Introduction

The office of poet laureate was instituted in 1668 for John Dryden, and underwent its most dramatic changes following the appointments of Thomas Shadwell in 1689 and Robert Southey in 1813. Its history therefore aligns well with that flexible period of study, ‘the long eighteenth century’, whether it be bounded by the Restoration and the Great Reform Act, by the Glorious Revolution and Waterloo or, as here, by Dryden and Southey (1668–1813). But the symmetry is more than a coincidence. The poet laureateship of the long eighteenth century is an eminently characteristic feature of the period, and highly illuminating of some of the central issues in long eighteenth-century scholarship.

The long eighteenth century has tended to be understood as the period in which ‘Britain’ came into being: not just in terms of the Act of Union being signed in 1707, but in terms of the more intangible measures by which a modern nation-state distinguishes itself from the traditional, hierarchical kingdom that existed before it. Thus Britain in the long eighteenth century transitioned from a society in which king and court were paramount in all matters political, administrative, social and cultural, to one in which a nationally conscious public, powered by commercial practices and the energies of the middle class, gained the overriding agency in each of these areas.1 Against this understanding of an essentially modernizing Britain, voices of dissent have been raised, emphasizing either the slowness of these developments or the persistent importance of traditional institutions, ideas, practices and social groups among them.2 The significance of this monograph, then – in its widest sense – regards how we are to make sense of this long-eighteenth-century Britain. As will be seen throughout the following pages, an interdisciplinary study of the laureateship is important in that it advances a conceptualization of the period hitherto undernourished.

There are two particular thematic threads that a study of the office engages with. The first is the role of the court vis-à-vis the emerging idea of the British nation. The predominant view – and certainly the assumption that scholars have found more useful to work with, in terms of carrying out their research – is that the court lost its practical and symbolic role at the apex of society, and was superseded by the institutions and ideologies of a new British nation. The second thread is the relationship between the court and literature (along with high culture in general). Again, the predominant view is that the more highly esteemed forms of literature, having traditionally been produced for and consumed by the court, moved from that courtly environment to a new home in the public marketplace, where they were produced for and consumed by a wider, more national and more middle-class audience. Both of these threads are associated with the idea of an emergent or newly important public.

A study of the laureateship is of crucial importance to these two threads, and to the wider picture outlined above. The office was a court office, but one which also, especially as the long eighteenth century wore on, positioned its holder in a prominent place with regard to the reading public and demanded of the laureate that they say something to the nation whose most prominent official cultural position they held. The office was a product of the traditional, courtly-patronal mode of literature, being appointed for (if not by) the highest patron in the land so as to glorify and entertain him. Yet most of the laureate’s works were his own independent, commercially minded productions, and even his ex officio poems were widely printed in periodicals and sold as standalone publications. By 1813, the office was considered by some observers to be a flagrant anachronism, worthy only of abolition; yet for others it remained a viable, important office, appropriate for a British genius like Walter Scott or Robert Southey. In short, despite being a manifestation of courtly patronage, it remained a conspicuous element in the literary world and in public life throughout the long eighteenth century, adapting to developments rather than being submerged by them. It can therefore be studied with a view to illuminating the place of the court, and of patronal ideas and practices, with regard to the modern British nation that was then taking shape.

This book’s main argument is that the significance of the laureateship and of the court were greater than has generally been recognized. It will show that the poets laureate were not merely figures to be mocked or ignored – their office universally considered an anachronism – but that they enjoyed a continuing prominence, and even respectability, throughout the period. Moreover, the court did not lose out to the public in terms of cultural production and consumption; in fact, it came to be viewed as a public, national forum. Hence this book will argue that the court remained central to British society throughout the long eighteenth century, both as an institution and, especially, as a concept.

In doing so, this book will pay particular attention to questions of space. Its approach will be part of a significant trend, particularly evident over the last three decades, of studying eighteenth-century Britain using a spatial approach, an urban history approach or with some concern for the theme of geography.3 As the foregoing description has indicated, the cultural history of eighteenth-century Britain has commonly been understood by reference to locations, whether actual, metaphorical or some combination of the two: locations such as the court, the nation, the public sphere and the marketplace. In analysing the laureateship’s role, it is therefore necessary to ask where the office was located in the cultural landscape. Here, this book will focus on how eighteenth-century Britons themselves conceptualized that landscape. It will view their conceptual geography both as a subject that is illuminated by the history of the laureateship, and as a framework by which to understand what the laureateship and court meant to eighteenth-century Britons. This framework will be denoted ‘the conceptual geography of culture’. The delineation of this conceptual geography, and of the laureateship and court’s place within it, will be the basis for wider conclusions about British society, as well as comprising an important historiographical contribution in its own right.

This Introduction will describe the idea of a conceptual geography in more detail. It will then give a narrative and historiographical survey of the poets laureate. Lastly, it will outline the book’s structure.

The conceptual geography of culture

Between 1668 and 1813, Britons routinely made reference to a number of locations in their discussions of the production and consumption of culture: the court, the church, the playhouses; coffeehouses, pleasure gardens, aristocratic country seats; London, the town, the city; England, Britain, Europe; the nation, the country, the world; the temple, the temple of fame, the closet, and so on. These locations tended to be at least partly metaphorical or ideal, but based on some actual, physical location or type of location. Britons used these locations as a way of contextualizing cultural products so as to give them meaning. They did not do so dogmatically; references to spaces were often casual and inconsistent, and coexisted with various other ways of evaluating cultural products. Nonetheless, the tendency was widespread. Writers, in particular, posited their works as existing in a certain space, with at least vague physical characteristics and at least a vague sense of producers and consumers standing visible to each other. The particular space that was being imagined had a significant bearing on the nature, purpose and value of the work.

It is therefore no surprise that historians have tended to study eighteenth-century culture by reference to spaces, even independently of the historiographical trends noted above concerning space, geography and urban history.4 Most influential from a theoretical point of view has been Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (first published in 1962 in German and in 1989 in English),5 while the definitive historical work on eighteenth-century British culture has been John Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997). These two works defined a narrative of eighteenth-century cultural transformation that has become widely accepted (even if the details of Habermas’s original arguments have been repeatedly challenged and changed).6 According to this narrative, culture moved from a single, central, physical location (the court) to an abstract, metaphorical location, in which vast numbers of people, each of them located anywhere, were joined together by the power of print: a location variously known as ‘the public sphere’, ‘the public’, ‘the nation’ or ‘the marketplace’. The midpoint or the means of this transformation was provided by an archipelago of physical locations (quintessentially coffeehouses) within which small numbers of people could gather in discussion, and which together constituted a metaphorical whole (quintessentially ‘the town’). As Brewer summarized it,

in the late seventeenth century high culture moved out of the narrow confines of the court and into diverse spaces in London. It slipped out of palaces and into coffeehouses, reading societies, debating clubs, assembly rooms, galleries and concert halls; ceasing to be the handmaiden of royal politics, it became the partner of commerce.7

His work also acknowledged that the spatial conceptualization of culture was common among contemporaries:

Arts and literature were discussed not in the abstract but as activities associated with special places – Grub Street, the home of the impoverished writer; Covent Garden, with its theatre and whores; the Haymarket, where there was opera; Smithfield, the centre of summer theatricals; Drury Lane, like its Covent Garden rival, a place of low life and theatre; Vauxhall Gardens, a site of summer pleasures; and St Paul’s Churchyard, centre of London publishing.8

However, although there has been some correspondence between contemporary and historical conceptualizations of space, it has not been thoroughgoing. Contemporaries spoke of ‘public(k)’ matters and of ‘the public(k)’; they did not speak of ‘the public sphere’, or postulate that any such space had emerged in the manner or timeframe postulated by Habermas. Similarly, while historians’ descriptions of a cultural ‘marketplace’ do bear some resemblance to processes that contemporaries would have recognized – such as Samuel Johnson’s famous comment that booksellers had become the new literary patrons – contemporaries did not often use ‘market’ or ‘marketplace’ in this abstract way, or conceptually position cultural products within a ‘market(place)’ in the ways that they positioned them in courts, coffeehouses and playhouses. In his dictionary, Johnson gave fairly short and literal-minded definitions for ‘Market’ and ‘Market-Place’, the latter being defined as ‘Place where the market is held’ and illustrated by quotations in which single, particular marketplaces were denoted.9 Even with those terms that show greater consistency of usage between contemporaries and historians – ‘the public’, ‘the town’, ‘Britain’ – scholars have been more concerned to use such terms as frameworks for historical analysis, rather than to study them as contemporary frameworks of analysis, or to follow the contemporary usage with any great scrupulousness. Contemporary usage has served as a jumping-off point, rather than as a pathway in and of itself. Of course, this is unavoidable. A historian who merely followed the notions entertained by the people whom they were studying would be no historian at all; they would be a writer of historical pastiche. But it does mean that our understanding of the conceptual geography of culture used by contemporaries is incomplete, and has the potential to be confused with the notions of space that scholars have put forward in their own works.

This book does not seek to map out those contemporary conceptualizations in full. However, it will attempt to treat the conceptual geography of culture as a subject in its own right, and to contribute some part of the map. This will mean analysing contemporary usage of certain words and notions at any one time; it will also mean analysing how such usage changed between 1668 and 1813. Broadly speaking, it will argue that there was a shift in conceptual geography over the course of the period, which does correspond in many ways to that which has been drawn by historians: from Britons tending to conceptualize culture by reference to physical locations, to them preferring more metaphorical ones. In the late seventeenth century, court, church and the two London playhouses loomed large, and there was an obsession, especially among those who produced and consumed theatrical works, with a tripartite distinction between town, court and city.10 Producers and consumers explicitly situated plays in the physical space of whichever playhouse they were being performed in, and, only slightly less immediately, in the social world of this tripartite London. This is seen, for example, in title pages, which usually stated the theatre and acting company of the original performance, and in the invariable printing of prologues and epilogues, which comprised explicit, familiar addresses to audiences who were defined by their situations in the playhouse and their social lives in London.11 Meanwhile, lyric poems were often published with, and blurred into, ‘songs’ and ‘odes’, and framed by reference to how they had been received in performance or in manuscript at court or in town.12 It was this physical orienteering that gave plays (especially) and other cultural products their meaning.

By the start of the nineteenth century, this was far less the case. Cultural products tended to be conceptually situated in those larger, more metaphorical spaces that no one person, or body of people, could literally inhabit. Producers pitched their work to a hypothetical public, spread throughout England or Britain. At the same time, even those more specific, physical locations became increasingly metaphorical in the way that they were conceived. For example, the ways in which London was imagined and experienced, and was used to give meaning to cultural products (and other forms of activity), became less to do with physical presence and more to do with print circulation. London news was read across the country, often in periodicals whose title included the name ‘London’. While the distinction between town and city became less meaningful, the conceptualized metropolis was increasingly used to house ideological distinctions which were entered into by readers who may never have set foot in London.13

It is by reference to these evolving spatial concepts that this monograph will analyse the poet laureateship. In particular, it will situate the laureateship within the dynamic of the public and the court. Of course, the first of those elements was not itself a conceptual space. Mark Knights, in his study of later Stuart political culture, viewed the public as ‘a collective fiction’, understood by contemporaries ‘as voters, as readers, as a legitimating authority, as umpires and judges of state and church’ and as ‘a reading public’.14 T. C. W. Blanning viewed it as ‘a cultural actor’ created by private individuals coming together in the public sphere ‘to form a whole greater than the sum of the parts’.15 However, as will be evidenced over the course of this book, the public as a contemporary concept held an important place in the conceptual geography of culture, and in the way that that geography changed over time.16 It did so in two main ways. First, it partially superseded, and partially collapsed, an older distinction in the conceptual geography of culture. Up to 1700, writers rarely invoked the public as a forum or audience for their products.17 Where the word ‘public(k)’ was used at all, it tended to be used as an adjective, and to denote matters of state or national well-being. Thus in Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid (1697), Aeneas described a Greek who was supposedly going to be sacrificed to please the gods as ‘the Wretch, ordain’d by Fate,/The Publick Victim, to redeem the State’.18

‘Public(k)’ affairs were more serious than plays and poetry; in their dedicatory epistles to patrons, writers would even sometimes contrast the seriousness of their patrons’ ‘publick’ services with the triviality of the publication that was being offered to the patron as a diversion.19 Against such notions, the combative Charles Gildon asserted that ‘POETS’ ought to be considered as bringing ‘Benefit to the Public’. But he made this argument no earlier than 1694, clearly felt himself to be advancing an unusual opinion and only portrayed ‘the Public’ as an abstract, passive entity, rather than as an audience with a will and an opinion of its own.20 Among seventeenth-century writers, usage of ‘the public(k)’ in the meaning that would later become common was rare and partial. Instead, they would present their work as having emerged from, being offered to and being received by spatially conceptualized audiences: the playhouse, coffeehouses, the court, the town.

Alongside this, writers would conceptualize a different sort of audience, albeit in a vaguer and less frequent fashion: ‘the world’. The world was not necessarily separate from or contrasted with those smaller locations, but it was generally viewed as a more impartial, widespread forum which would receive a work primarily in its printed form and judge that work according to abstract criteria of quality.21 When a distinction was explicitly drawn (which was not often), it was between the town as a physical forum, whose topography and social dynamics conditioned every aspect of a work’s production and consumption, and the world as either a faceless generality or a shorthand for an abstract determination of literary quality. Occasionally, one of two other, more specific locations would be used instead of ‘the world’ to denote similar or overlapping ideas: ‘the country’ beyond London and ‘the closet’ within people’s homes.22

These conceptualizations changed between 1700 and 1730. At around the turn of the century, increasing numbers of writers began to use ‘the public(k)’ to denote a judging audience, often interchangeably with other terms; by 1720, the new usage was widespread, and by 1730, it was commonplace. Although the world and the smaller locations preferred in the seventeenth century were still referenced, the public became writers’ favourite, or even default, conceptualization of their audience.23 But the public had not simply replaced any of the older terms, and its ascendancy did not mean that the generalized audience denoted by ‘the world’ had become prioritized over the particularized audience(s) denoted by (for example) ‘the town’. In fact, the public was built upon both concepts: the world, on the one hand, and the conceptualization of London, especially of the town, on the other. The public was London-centric and most visible in London, but it also transcended London, and could be imagined in a way that had nothing to do with the metropolis. Though in geographical terms it was therefore a more capacious concept than the town, it was a more specific concept than the world, and different from the town, in terms of the people it was denoting. This public was not just the fashionable upper classes of London, whose lives revolved around the court, coffeehouses, playhouses and soirees, but nor was it a faceless general opinion; it was the body of people who thought, bought, read and wrote, wherever they might be located in the nation. Their capital was London, but they were bound together by print.

Indeed, references to the public often give some indication of the slippages and complexities of its position. As late as 1772, Richard Cumberland published The Fashionable Lover with the advertisement, ‘I commit this Comedy to the press with all possible gratitude to the Public for the reception it has met: I cannot flatter myself that the same applause will follow it to the closet; for … it owed much to an excellent representation [on stage].’24 Cumberland’s advertisement did not make clear whether the play’s readers would also become ‘the Public’ now that the play was published; but, in any case, it is significant that he was using ‘the Public’ to exclusively denote Londoners who had viewed the play at Drury Lane, and contrasting them with readers. Perhaps, given that the published form of the play was being read by individuals in closets, readers were too atomized a group to form ‘the Public’; paradoxically, the fact of publication made for a private, individual experience, whereas theatrical performances, held in crowded, sociable spaces, created a public.

Of course, for those writings that were not performed – such as most forms of lyric poetry – the public could only be composed of readers. But even here, the public often took its lead from the town. Thomas Warton’s Five Pastoral Eclogues (1745) was prefaced thus:

How the ideas of fields and woods, and a poetry whose very essence is a rural life, will agree with the polite taste of the town, and of gentlemen who are more conversant in the fashionable ornaments of life, is a question: but I hope as they relate to that war, which is at present the most general topic of conversation, this unpoliteness will in some measure be excused … How the author of these pieces has succeeded in the performance of this, is humbly submitted to the censure and judgment of the public.25

Warton situated his work primarily in the context of ‘the town’, which context he feared would be to the detriment of his work’s relevance and reception; yet, by the same token, he hoped that his work would be valued as a contribution to the current topic of town-based ‘conversation’. He then referenced ‘the public’, perhaps using the term as a synonym for ‘the town’, perhaps alluding to a more transcendent audience whose judgement was not determined by the partialities of town life. Thus in the mid and later eighteenth century it was still normal to conceive of the public as being based in, or looking to, the physical spaces of London.

Moreover, the public’s powers of judgement were more flexible than those ascribed to the town or the world. Its judgement was purer, more abstract and less hurried than the town’s, but not as vague, impersonal or passive as the world’s. Yet it had the potential to slide towards either extreme, both in the sense that any given writer might conceive of it in such a way and in the sense that, according to many writers, the public could be guided towards either correct or corrupt principles by writers, critics, statesmen and even kings. In 1746, Joseph Warton advertised his Odes on Various Subjects with the claim,

The Public has been so much accustom’d of late to didactic Poetry alone, and Essays on moral Subjects, that any work where the imagination is much indulged, will perhaps not be relished or regarded. The author therefore of these pieces is in some pain least certain austere critics should think them too fanciful and descriptive. But as he is convinced that the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far, and as he looks upon Invention and Imagination to be the chief faculties of a Poet, so he will be happy if the following Odes may be look’d upon as an attempt to bring back Poetry into its right channel.26

In Joseph Warton’s view, the public’s taste was conditioned by the fare put in front of it. A poet could bring its tastes back towards correct principles, but would have to battle against critics and other writers in order to do so.

Thus the definition of the public was looser than the town and the world in some ways – especially geographically – but tighter in others. It was an audience that existed across the nation but had relatively focused characteristics. It was constituted in the abstract space of text, but centred on the physical space of London. It could judge, but was not as partial as the audience of a London playhouse, and would have to be entered into dialogue with via print, rather than by conversation in a coffeehouse. It gave writers an audience that fitted the circumstances of eighteenth-century writing: the increasing volume of print and of the money to be made from it; the increasing size of London, and the fact that London was stretching its tendrils across the rest of the country via print and via improved travel facilities, which reduced London’s coherence and comprehensibility as an actual community while increasing its importance as an idea; and the fact that playwriting became proportionately less conspicuous and plausible a career as the century wore on, compared to other forms of writing.

The second main way in which the public relates to the conceptual geography of culture is that, over the course of the long eighteenth century, as the spaces within which culture was conceptually situated moved from physical to metaphorical, the public served as the appropriate audience to inhabit those metaphorical spaces. This worked on a number of different levels. On one level, the development of the public as an audience for cultural products went hand in hand with the increasingly sophisticated conceptualization of Britain as a forum. In the late seventeenth century, references were routinely made to ‘England’, ‘Britain’, ‘the nation’ and ‘the country’, to specifically English and British characteristics such as Protestantism and liberty and even to the greatness of English and British literature. But the eighteenth century undoubtedly saw developments in all of these areas, and perhaps especially in the cultivation and promulgation of the literary canon.27 As the public became established as a concept, it became established as the body of people that inhabited, and were most conscious of inhabiting, this British nation.28 On a second level, the public was conceived as inhabiting the capital city. As mentioned above, London became increasingly potent and widespread as a metaphor, in political as much as in cultural affairs; it became the forum for the activities and opinions of people across Britain who read London newspapers, read about London, read texts that vicariously placed them in London and identified with London-based identity groups. Insofar as London was a metaphorical space for cultural production and consumption, the public was that space’s audience, before whom the creator of the cultural product stood.

On a third level, the public was capable of conceptually inhabiting locations that were yet smaller in their physical referents. These locations had previously been conceived of purely in terms of their physical existence and of the audience that was physically capable of fitting inside them. However, by the turn of the nineteenth century, they were more likely to be conceived of as metaphorical locations, and it was in this sense that they played a role in cultural production and consumption. Scholars have shown one example of this in periodicals, such as the Gentleman’s Journal and The Spectator. With their contents, tone, and attitude to readers and correspondents, periodicals such as these recreated (sometimes explicitly) clubs, coffeehouses and courtly coteries, but in a printed form, meaning that they were able to be spread across Britain. This trend was evident at the turn of the eighteenth century, although Addison seems to have conceived of The Spectator’s readership as ‘Disciplines in London and Westminster’;29 thereafter, it became increasingly pronounced, with various types of writing, including poetry, creating imagined, nationwide clubs of different sorts.30 The public was the audience that inhabited the metaphorical locations constituted by print.

This development – a physically grounded conceptual geography evolving into a more metaphorical one, occupied by the public – obviously harmonizes well with the narrative of cultural transformation established by Habermas, Brewer and other scholars. However, this book’s approach and arguments will differ from that narrative in one important respect: it will emphasize the continuing importance of the court. Here, it will be following the path laid down by such scholars as Clarissa Campbell Orr, Matthew Kilburn and especially Hannah Smith, who have argued that the court adapted to eighteenth-century developments, rather than being sidelined by them.31

As mentioned above, a study of the laureateship is ideally placed to forward these arguments, and to reveal the changing nature of the court’s role; but the emphasis on contemporaries’ conceptual geography is also highly relevant in this respect. The standard historical narrative posits that cultural change happened at the expense of the court; and the argument given above, that contemporary understandings of culture moved from specific, physical locations to wider, metaphorical ones, might be assumed to entail that a specific, physical location like the court would lose out. Likewise, it might be assumed that the laureates would suffer a similar fate: they were anchored at court, trapped under their monarchs’ gaze, and therefore had no place in the Habermasian public sphere, Brewer’s cultural marketplace or the increasingly diffuse conceptual geography of culture posited here. However, this monograph will demonstrate that court and laureateship remained highly important in contemporary conceptualizations of culture, evolving along similar lines to those delineated above for London as a whole, and for clubs, coffeehouses and playhouses. In proportion as the conceptual geography of culture became more abstract, the court developed from a physical to a metaphorical location, in which the public was the proper audience.

Nor was it a coincidence that the court’s transformation should have proceeded in step with that of London as a whole. The court was an integral part of London; the palaces of St James’s, Kensington, the Queen’s House and (until it burned down in 1698) Whitehall were all located in the metropolis, and Windsor Castle and Hampton Court were nearby. Greig has pointed out that, after the huge Whitehall palace was destroyed, the court ‘consisted of a constellation of smaller residences dispersed across a wider metropolitan map’.32 Rather than diminishing its importance, this actually ‘integrated the court more substantially into the London landscape’, especially given that ‘the royal household occupied buildings that were comparatively open to the public gaze’.33

As mentioned above, late seventeenth-century writers, particularly dramatists, constantly situated their works in a tripartite London, comprising a rich body of notions about court, town, city and the relations between the three. In this scheme, it was actually the city that was presented (and mocked) as the outlier, whereas the court and the town were grouped together in physical and social intimacy.34 The town was probably the cultural space that later Stuart and early Hanoverian writers cited most frequently, and their successors continued to reference it with some frequency even into the nineteenth century; it was the fashionable part of London, home to the social elite, to the leading writers and artists and to the small number of theatres that most plays and operas were written to be performed in. Yet the town had intentionally been constructed on the doorstep of the royal palaces and parliament, and its conceptual identity was dependent upon this proximity, especially to St James’s Palace. As late as 1755 (and in the revised fourth edition of 1773), Johnson’s dictionary defined the ‘Town’ area of London as ‘The court end of London’.35 The town was not a rival to the court; if anything, it was a hinterland. Likewise, as London became increasingly present and important to readers across the country, but more abstract as a result, the court was very much a part of this metropolis. And as the court became transcendental, so too did the laureate transcend the physical space of the court. He became the representative of a more diffuse, national, public court: a court that thus remained integral to the cultural landscape.

It is primarily in this sense that the court will be analysed here: as a contemporary concept. Of course, it was also a physical place, or places, being understood by contemporaries and historians alike as the several palaces in which the monarch was or might be present. Not least because the court’s metaphorical potency was rooted in this physical existence, the court will sometimes appear in the following chapters in the physical sense: as the palace at which the monarch was resident, and particularly as St James’s Palace, where the laureate odes were normally performed. It will also be mentioned sometimes, particularly in Chapter One, as an institution, in the sense of there being a departmental structure, a body of officials and financial resources and apparatus that together can be classed as an institution. Where the context of discussion makes it necessary to distinguish between these different senses, the terms ‘conceptual court’, ‘institutional court’ and ‘physical court’ will be used.36 However, the last term will not be used often; the analytical emphasis will be on a conceptual court that included the physical court in the same way that a ‘person’ includes a skeleton and owes much to that skeleton in the way that they are constituted, but also comprises and connotes much more than just bones. As for the public, it too will primarily be analysed as a concept held by contemporaries: more as Knights’s ‘collective fiction’ than Blanning’s ‘cultural agent’. However, there will be times, especially in Chapter Four, where the general body of readers who were conceived of and conceived themselves as the public becomes a subject of discussion in its own right, albeit with due appreciation of the difficulties of defining this generalized body, let alone defining its views. At these times, it will be distinguished from the conceptual public by the term ‘the reading public’. This term is common in eighteenth-century scholarship but was not common among contemporaries, and hence serves well to distinguish the public as an object of historical, rather than contemporary, concern.37

It may be objected that this is a random, narrow perspective, or that it might distract in some way from the laureateship. The first objection would be supported by the admission made above, that spatial concepts were not the only way that contemporaries understood cultural production and consumption, and were not even used in an especially consistent, wholehearted or sophisticated manner. However, three defences can be made against this objection. First, even if contemporaries’ use of spatial concepts was not exclusive or comprehensive, that use was widespread and shows significant consistencies, patterns and developments. It therefore warrants appreciation as a subject in its own right. Second, as is generally recognized, even a society’s most casual word choices reveal a great deal about that society, and about the changes that it was going through; as will be seen, the ways in which Britons used such concepts as the public and the court in the long eighteenth century can furnish significant wider conclusions. Third, as it is by concepts that people understand their experience and surroundings, it is concepts that determine people’s behaviour. Insofar as producers and consumers conceptualized culture spatially, and by reference to the public and the court, their individual and group behaviour can only be comprehended by understanding those concepts.

As for the second objection, this book will show that the history of the laureateship fits perfectly with the focus on contemporary conceptualizations. It reveals how contemporaries conceptualized the court’s role with regard to culture and the public. By the same token, a consideration of these wider themes helps to make sense of the office’s own role. This is true both of the laureateship as an institution, and of the laureates as individual cultural figures. Studying the laureateship as an institution, with a particular place as part of the court, allows us to better appreciate contemporary uses of spatial concepts. Studying the laureates as individuals allows us to see how and why this conceptual geography existed in the first place, and why it changed in the ways it did. As will appear in the following chapters, this geography gave individuals something to navigate as they sought advantages for themselves and their associates. Throughout this monograph, we will see the laureates, and other figures who had some concern in the laureateship, appraising the cultural landscape, identifying the place where it would be most advantageous for them to be, plotting the best route to get there and giving utterance or action to their appraisals. Each of the individuals shown in this monograph gives some indication of the conceptual geography that existed at the time, what factors determined its shape and where court and laureateship stood within it.

Thus the usage of the terms ‘public’, ‘court’ and other terms denoting locations will primarily refer to the conceptual geography of culture as described above; this will be the main framework of analysis. Spatial terms that have proven useful in modern scholarship, but that were not used by contemporaries, such as ‘the public sphere’ and ‘the marketplace’, will generally be eschewed, although convenience and context will sometimes require exceptions. Certain other key terms will be used entirely in disregard of eighteenth-century usage. One is ‘culture’. Johnson defined it as, ‘The act of cultivation; the act of tilling the ground; tillage’ and the ‘Art of improvement or melioration’.38 Its definition is now very different, but it is a notoriously capacious or slippery term; Ludmilla Jordanova has even argued that ‘all history is cultural history’.39 In comparison, this book’s focus will perhaps seem disappointingly unambitious, and disappointingly unrelated to farming. ‘Culture’ will here be shorthand for ‘high culture’, or for what is sometimes called ‘the arts’ or ‘arts and literature’. However, as mentioned above, it will be argued that wider conclusions about the nature of British society can be drawn from an analysis of culture so defined. As for ‘literature’, it will be used in its modern, somewhat anachronistic sense: creative or imaginative writing, mostly of a high-brow, fictional inclination. This is not how the term was understood in the early eighteenth century, when it tended to mean something more like ‘learning’ or ‘book-based learnedness’. The modern definition of literature came into being in the latter half of that century, and even then, Johnson, for example, was happy to switch between usages.40 However, as Terry has shown, this modern definition took the place of older, largely synonymous terms that were current throughout or even before the seventeenth century; ultimately, some concept of creative, fictional writing, and of its potential importance, went back to the ancient world.41

The office and scholarship

The laureateship, especially in its eighteenth-century form, has not been much studied by historians or literary scholars. The standard account is E. K. Broadus’s The Laureateship: A Study of the Office of Poet Laureate in England, With Some Account of the Poets (1921), which devoted a chapter each to the later Stuart period and to the eighteenth century. This was a well-researched and insightful history, with helpful information on each of the laureates. But it does not engage with the same themes, questions and concerns as this monograph, and it is nearly a century old. General narrative histories of the office were also published in 1853, 1879, 1895, 1914 and 1955; but none are very analytical, none come close to the scholarship of Broadus and none offer much new information (if any).42 In 2014, Ewa Panecka published a study that was predominantly focused on the laureate poems themselves. It devoted most of its attention to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and, in its treatment of the eighteenth-century laureateship, was based on those earlier narrative histories.43 Other than Broadus’s work, the most original contribution to the field has been Rosamond McGuinness’s English Court Odes: 1660–1820 (1971). Although primarily a study of the musical trends and traditions of the biannual court odes for which the laureates wrote most of the words, it included a rigorous, comprehensive attempt to identify all of the odes and trace the history of the form.44

The origins of the office of poet laureate, and the rationale behind its conferral upon John Dryden in 1668, will be discussed in Chapter One. However, it should be noted here that, after several decades in which prominent English poets had bandied around the idea of ‘poets laureate’ and had sporadically associated this idea with the pensions that were sometimes bestowed upon favoured poets by the Stuart court, Dryden was the first man for whom the laureateship was a genuine, salaried office. William Davenant, who had received a pension from Charles I, died in 1668, and Charles II issued a royal warrant making Dryden his poet laureate shortly after. Neither Charles nor Dryden, nor (it seems) any other contemporary, viewed Dryden’s appointment as a novelty or invention. The recent currency of the idea of ‘poets laureate’ had caused people to believe not only that Davenant had been holding a particular, official position that had now passed to Dryden, but that a long succession of other poets must have been holding the same position too. Any poet who had been pensioned by the English court, or whose work seemed associated with it, was yoked into this spurious laureate tradition, the highlights of which were Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson. Dryden became England’s first poet laureate, yet was imagined to be the latest in a long, distinguished line. At this stage, the office was honorific, with no attendant responsibilities. In 1689, due to his Catholicism and implicit loyalty to the deposed king, James II, he was himself deposed.

Dryden has received more scholarly attention than all of his long eighteenth-century successors put together (possibly excepting Southey), with all his various works having attracted at least some generous ration of academic interest. As well as dedicated monographs, biographies and essay collections, he finds his way into almost every more general publication on his period.45 Because of the profuseness of his oeuvre, and his keenness to discuss virtually everything that was going on in his lifetime, he has proved to be the academic’s friend. However, his role as laureate – which was ambiguous and ill defined – has received only a small portion of all this scholarly attention. That portion has mainly taken the form of a debate about the early years of his salary.46

Dryden’s successor was Thomas Shadwell (PL 1689–92), with whom he shared more in common than the respective natures and copiousness of scholarly publications on the two men would suggest. Dryden and Shadwell knew each other well, having been two mainstays of the Restoration stage, and having long been professional and political rivals. But Shadwell’s tenure as laureate was brief. He wrote some odes and other forms of panegyric for William and Mary, enjoyed a few years as the most successful playwright in the country, then died in 1692. The existing Shadwell scholarship reflects both the relative brevity of his tenure and the general lack of scholarly concern for the office. It also manifests the posthumous potency of Dryden’s hatred. For a long time, Shadwell was known only as Dryden’s ‘dull’ antagonist. But a multi-volume Complete Works was published in 1927 by the eccentric Montague Summers, who also provided, in the long introduction, a detailed study of Shadwell’s life and times.47 Then, over the latter half of the twentieth century, Shadwell was rehabilitated as a major Restoration playwright. There has been a fairly ample smattering of articles on various aspects of his plays; A. S. Borgman published a biography of him in 1969; and he now tends to feature prominently in any general dramatic history of the period, partly on account of being the foremost exponent of ‘humours’ comedy.48 However, his work as a satirist and controversialist has been far less studied, and his brief but important tenure as laureate has been entirely neglected.

Following Shadwell was Nahum Tate (PL 1692–1715), who has proven neither the academic’s friend nor the revisionist’s bounty. The scant scholarly attention he has received has tended to focus on his work as a Shakespeare adaptor.49 His other, more original plays have been largely ignored; likewise his vast reams of poetry, his attempt to write a poetic and religious version of The Spectator and his successful translation of the psalms into English. Purcell scholars know him as the librettist to Dido and Aeneas.50 But there was a 1972 biography of him produced under the imprint of Twayne Publishers, who for several decades were publishing critical biographies of a wide range of English writers.51 There have also been a short article on the vicissitudes of Tate’s laureate salary (1957); an obscure but strangely effusive study of Tate’s laureate panegyrics (1999); and a handful of other anomalous articles.52

However, it is highly appropriate that work on Tate’s laureate salary and panegyrics should bulk comparatively large in the diminutive field of his academic afterlife. Tate’s tenure was a transformative period for the office. By the time of his death in 1715 – a year after Queen Anne’s – the laureateship had become associated with formal expectations that had not existed for Dryden, and had passed firmly into the lord chamberlain’s department in the court establishment. The laureates would henceforth be formally appointed by the lord chamberlain, and would have to write two odes a year, for New Year’s Day and for the monarch’s birthday, which would be set to music by the king or queen’s master of music and performed as part of the festivities on those days. It also became customary for those odes to be published, as individual publications, in periodicals or both. For the rest of the eighteenth century, the office would be heavily identified with, and even defined by, this duty.

To some extent, this development was a result of Nahum Tate’s own activities. Neither he himself nor anyone else regarded him as an equal of Dryden’s, or even of Shadwell’s. Although his early literary career had overlapped with theirs, he had never become as prominent as either of them. Nor had his name ever been firmly associated with any particular genre, as Shadwell’s had been with drama, and as Dryden’s had been with both drama and satire. He had written several plays, ranging from farces to topical adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and one of those adaptations, Richard II, had even been banned from the stage for its depiction of a king being dethroned. Despite this setback, Tate’s sympathies were initially with the Tories; he wrote most of the sequel to Dryden’s anti-Whig satire, Absalom and Achitophel. He also spent the 1670s and 1680s writing lighter, more occasional poetry, which was published in Poems (1676) and an enlarged second edition (1684). However, his loyalties fixed firmly upon William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution. Having always been something of a political naïf, he rarely evinced any partisan leanings thereafter, with his only controversial pronouncements coming in favour of certain policies being espoused by his monarchs. In this respect, his appointment as laureate seems to have been both cause and effect, hardening his pre-existing tendencies to shy away from political controversy and cleave to the court. After he became laureate, the nature of his output became more restricted. Although he wrote occasional translations and a couple of mildly humorous poems, most of his productions were concerned with the depiction of virtuous figures and enumerations of their virtues.

Tate died a year after George I’s accession, and a very different sort of writer, Nicholas Rowe, was appointed to succeed him. Rowe (PL 1715–18) was the leading tragedian of the day, a highly respected writer and an inveterate Whig office-holder. He had already served the Whig government in a fairly serious fashion under Queen Anne, and, in the few years of his life lived under George I, was to accumulate both sinecurial and non-sinecurial positions, of which the laureateship was but the most conspicuous. In terms of his work and reputation, he was almost the polar opposite of Nahum Tate. Yet he was enjoined with continuing Tate’s habit of writing the biannual courtly odes: having only been a habit during Tate’s tenure, it was now formalized into an official responsibility. On at least two occasions, Rowe farmed the task out to his friends.

Rowe is another figure who has attracted much attention for his theatrical work, but not much for anything else. In fact, the situation of Rowean scholarship is almost identical to that of Shadwellian. Rowe appears in general dramatic histories as the foremost exponent of a certain type of play: the softer, sentimental tragedy of the early eighteenth century, best exemplified by his three ‘she-tragedies’.53 His individual plays have, like Shadwell’s, been addressed in various articles.54 But two things set him apart from Shadwell. One is his edition of Shakespeare, which, being the first ‘modern’ edition, has inevitably attracted a lot of interest.55 The other is that he was active in the reign of Queen Anne, which means that scholars have been particularly interested to tease out the political content of his work. 2017’s multi-volume Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe is a good example of this. It is a comprehensive and impressive edition, providing everything that students of Rowe could possibly want; but the introductory matter to each play is dominated by party-political considerations to a greater extent than is justified by the content of those plays themselves.56

The next laureate was Laurence Eusden (PL 1718–30), who is the most neglected of the lot. He does not seem to have inspired a single monograph or article until 2020, when Leah Orr published an article on his reception and afterlife.57 His ONDB entry is several short paragraphs in length.58 Because he was not a playwright and was not very active in politics, he is likewise missing from more general works; but he was mentioned several times in The Dunciad, and Valerie Rumbold therefore touched upon him at the appropriate points in the notes to her edition of the four-book version.59 He is the extreme version of Nahum Tate (who was also mocked in The Dunciad ), except for the fact that Tate’s characteristics as a writer included prolixity and profuseness, whereas Eusden did not write (or at least publish) very much over the course of his lifetime (contrary to Pope’s characterization of him as prolix and profuse).60 He spent much of that life at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then, between 1724 and his death in 1730, was engaged with the twin demands of clerical work and clerical drinking. (The drinking had probably begun earlier.) His appointment to the laureateship had come at a young age, and is most obviously attributable to an epithalamium he wrote for the marriage of the duke of Newcastle, who was then lord chamberlain. Although Eusden diligently wrote panegyrics (both within and without the remit of his office), he was even more diligent in his alcoholism, and he died at forty-two years old.61

Colley Cibber (PL 1730–57) came next. Again, he was a very different kind of appointee to Eusden. He was probably the most famous theatrical figure of the time, having acted, managed Drury Lane theatre and written plays (some of them hugely successful and enduring) for several decades. His work had not been especially political, but The Non-Juror (first performed 1717, first published 1718) had comprised an explicit attack on supporters of the Stuarts. As well as enjoying massive popular success, it had earned him a £200 gift from George I. He was also known to be close to leading Whig statesmen, including Robert Walpole, and was associated with government Whiggism to a greater extent than would be suggested by a perusal of his writings. Some observers considered the appointment a disgrace, and Cibber’s activities as laureate only increased the numbers and the hostility of these critics; his biannual odes were the most widely mocked of the century, for reasons discussed in Chapter Five.

In terms of scholarship, if Eusden belongs with Tate, then Cibber is firmly in the camp of Shadwell. Indeed, he is to Pope what Shadwell is to Dryden: a ‘dull’ antagonist, condemned to centuries of notoriety and neglect by his opponent’s hostile wit. Only in the latter half of the twentieth century did scholars begin to reappraise Cibber. Now, he is recognized as one of the major playwrights of the eighteenth century.62 To what extent he should be identified with ‘sentimental comedy’, and whether such a genre even existed, are subjects of debate.63 Whatever the case, he was certainly a popular and imaginative playwright, who was well attuned to eighteenth-century tastes. Helene Koon published a biography of him in 1986.64 In 2001 came The Plays of Colley Cibber: Volume 1, edited by William J. Burling and Timothy J. Viator; but no following volumes were ever published. There have been a significant number of articles published on various aspects of his plays and on his relationships with other literary figures of the time;65 recently, there has been emphasis on his stature as an early ‘celebrity’.66 In 2016, Elaine McGirr published a study of Cibber rebutting the literary histories that have been constructed at his expense and asserting his centrality to eighteenth-century culture.67 The autobiographical Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber has long been recognized as a valuable guide to the theatrical world of the early eighteenth century. But his non-dramatic poetry has been entirely ignored, despite how much attention his laureate odes attracted at the time.

His successor, William Whitehead (PL 1757–85), has been considered a talented and interesting poet by those who have read his work, but their number is small and their voices are quiet. He has been studied even less than Tate, and little more than Eusden. Other than a German-language monograph published on him in 1933 and an entry in ODNB, no book or article seems to have been written on him.68 His dramatic works are referenced in English Drama: Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660–1789, where Richard D. Bevis notes that his Roman Father entered the repertory for a while.69 Scholars of Charles Churchill know Whitehead as one of that satirist’s repeated targets.70 But he is mostly invisible in eighteenth-century literary scholarship.

This is partly because he has been left isolated from such important scholarly narratives as preromanticism, graveyard poetry and Gothicism. His output, which was almost entirely in verse, was initially circumscribed by the twin examples of Pope and Matthew Prior; but he had started to widen his compass just before his appointment, writing ABAB elegies and a blank verse effusion on the landscape around Bristol. Shortly after becoming laureate, he wrote a semi-official poem addressing the nation, and another addressing the poets of the nation in the manner of a bishop to his clergy. Thereafter, he published little other than his laureate odes; but those odes were highly prominent exemplars of the same poetic trends that have been located in the work of Gray, Collins and the Wartons, and they deserve to be integrated into wider studies of eighteenth-century poetics. He also produced four plays over the course of his life, with decent success; and he avoided party and political matters, while nonetheless drawing the hatred of the satirical attack-poet Charles Churchill and the opposition newspaper press. Whitehead generally enjoyed a far more positive reputation than Cibber, and was probably the most celebrated laureate qua laureate since Dryden.

His successor as laureate was Thomas Warton (PL 1785–90), who enjoyed even greater literary esteem, and who, for his literary scholarship and poetic innovations, was to be more enduringly esteemed, too. He was a lifelong fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and in 1785 he was best known for his Pleasures of Melancholy and ‘The suicide’ (quintessential graveyard poems) and for his History of English Poetry, the only three completed volumes of which had appeared in 1774–81. He has been much studied, especially with regard to the questions of canon formation and Gothicism.71 However, his role and work as laureate – a position he only held for five years – have not generated much interest.

In 1790, William Pitt the Younger, then prime minister, seems to have taken the appointment decision upon himself, and gave the office to Henry James Pye (PL 1790–1813). Pye was a well-known, fairly well-respected poet, having written a number of long poems in couplets and shorter lyrics in a variety of forms; and he had served as an MP for Berkshire between 1784 and 1790, as well as serving long stints as a magistrate. While laureate, Pye turned out copious amounts of verse and prose, his name becoming a byword for bad poetry in certain quarters but being celebrated in others. He also set about diligently quelling any potential Jacobin activity, both through his powers as a magistrate and through his writings (which included two anti-Jacobin picaresque novels).72

Pye has been treated by academia in much the same way as Tate, Eusden and Whitehead. As a prolific writer spanning many forms and genres, he has managed to find his way into a couple of general works; his long poem Faringdon Hill, for example, has been discussed as an example of topographical poetry by Donna Landry and David Fairer, and the recent interest in anti-Jacobin novels has led to reinvestigations and reprintings of his The Democrat and The Aristocrat.73 But no publication has ever been devoted specifically to him. He was generally despised by the canonical Romantic writers (among others), and no one has attempted to reverse that judgement. Like Whitehead, his poetry has been deemed insufficiently experimental or exciting to warrant study.

Pye’s death in 1813, just as the Peninsular War was reaching its triumphant conclusion, gave rise to the best-documented selection process of the long eighteenth century.74 The prince regent, prime minister and lord chamberlain, as well as various other government figures, involved themselves in the question of who should succeed Pye, united in their opinion that the role should go to the greatest poet in the land. After a certain amount of confusion, the laureateship was offered to Walter Scott, who declined it, and then Robert Southey, who accepted. Upon his appointment, Southey (PL 1813–43) discovered that he was still expected to write the biannual odes – which he believed was contrary to a promise he had received beforehand – but eventually, in the course of his thirty-year tenure, he managed to have the task permanently dispensed with. Because Southey was generally held to be a great poetic genius by contemporaries, and because he had freed the laureateship of its duties, the position finally settled down into comfortable honourability. Southey’s successors were William Wordsworth and then Alfred Tennyson. Although subsequent holders have rarely been lauded as highly as those two, the office has remained quietly respectable ever since.

Southey’s tenure lies beyond this book’s remit; he will only feature in the discussion of appointments (briefly) and in the Conclusion. Dryden’s and Southey’s appointments thus mark the two boundary stones of the eighteenth-century laureateship, one representing its creation, the other its transformation into something else. In terms of scholarly attention, too, they are good bookends, because a colossal amount of work has been carried out on both of them (although Dryden’s is the more colossal). Lynda Pratt and Tim Fulford have been particularly active in restoring Southey to something like the position of prominence he occupied in his own day, leading two projects to make widely available his complete correspondence and poetic works.75 In addition, they and others have published various chapters, articles and monographs on all manner of Southey’s (very diverse) body of work, and he has become one of those stock writers often discussed in more thematic-based monographs and edited collections.76 Whereas Dryden has proven a favourite of older and newer generations of literary scholarship alike, Southey, although somewhat neglected by the older, has been found newly relevant to the newer.77 However, the laureateship has not loomed very large in this corpus, the exceptions being volume three of the Later Poetic Works, the introductions of which discuss Southey’s appointment and poetic practice as laureate, and Michael Gamer’s work on the poet’s motivations for accepting the post.78

Scholarship on the eighteenth-century laureates, then, comprises a patchy body of work. A great deal has been written on some of the laureates, not much on some of the others, and there are great discrepancies between the kinds of work that have been done on each figure. Moreover, insofar as the eighteenth-century laureateship has been paid attention to at all, it has been dismissed and disparaged. Broadus and other scholars of the office’s entire history have routinely depicted the period between Dryden and Southey as the low point;79 they have also assumed that this was the general and uniform opinion of contemporaries. Broadus’s observation ‘that Warton’s appointment had turned a good poet into a bad laureate’, and thus ‘crystallized’ public opinion against the office and the odes, is typical.80

Even those scholars who have devoted attention to any individual laureate, and who have therefore taken a more sympathetic view of that poet and his official work, have set up an explicit, contemptuous contrast to the office itself and to its other holders. Koon, for example, argued that Cibber’s odes were not as execrable as his critics made out. However, to support her point, she insisted that Whitehead’s efforts ‘were no better than Cibber’s and considerably duller, but they were not attacked’ – an observation mistaken on both counts.81 Daniel Ennis, in his discussion of the laureateship as one of the eighteenth century’s poetic ‘Honours’, lumped Whitehead together with Eusden as ‘obscure but politically reliable poetasters whose undistinguished verse did nothing to raise the prestige of the position’.82 Fairer was respectful (in passing) to Warton’s laureate odes, calling them ‘effective and dignified’, but then went on to say, ‘It was generally held that Warton, whose tenure fell between those of William Whitehead and Henry James Pye, raised the reputation of the post at a difficult moment in its history.’83

The foregoing description has already indicated some of the reasons why the eighteenth-century laureateship has been viewed in this way: its holders tended to be writers who have not become canonical figures of British literature, whereas those eighteenth-century writers who are now deemed canonical were not appointed, and in some cases even set themselves against the laureates. This relates to the second major reason why the office has been neglected: a handful of critiques of the laureateship were made by eighteenth-century figures that, due to their wittiness or to the canonical status of the persons making them, have proven popular and enduring. Pope’s four-book Dunciad, private comments by Gray, a footnote in Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Probationary Odes for the Laureatship have been taken as representative samples of contemporary opinion on the office, and as absolute damnations of it, rather than as the partial, partisan or idiosyncratic comments that they generally were.84 However, the most fundamental reason for the office’s neglect is that it was a courtly, patronage-based office. It has therefore been taken as anachronistic, ill-fitting and uninteresting in relation to those ideas about changes in eighteenth-century culture and society that have dominated the relevant scholarship.

New contributions to scholarship

By the same token, a study of the laureateship can provide a fuller, more nuanced picture of this period than has hitherto appeared. This monograph will argue that, as certain scholars cited above have asserted, the extremity of eighteenth-century developments has tended to be exaggerated. In particular, it will demonstrate that the laureateship was considered a relevant and respectable office to a greater extent than is supposed, and that, far from being anachronistic, it was actually representative of certain court-orientated ideas and practices of cultural production that persisted and adapted throughout the long eighteenth century. This argument is located at the interstices of literary and historical scholarship, and will both continue, and take advantage of, the trend in eighteenth-century studies towards interdisciplinarity. The types of evidence and approaches here employed are variously rooted in the traditional practices of each separate discipline, but will be used in conjunction so as to illuminate each other. Ultimately, of course, this monograph is written by a historian and published by the Royal Historical Society. Its core audience is historians of eighteenth-century Britain, especially cultural historians. Nonetheless, interdisciplinarity is its guiding principle, and – as could hardly be otherwise, given the subject matter – it is very much aimed at literary scholars too.

Hence this book makes three major contributions to eighteenth-century scholarship. They are especially significant for the cultural historiography of Britain in the long eighteenth century, where this book aims to set a new agenda. But they have a broader significance for our understanding of how eighteenth-century British society was structured and functioned, and will therefore engage scholars of eighteenth-century Britain in general. Moreover, these contributions may encourage scholars of earlier periods and of other European and Atlantic countries to take on similar perspectives.

The first major contribution is the most obvious: to reinstate the laureateship to a position of great importance in eighteenth-century Britain. By proving that the office and its holders mattered to contemporaries, it will prove that scholarship on eighteenth-century British culture and literature must henceforth take heed of them. Moreover, this reinstatement has wider ramifications: it will emphasize the multifaceted importance of institutions in eighteenth-century British culture and the validity of the laureate-style model of cultural producer (as opposed to, for example, the Romantic model) throughout the long eighteenth century.

The second major contribution is to place the court and its relationship with the public in a more central place in our understanding of eighteenth-century Britain. Of course, as described above, this is not an unprecedented contribution. Certain scholars have established something similar before, and in recent scholarship it has become a vague truism that tradition coexisted with modernization in the eighteenth century.85 However, there remains much to explore and prove in terms of what this meant in practice. This monograph will provide a detailed, thoroughgoing case study of the court’s relationship with the public, and will show that this relationship was vital to the workings of British culture and society. It will also demonstrate how the interaction of tradition and modernization actually functioned, thus turning a vague truism into a concrete, complex truth. These dynamics are denoted by the book’s subtitle, ‘Courting the Public’.

The book’s third major contribution is that it advances a new paradigm for eighteenth-century cultural history: the conceptual geography of culture. Although partially foreshadowed by scholars in the ways suggested above, this is a topic that has not hitherto received dedicated study even as a topic, let alone as a paradigm of research and analysis. If accepted, it will mean a movement away from the Habermasian public sphere paradigm that has dominated the field for so long. Hopefully, this book will draw other scholars’ attention to the conceptual geography of culture too, filling in more parts of the map, and will encourage them to see it as a valid, fruitful framework by which to study cultural history, not just in eighteenth-century Britain but in earlier periods and other countries. Even if it is not taken up widely, it will nonetheless show that there are paradigms other than the Habermasian one, and concepts other than that of the public sphere, by which to approach eighteenth-century British culture.

Overall, then, this book sets out a fresh vision of how British society and culture functioned. It shows Britons acting according to a conceptual geography that changed over time, and that became increasingly shaped by print and by the metaphorical spaces that print constituted, but in which London and its court remained enduringly central. The laureate – a court poet, usually successful in London society before and after becoming laurelled – was a figure whose appointment, works and reception testify to this state of affairs, and who also held an important role in maintaining it.

Structure

The structure of this book is partly chronological, partly thematic. This structure has been chosen as giving the best representation of the way in which the office changed and developed over time, while also allowing the key aspects and themes of the office to be properly discussed and analysed and showing how certain aspects and themes became more or less prominent over time. Chapter One focuses on the later Stuart period, investigating the formation, early fluidity and transformation of the laureateship in those years. By examining court archives and those of Charles Sackville, sixth earl of Dorset, along with contemporary publications on the court and the writings of the first three laureates, this chapter shows that the office was instituted as a vague, honorific position, before becoming fixed with a certain function by the early years of George I’s reign. The laureate gained a distinct place within the royal household and its cultural life, which it occupied for the next hundred years.

Chapter Two then focuses on George I and George II’s laureates, and especially on Nicholas Rowe. Investigating the dichotomy of courtly values and commercial values as it manifests in the printed works of these laureates, that dichotomy is shown to be a false one, with the laureateship being both a symbol and an organ of their mutuality. Rowe, Eusden and Cibber pitched their work to court, town and public, and used the validation gained from each to sell their work to the other. Nor were they atypical in their practices; in a sense, the laureateship to which they were appointed formed the pinnacle of a system in which literature was produced and consumed in various interrelated spaces, including the court.

Chapter Three, taking a view of the entire Hanoverian period, returns to more behind-the-scenes matters. It discusses the practicalities of appointing a new laureate, looking at the roles of the different agents: king, royal family, lord chamberlain, politicians and others. Although this Introduction has indicated that there was no overwhelming consistency in terms of what kinds of writers were appointed laureate, Chapter Three shows that a number of significant patterns can be identified. The laurel was used to strengthen and legitimise various networks and to establish how those networks connected with the court. Behind each selection process, there was a complex relationship between the exigencies of patronage and ideas of merit; in this respect, the court-centred patronage that encompassed the laurel was used to determine the value and meaning of writers who had hitherto been working outside the forum of the court.

Chapter Four broadens the thematic scope, bringing the related topics of national identity, partisan politics and ideas concerning literature more directly into focus. Using a large amount of contemporary printed material (predominantly newspapers), this chapter seeks to establish the reception of George III’s laureates among the reading public. It shows that, in the reign of George III, the laureate became a public figure to an unprecedented extent. George III’s laureate held a unique and important place in contemporary literature, and his office was clearly of much greater prominence, and much greater diversity of reception, than has been previously recognized. This pre-eminence demonstrates how contemporaries conceived the court, the public and the relationship between the two.

With the first four chapters having covered the long eighteenth century in a vaguely sequential fashion, Chapter Five then takes the entire period as its timeframe and explores the corpus of biannual laureate odes. It studies the odes as deliberate attempts to present an image of the monarch, the national community and the relationship between the two. It argues that the laureate ode format was highly sensitive to that relationship, and increasingly responsible for mediating it to the reading public. Although the odes were constantly evolving, these issues remained consistently important to the ode format. In the later Stuart period, the odes were explicitly situated in the physical space of the court; in published form, they appealed to readers by allowing them to vicariously enter the court and witness the ode’s performance. The court was thus presented as standing at the head of society; all readers would wish to physically come there. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the odes were doing something very different. They now portrayed the court as an abstract, metaphorical space, at one with the nation.

Lastly, the Conclusion summarizes the main arguments of each chapter, discusses once more the importance of the laureateship, and indicates possible future directions of research.