became better known than poets, and intellectual prose forms such as the essay proliferated. - The mid-eighteenth century is often referred to as the "Age of Johnson" after the renowned essayist Samuel Johnson, who in 1755 wrote one of the first English dictionaries to define word meanings by employing quotations taken from the best English writers, past and present. - By the 1740s the novel rose to dominate the literary marketplace, with writers like Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne defining the form and its modes of representing the private lives of individuals. - The late eighteenth century saw a medieval revival, in which writers venerated and imitated archaic language and forms. One important development of this movement was the Gothic novel, which typically features such forbidden themes as incest, murder, necrophilia, atheism, and sexual desire. - Late eighteenth-century poetry tends to emphasize melancholy, isolation, and reflection, in distinction to the intensely social, often satirical verse of earlier in the period. Full Article and details: Check the Norton Anthology, vol. 1 for more details.

4 Eighteenth-Century Literature: What to Call the Eighteenth Century? The Eighteenth Century is called the Classical Age (Neoclassical) in English literature for a number of reasons. One reason is that the term classic, refers in general, to writers of the highest rank in any nation. This term was first applied to the works of the great Greek and Roman writers, like Homer and Virgil. As the writers of the eighteenth century in England tried to follow the simple and noble methods of the great ancient writers, they began to be called Classical writers. Another reason is that during this period the English writers rebelled against the exaggerated and fantastic style of writing prevalent during the Elizabethan and Puritan ages, and they demanded that poetry, drama and prose should follow exact rules. In this they were influenced by French writers who insisted on precise methods of writing poetry, and who professed to have discovered their rules in the classics of Horace and Aristotle. The eighteenth century is called the Classical Age, because the writers followed the classicism of the ancient writers, which was taken in a narrow sense to imply fine polish and external elegance. But as the eighteenth century writers in England followed the ancient classical writers only in their external performance, and lacked their sublimity and grandeur, their classicism is called pseudo-classicism i.,e., a false or sham classicism. The eighteenth century was also called the Augustan Age. This term was chosen by the writers of the eighteenth century themselves, who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson and Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil, and other brilliant writers who made Roman literature famous during the reign of Emperor Augustus. Another term that was used to describe the eighteenth century is the Age of Reason or the Age of Good Sense, because the people thought that they could stand on their own legs and be guided in the conduct of their affairs by the light of their own reason unclouded by respect for Ancient precedent. Even in literature where respect for classical art forms and the rules for writing in those forms gave the defenders of the Ancients a decided advantages, critics could declare that the validity of the rules of art was derived from Reason rather than from Ancient Authority. This was the temper of the eighteenth century. If it is called The Age of Reason or The Age of Good Sense, it is because in this age it was assumed that in reasoning power all men are and have always been equal. It was an age which took a legitimate pride in modern discoveries based upon observation and reason, and which delighted to reflect that those discoveries had confirmed the ancient beliefs that there is an order and harmony in the universe, that it is worked on rational principles, that each created thing has its allowed position and moved in its appointed spheres. It

5 was, in short, an age which implicitly believed in the Biblical saying: God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good. The same key-word reason can be found in the deflation of the term Enlightenment: "the period in the 18th century in Europe when certain thinkers taught that science and the use of reason would improve the human condition". The writers and philosophers of this age thought that man was virtuous by nature, and vice was due to ignorance only, so they started a public movement for enlightening people. To their understanding, this would do away with all the evils of society, and social harmony would be achieved. But the 18th century in England was also "the age of elegance". Real civilization, superior to the old classical civilization of Greece and Rome, to which the 18th century compared itself, had been achieved at last. At the beginning of this period literature was chiefly created for a small society of important and influential people. It was a public literature, which represented the outlook and values of this limited society. It did not represent the impressions, hopes or fears of one individual. It was literature that could be read aloud in a drawing-room, enjoyed in a theatre or discussed in a coffee-house. It seems quite natural, that the atmosphere of this kind encouraged comedy, satire in verse and prose, pleasant little essays, and criticism, but it did not encourage poetry, because this society did not expect from literature anything private or intimate. However, very soon the situation changed drastically. The middle class, especially its women members took to buying and reading books. If they could not afford to buy them, they borrowed them from libraries run by shopkeepers. This fact shows that by 1770s the novel had won great popularity. Full Article and details: Eighteenth-Century Literature: The 18th century (The Enlightenment): Characteristics of Eighteenth Century Literature: Prose became the prominent mode of expression: For the first time in the history of English literature, prose occupies the front position. As it was the age of social, political religious and literary controversies in which the prominent writers took an active part, and a large number of pamphlets, journals and magazines were brought out in order to cater to the growing need of the masses who had begun to read and take interest in these controversial matters, poetry was considered inadequate for such a task, and hence there was a rapid development of prose.

6 Poetry became polished, witty and artificial, but it lacked fire, fine feelings, enthusiasm, the poetic glow of Elizabethan Age and the moral earnestness of Puritanism. In fact, it became more interested in the portrayal of actual life, and distrusted inspiration and imagination. The chief literary glory of the age was, therefore, not poetry, but prose which in the hands of great writers developed into an excellent medium capable of expressing clearly every human interest and emotion. The two main characteristics of the Restoration period Realism and Precision were carried to further perfection during the eighteenth century. They are found in their excellent form in the poetry of Pope, who perfected the heroic couplet, and in the prose of Addison who developed it into a clear, precise and elegant form of expression. Another characteristic of this age was the development of satire as a form of literature, which resulted from the unfortunate union of politics with literature. The wings and the Tories members of two important political parties which were constantly contending to control the government of the country used and rewarded the writers for satirising their enemies and undermining their reputation. Moreover, as satire is concerned mainly with finding fault with the opponents, and is destructive in its intention, it cannot reach the great literary heights. Thus the literature of the age, which is mainly satirical cannot be favourably compared with great literature. One feels that these writers could have done better if they had kept themselves clear of the topical controversies, and had devoted their energies to matters of universal import. Another important feature of this age was the origin and development of the novel. This new literary form, which gained great popularity in the succeeding ages, and which at present holds the prominent place, was fed and nourished by great masters like Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and others who laid its secure foundations. The realism of the age and the development of an excellent prose style greatly helped in the evolution of the novel during the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was deficient in drama, because the old Puritanic prejudice against the theatre continued, and the court also withdrew its patronage. Goldsmith and Sheridan were the only writers who produced plays having literary merit. Another important thing which is to be considered with regard to the eighteenth century literature is that it was only during the early part of it the Age of Pope, that the classical rules and ideals reigned supreme. In the later part of it the Age of Johnson cracks began to appear in the edifice of classicism, in the form of revolts against its ideals, and a revival of the Romantic tendency which was characteristic of the Elizabethan period. Full Article and details: Eighteenth-Century Literature: Development of the Novel:

7 The Novel as a Literary Genre: While historians argue about the "first" novel, the definition of the novel could be a separate argument itself. With the different perspectives associated with the novel, the definition as it emerged in the 18th century included many facets. Different definitions of the novel include: an imaginative re-creation of reality, a history, a scary conveyor of truth that demanded scrutiny, a biography, a harmless amusement, a travel narrative, a romance, a tale of spiritual journey. Despite the contradictions that exist within these varying perspectives on the 18th century novel, several key features among them can be picked out as components of the novel as a new textual medium. 1- Contamporaneity became a common theme within the novels, writers were more inclined to show the life of the present day versus life as it was in the past. 2- Characters and events were made to be believable, as if to mirror the people and events in the everyday world of the time, lending the novels credibility. 3- Characters within the stories were presented in a manner similar in social rank to the people reading the novels, not as kings or queens. 4- This afforded a level of familiarity with the readers. With familiarity, readers were able to identify and empathize with characters in the novel. 5- Writers also began to reject traditional plot types; stereotypical plots such as those found in earlier aristocratic stories were avoided. Instead, writers paid greater attention to self-consciousness and the process of thought. As a result, stories reflected more of their individualism and subjectivity. Evolution of the Novel Form In the 21st century, where the novel is quite possible the most popular form of literature, it is hard for one to believe that its form is relatively novel (new) for the world. Prior to the 18th century, there were no known literary pieces in existence that fit the definition of a "novel" (refer to above section for definition). Traditionalism in literature was a key to success prior to the latter half of the eighteenth century. Authors such as Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, were responsible for telling stories in which the people were familiar with. The fiction that was produced before the introduction and development of the novel were never based on actual people but on characters whom everyone was familiar with, Hercules, Adam and Eve, etc. Thus, the success of an author was mainly based on whether or not he could re-invent an already popular story and model the traditional classics from the days of yore. Usually, writers were rated on how well they represented historical events and/or their ability to re-tell stories that everyone had already heard. Defoe, in the eighteenth century, pulled away from this tendency of re-telling stories and began to develop protagonist characters that were new to the literary world. Defoe began writing novel-like works about a character and their life, often using autobiographical information to fuel his writing. Many consider Daniel Defoe as being the author of the first English novel. The first novel is usually credited to be Defoe's Robinson Crusoe which was first published in The novel is

8 about a man, Crusoe, who spent 28 years on a deserted island and the adventures in which he encountered while on the island. Full article: The Rise of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century: Notable 18 th Century Novelists: DANIEL DE FOE He is considered the pioneer of the modern novel. De Foe s characters are common men and women with whom his middle-class readers could identify themselves. All characters of his novel narrate their individual struggles for survival in a difficult world, from Moll Flanders to Robinson Crusoe. His novel The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner is regarded as the first English novel. It is based on the real story of a Scotch sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who had lived alone for four years on the Isle of Juan Fernandez in the Pacific after a shipwreck. The story is told in the first person singular in the form of a diary. Robinson Crusoe is the first narrative in which the character is not a hero, but an average man. Puritanism: De Foe went on with the puritan ideas that had survived even after the collapsing of the Puritan Republic of the Commonwealth. Robinson, a shipwrecked merchant who remained on a desert island for about 28 years, is considered the true puritan man: he showed industry, colonizing spirit, courage and initiative and was seen by the readers as the personification of their own qualities: practical, resourceful, religious. Enlightenment: Crusoe can also be seen as an enlightenment man. Though he does engage in spiritual writing, his survival on the island was largely brought about by his deductive and reasoning skills. As Descartes noted in the 1700s, I think, therefore I am. Alone on a deserted island, Robinson Crusoe is required to do a lot of thinking in order to survive. Because he is solitary, Crusoe does not have a companion at least for the first twenty five years of his time on the island, and he therefore he has no one to confer with in regards to his methods of survival. Because of this, he must think to survive, taking Descartes quote to a literal sense. If Crusoe does not think, he would not exist because he would not survive. Also, interpreting the quote with its intended meaning, Crusoe thinks, and therefore is ensured of his existence in a place where his sanity could be risked.

9 He organized his life on the island and succeeded through hard labour in surviving a difficult situation exploiting all what the place offered. Imperialism: Further, he not only made the native man Friday accept him as master but also got him to use his language and converted him to Christianity. This reflects Defoe s position as a reformer, but not an abolitionist. In his journalism, he criticized the cruelties of the institution, but accepted its necessary existence for the health of British trade (Rufus). Robinson Crusoe s ethics are rooted in his inherent imperialism. Being the only representative of his race and culture for 27 of his 28 years upon the island, and considering both superior to all others, he not only endeavors to replicate the society from which he came but to reign supreme over his environment. Crusoe is culpable because he acknowledges that he has been freed from socially-defined standards and, more importantly, that such standards might, in themselves, be questionable yet, after rationalizing the ethically justifiable course of action, he frequently opts for a more self-aggrandizing, convenient, or profitable avenue. For example, he criticizes the Spanish Inquisition as being unjust yet forces a Caribbean native whom he has liberated from being cannibalized not on moral grounds but in order to obtain a servant to assimilate to his Anglo-Saxon lifestyle. Crusoe never bothers to ask the native s given name. Instead, to commemorate the day upon which Crusoe acted so gallantly, the creature is nonchalantly dubbed Friday. Furthermore, Crusoe rarely inquires into Friday s perspectives, customs, or culture (the latter has to offer them), thus implying that Crusoe believes his ways to be implicitly superior as he proceeds to teach Friday to speak English and convert him to Christianity. It is worthy of note that, when Friday is rescued, he grovels at his liberator s feet. Crusoe does not lift Friday up but permits him to remain in his subservient position so as to establish the desired hierarchy (he has Friday refer to him as Master ) as well as to satiate his narcissism. Most pointedly, being free of societal customs and beliefs, there is no alibi for why he continues to uphold the institution of slavery, especially considering that, for several years, Crusoe and Friday are the island s only inhabitants. Granted, he does not literally bind Friday in shackles and chains, however, he treats him as an inferior and in a manner which, if back in Europe, he would by no means apply to a fellow Briton. Capitalism: Many critics charged this novel with being an imperialistic novel because it contained an affirmation of capitalism and saw man as an economic animal. Robinson was considered by those critics as the first capitalist hero in English literature, because he looked at everything in economic terms: produced more than he needed, kept from the ship a lot of things, expanded his power on the whole island and eventually became rich. They pointed out that when Robinson managed to go on board the ship which had been carried within a reaching distance, he also kept some money which, of course, was of no use on a desert island.

10 Full articles can be found: The 18th century novel: De foe-swift-richardson-fielding-sterne: Robinson Crusoe As It Relates to the Enlightenment: Robinson Crusoe, Enlightenment Man: Not My Everyman: Moral Degeneracy in Daniel Defoe s Character of Robinson Crusoe: JONATHAN SWIFT: He was the greatest satirist of his age. Using irony and satire he tried to change his own society and attacked it at all levels. Swift was not insensible to the sufferings of the Irish and he was indignant at their exploitation by the British Government. The Irish lived on bad condition. He wrote and published a work in defense of Ireland: A Modest Proposal from Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or the Country. It was a new attack against the English. Using satire, he explained, that the misery of the starving Irish could be easily relieved by selling their children to the rich as food. There was also another benefit for the Irish: it should solve the problem of overpopulation of Ireland, too. Swift is remembered for his Gulliver s Travels, a novel that, like Robinson Crusoe, is nowadays regarded as a book for children and as an anticipation of the modern fantasy novel. Actually the book was intended to be a bitter satire of his own country. Gulliver s Travels tells the various imaginary voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon on a ship, to various strange lands where he meets several man-like creatures. Book I: In the first book he is shipwrecked near Lilliput where he meets a race of tiny people, only six inches tall, and he is a giant among them. Rationality is represented by the Lilliputians with their organized society and their deep knowledge of mathematical science. The inhabitants of Lilliput are in war with the Belfescuans. These two groups of people used to be one society until there was a disagreement over how the people were to crack their eggs. The disagreement was whether they should crack their eggs from the large end or the small end of the egg. Because of this disagreement, there was a war and many people died and the Belfescuans decided to move to the other side of the island and start their own society.

11 When Gulliver, the giant called the Man-Mountain and a Colossus by the little people accidentally arrives on their island, he does not receive the traditional hospitality offered to travelers in need of food and rest. The cunning Lilliputians tie Gulliver, surround him with soldiers with poisoned arrows, transport him with sophisticated machinery, and agree to feed him on the condition that he follows the Emperor s orders. Gulliver is a useful beast of burden who transports Lilliputians all over the island; he is a powerful instrument of war who can be employed in the country s naval battles with Blefuscu; and he can perform slave labor by measuring the island with his giant strides. As Swift s satire of the Lilliputians shows, learning without morality and science without wisdom leads to corrupt politics, the worship of power, the glorification of war, and the use of human beings as objects or instruments of the state. Debating whether to keep Gulliver alive or to put him to death, the Lilliputian mind reduces moral reasoning to political arithmetic: If Gulliver lives, the food he consumes may create famine; if he dies, the carcass may cause pestilence. Thus the Lilliputians decide to blind Gulliver as an act of mercy in exchange for his service and labor. As long as they gain more than they lose, the Lilliputians imagine themselves rational, moral, and enlightened. Book II: In book II the situation is reversed. He is in Brobdingnag, the land of giants and he is a dwarf among them. On this island, Gulliver is depicted as embodying the spirit of the Enlightenment as opposed to Brobdingnag s simple-minded inhabitants. Swift ridicules the prideful Gulliver who boasts of great learning and superior British culture, imagining that his knowledge of gunpowder and modern history qualifies him as the enlightened expert qualified to advise the backward Brobdingnagians whom he accuses of narrow Principles and short Views because the King abhors the thought of gunpowder and warns Gulliver not to mention the subject again. The learned Gulliver who knows the secret of how to make and use explosives mocks the magnanimous king who values only the humanistic knowledge of how to make two ears of Corn, or two Blades of Grass to grow upon a Spot of Ground where only one grew before. Imagining himself to be rational, objective, and truthful because of all the data he records in the account of his travels (dates, mileage, wind velocity, latitude, longitude), Gulliver glibly boasts of an extreme love of Truth while guilty of the notorious faults of travel writers: bias, vainglory, and relativism. Gulliver s high opinion of himself is dismissed by the king with the view that Gulliver belongs to the most pernicious Race of little Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth. Gulliver s blind chauvinism robs him of all moral sensibility. Book III:

12 Swift s satire against vain learning continues in The Voyage to Laputa where Gulliver encounters a flying or floating island manipulated by a tyrannical ruler who subjugates the towns below with brute power. If they rebel or fail to pay taxes, the king can deprive the population of sunshine and rain, attack them with stones from above, or crush the town by lowering the flying island and demolishing it, a universal Destruction both of houses and of Men. Here too knowledge without ethics equals wanton power. Swift again satirizes the thinkers or inventors who know how machinery works but never ask why it is needed or what moral purpose it serves. While in the flying island of Laputa which is inhabited by scientists concerned with abstract ideas, Gulliver visits the University of Lagado where he meets the projectors, who work on new scientific odd plans. In the Academy of Lagado the Projectors or Moderns erase from their minds the wisdom of the past and pursue research in the form of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, melting ice into gunpowder, plowing the land with hogs, and building houses from the roof instead of the ground. While this futile experimentation continues, the whole Country lies miserably waste, the Houses in Ruins, and the People without Food or Cloathes. All this useless (impractical) knowledge lacks human value and moral purpose. Book IV: In Gulliver s final voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms, the country where the ruling horses appear rational, benevolent, and peace-loving, Gulliver imagines he has discovered a utopian society. A land without crime, poverty, disease, or war, the land of the horses gives the illusion of an unfallen world where joy without sorrow prevails. Swift satirizes the cult of the noble savage, the primitivism of a Rousseau who equated evil with the institutions of civilization and defined happiness as a return to nature. The horses are indeed primitive and wear no clothes, have no educational system, lack constitutional government, practice no religion, and engage in no commerce: For the Inhabitants have not the least Idea of Books or Literature. They live simply, obey reason, and follow nature. Gulliver begins to idolize the horses as the paragons of virtue living in a perfect society:... I entered on a firm resolution never to return to human Kind, but to pass the Rest of my Life among these admirable Houyhnhnms in the Contemplation and Practice of every Virtue. The scientific Gulliver who boasted of his great love of truth overlooks the horses lack of all human compassion, charity, and tenderness. They do not mourn their dead, and they do not cherish their children, exchanging their offspring with other families. Their imagined reason lacks judgment, discretion, and common sense. A perfunctory reflex, the so-called rationality of the Houyhnhnms is incapable of making distinctions and simplistically views reality exclusively in terms of two categories the all-good horses and the all-evil Yahoos. When the horses find themselves perplexed in determining Gulliver s status (he looks like a Yahoo but he demonstrates the intelligence of a horse), their dull minds cannot acknowledge a third category.

13 The perfect horses that Gulliver idolized as the most rational and benevolent of creatures have no idea of love, and they ostracize Gulliver on the basis of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. Duped by the illusion of the cult of the noble savage, Gulliver s scientific education blinds him to the reality of good and evil. Ignorant and backward, the horses whose maxim is Cultivate Reason reduce thinking to cold rationalism uninformed by the conscience or the heart. Conclusion: In short, while man is famously defined by Aristotle as a rational animal, Swift shows the corruption of learning in its many forms during the Enlightenment. The Lilliputians profit/loss political arithmetic amounts to the reckoning of a fox or rat. Gulliver s accumulation of data, statistics, and measurements reduces learning to half-truths and empirical knowledge, numbers without interpretation, tedious explanations of secondary causes with no sense of the final cause. The Projectors theories and research that ignore the accumulated wisdom of the past lead to daydreaming and loss of contact with Mother Nature. And the Houyhnhnms version of reason lacks all prudence, reflection, judgment, and contemplation. As Swift incisively demonstrates, political thinking, scientific knowledge, and fashionable theories devoid of morality, conscience, and charity are monstrous evils deserving of excoriating satire. Swift s point is that man is not a reasonable animal but an animal endowed with reason, which he is not always able to use in the right way. Full articles can be found: The 18th century novel: De foe-swift-richardson-fielding-sterne: Swift s Gulliver s Travels: