The Scriblerus Club and its Legacy
Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
January 2025
As a living entity, the Club survived for only a few months from the end of 1713 to the summer of 1714. The demise of the social meetings between members was caused by external factors surrounding the collapse of the Oxford administration and the death of Queen Anne. However, the initiative that lay behind the formation of the group long outlasted this brief period of activity, and underlay the appearance of a hugely influential mode of comic writing, easily identified and analysed under the name of Scriblerian satire.
The members of the group were five authors, currently based in London, all of whom apart from Jonathan Swift were only just cutting their teeth in the world of polite literature. Two were Irish, Swift (b. 1667) and Thomas Parnell (b. 1679). One was a Scot, John Arbuthnot (b. 1667), already making his name as a physician and polyglot. The two youngest were English, John Gay (b. 1685) and Alexander Pope (b. 1688), the only one to have been born in London. Each of them was broadly in support of the Tory government led by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford (1661–1724), which had come to power in 1710. Oxford acted as a kind of sponsor and protector, who was sometimes invited to attend meetings.
Beginnings
Behind the formation of the Club lay various developments. Swift had become chef de la propagande for the ministry, publishing a series of important pamphlets in support of its policy of ending the costly War of the Spanish Succession such as The Conduct of the Allies, as well as the weekly Examiner. However, the administration was increasingly riven by disagreements between its two major figures, Oxford and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). One small sign of this friction is the omission of the former in 1711 from a group often called the Brothers’ Club, deriving from an informal society known as the Saturday Club. Nevertheless, his son Edward Harley, later 2nd Earl of Oxford (1689–1741) was admitted, as were congenial figures such as Arbuthnot, the poet and diplomat Matthew Prior, and the soon to be ennobled Allen Bathurst (1684–1775) who would become with Edward Harley, the most intimate of Pope’s aristocratic friends and patrons. Another scheme in the background was Swift’s ambition to form an English academy on the model of the Académie Française, a scheme viewed by its author as an instrument of cultural regeneration, but attacked by Whigs as a device to ensure Tory hegemony.
It was Pope who played the decisive role in getting the Scriblerian project off the ground. On 14 August 1712, he contributed one of his occasional essays to The Spectator, the vastly influential periodical operated by the Whig politicians Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Steele (1672–1729). The big idea comes in the concluding paragraph:
I need not tell you, Sir, that there are several Authors in France, Germany and Holland, as well as in our own Country, that Publish every Month, what they call An Account of the Works of the Learned, in which they give us an Abstract of all such Books as are Printed in any Part of Europe. Now, Sir, it is my Design to Publish every Month, An Account of the Works of the Unlearned. Several late Productions of my own Countrymen, who many of them make a very Eminent Figure in the Illiterate World, Encourage me in this Undertaking. I may, in this Work, possibly make a Review of several Pieces which have appeared in the Foreign Accounts above-mentioned, tho’ they ought not to have been taken Notice of in Works which bear such a Title. I may, likewise, take into Consideration such Pieces as appear, from time to time, under the Names of those Gentlemen who Compliment one another, in Publick Assemblies, by the Title of the Learned Gentlemen. Our Party-Authors will also afford me a great Variety of Subjects, not to mention Editors, Commentators, and others, who are often Men of no Learning, or what is as bad, of no Knowledge. I shall not enlarge upon this Hint; but if you think any thing can be made of it, I shall set about it with all the Pains and Application that so useful a Work deserves.
Here is the blueprint for almost the entire production line of Scriblerian work in decades to come.
- First, we have a parody of the existing publications, most obviously an English version, The History of the Works of the Learned, or An Impartial Account of Books lately Printed in all Parts of Europe: with a Particular Relation of the State of Learning in each Country, which ran from 1699, but by an ironic twist had ceased publication in January 1712. Along with burlesque and travesty, its cousins, parody would always be a principal agent of the humour of the group.
- The regular targets of satire are headed by foolish or misguided “Editors and Commentators,” among authors such as Richard Bentley and Lewis Theobald who would become common figures in satire.
- There is a stress on the ignorance of many among the target authors, marked by their status as “the Unlearned” and “Men of no Knowledge,” and as members of the “illiterate World.” This looks forward to the treatment of Grub Street, discussed below.
- As for “Party-Authors,” while most of the output of the Club is not narrowly political, it does more commonly attack writers with connections to the Hanoverian court such as the poet laureate Colley Cibber; sycophantic disciples of Addison’s coterie at Button’s London coffee-house, such as Ambrose Philips, Thomas Tickell and Thomas Burnet; booksellers and editors who frequently printed assaults on Pope and his allies, such as George Ridpath and William Wilkins; those associated with the journalism in support of Robert Walpole’s ministry, such as James Pitt and Aaron Hill; Whig pamphleteers such John Oldmixon, John Dunton, and Philip Horneck; or Low Churchmen such as Benjamin Hoadly and Francis Hare. In a very broad sense, the tone and tenor of the group’s offerings may be said be conservative, in that they generally stood for the landed interest against the mercantile forces of the City of London. They defended not just the moderate Oxford, but equally the High Church Bishop, Francis Atterbury; and they never properly came to terms with the long dominance of Walpole, flirting with what has been called the “politics of nostalgia.” At the same time, they all had Whig friends and made fun of Tories on numerous occasions.
The satiric idiom that emerged obviously has debts to earlier masters of satire, among them Lucian, Erasmus, Rabelais and Cervantes. More immediate roots are found in Swift’s own Tale of a Tub (1704); his Bickerstaff papers (1708); and Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull (1712). Another proto-Scriblerian work by the doctor is the Proposals for Printing … A Treatise of the Art of Political Lying (1712), set out as a mock appeal for subscribers. However, not even the Tale exemplifies the Scriblerian way of writing in as concentrated and typical a form as the works that grew out of Club involvements. Several of the best-known works would ultimately be collected in the group’s Miscellanies, first issued between 1727 and 1732. However, a penumbra exists outside that series, consisting of items to be discussed here which are less often noticed.
Pope began to approach likely collaborators after the appearance of his message in the Spectator. Steele was soon an impossible candidate, as his career and writing became more nakedly partisan; and after a while Addison grew less acceptable, partly on personal grounds. But Pope already knew Gay and Parnell, and through the latter he was able to make contact with Swift by October 1713, when he wrote to Gay, “Dr. Parnell … enters heartily into our design…. Dr. Swift much approves what I proposed even to the very title, which I design shall be, The Works of the Unlearned, published monthly, in which whatever Book appears that deserves praise, shall be depreciated Ironically, and in the same manner that modern Critics take to undervalue Works of Value, and to commend the high Productions of Grubstreet.” In fact, the regular monthly publication was immediately shelved, but the group was ready to go, once Arbuthnot signed on at some unknown date. The doctor was already familiar with the Harleys, father and son, and had known Swift since early 1711. Since he had an apartment at St. James’s Palace, owing to his position as a physician to the Queen, this became a convenient pied à terre for Club gatherings.
A handful of meetings across the first half of 1714, mostly around the spring and early summer, yielded a few amusing trifles, mainly verses signed by the members inviting Lord Oxford to join them. Six manuscripts survive in the Longleat papers. By this stage, the eventual persona responsible for the supposed works had already been identified as Martin Scriblerus, a pedantic virtuoso from Műnster settled in London, who blends features of British and Continental scholars. It is clear that work had already begun on what was to be the largest collective effort of the group, ultimately published as The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. Around April, Gay informed Parnell (who was staying at Binfield with Pope) that he and the Dean met as usual at Arbuthnot’s lodging: “Martin is still in the Doctor’s hands & flourishes.”
Progress was delayed when Swift left London in early June, to distance himself in rural Berkshire from the worsening squabbles within the ministry. Speculation was rife in the capital about his disappearance, with a variety of explanations facetiously listed by Pope in a letter of 18 June. Coffee-house chat has it that he has gone to Hanover with Gay; others “apprehend some dangerous State-treatise from [his] retirement; Pope himself whispers that he has gone “to meet some Jesuits commissioned from the Court of Rome” to prepare for “the coming of the Pretender.” Ony Arbuthnot holds out with the view that the Dean’s real plan is “to attend at full leisure to the life and adventures of Scriblerus. This indeed must be granted of greater importance than all the rest.” Pope adds, “The top of my own ambition is to contribute to that great work, and I shall translate Homer by the by.” On 26 June the doctor wrote to Swift, with the news that Gay had been allocated money for his forthcoming trip to the court of Hanover, and that he had solicited both Oxford and Bolingbroke with regard to prospects for “the parnelian” within the Church. He then set out some of his ideas for medical material in the Memoirs, and reported that “Pope has been collecting high flights of poetry which are very good, they are to be solemn nonsense” (a phrase that applies to much of the Club’s productions). Here are the roots of a later collaborative production, The Art of Sinking in Poetry.
In his reply of 3 July, Swift shows his interest in the project and his respect for Arbuthnot’s skills, but also his doubts about the younger members of the group: “To talk of Martin in any hands but Yours, is a Folly. You every day give better hints than all of us together could do in a twelvemonth; And to say the Truth, Pope who first thought of the Hint has no Genius at all to it, in my Mind. Gay is too young; Parnel has some Ideas of it, but is idle; I could putt together, and lard, and strike out well enough, but all that relates to the Sciences must be from you.” On 11 July Pope wrote to the doctor, referring to the looming political crisis, “This is not a Time for us to make others live, when we can hardly live ourselves: So Scriblerus, (contrary to other Maggots) must lye dead all the Summer, and wait till Winter shall revive him.” He hoped that, since mankind would be playing the fool in all weathers, this would afford the team with “materials for the Life, … which I hope to see the grand Receptacle of all the oddnesses of the world.” In his next letter to Swift, on 17 July, Arbuthnot refers to a scheme to ascertain the longitude, involving ships discharging shells into the atmosphere. It came from William Whiston, the mathematician and Trinitarian theologist, whom the group often ridiculed in years it come. The doctor remarked of Whiston, “a pox on him, he has spoild one of my papers of Scriblerus, which was a proposal for the longitude to this purpose, not very unlike his, that since there was no pole for East and west, that all the princes of Europe should joyn and build two prodigious poles on high mountains with a vast light-house to serve for a pole star.”
A Partial Hiatus
This was the last of Scriblerus in its current form. On 27 July the storm finally broke, when the Queen lost patience with Oxford and dismissed him, just five days before her own death. The whole earth was turned upside down overnight. “The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday,” wrote Bolingbroke to Swift. The Queen died on Sunday. What a world this is, and how does fortune banter us.” Neither of the two Tory ministers ever regained office, and they did not see a Tory government in power again (any more than the five Scriblerians would). For a short time, the members attempted to keep the programme alive, and Pope wrote told Arbuthnot on 2 September that he hoped “the Revolutions of State will not affect Learning so much as to deprive mankind of the Lucubrations of Martin, to the Encrease of which I will watch all next Winter, and grow pale over the Midnight Candle.” Gay would still act as secretary to the proceedings, but Parnell was a less reliable assistant, despite “tho’ he mentions the name of Scriblerus to avoid my Reproaching him, yet is he conscious to himself how much the Memory of that Learned Phantome which is to be Immortal, is neglected by him at present.” The doctor responded by saying that “Martin’s office is now the second door on the left in Dover-street, where he will be glad to see Dr Parnell, Mr. Pope, and his old friends, where he can still afford a half pint of claret.” This indicates that the new headquarters were to be at Arbuthnot’s own home, just off Piccadilly. Nobody else had a base in London: Parnell’s wife had died in 1712, and the others were unmarried.
In reality, the break-up did not take long. Parnell had perhaps foreseen what was to come, when recalling fondly the days when “the immortal Scriblerus Smild upon our endeavours, who now hangs his head in an obscure corner, pining for his friends that are Scattering over the face of the earth. Yet art thou still if thou art still alive O Scriblerus as deserving of our Lucubrations … still shall half the learned world be called after thy name” (that is, half the alleged learned community are dunces). Swift had already been condemned to the Siberia that Dublin appeared to him, and soon took up the post which was to be his only real preferment. Parnell was slower to resume his duties as Archdeacon of Clogher at a small village in County Tyrone, having become too accustomed to the pleasures of London. Gay came back disappointed from his hopeful visit to Hanover, without any prospect of a job. Arbuthnot lost not just his lodgings at St. James’s, but also an apartment at Chelsea College. He was removed without ceremony from the Commissioners for Building Fifty New Churches in London, in the equally unacceptable company of Christopher Wren and Edmond Halley. As for Pope, he needed to make his way as a professional writer (a mostly new category) and set about his onerous task of translating the Iliad, which would be his main preoccupation for the next six years.
Work seems to have stopped for a time on the Memoirs of Scriblerus. However, a few parerga came out to show that the same satirical impulses announced in 1712 were still alive and kicking. This is evident from Pope’s work as early as 1713, with a blistering attack on both the quack doctor and on the pretentious man of letters John Dennis. It was followed one year later by A Key to the Lock, a hilariously absurd effort by “Esdras Barnivelt, Apothecary” to demonstrate that the great mock-heroic poem was actually Jacobite propaganda. Barnivelt was one of a long line of surrogate authors invoked by the Scriblerians, culminating in Lemuel Gulliver. A year on, and a work attributed to “the Author of the Tale of a Tub” (really Pope, with possible help from Arbuthnot) came out as The Dignity, Use and Abuse of Glass-Bottles. All these display learned wit enlisted to strike at the group’s favourite targets in the world of learning. Meanwhile Parnell had compiled a dozen Scriblerian epigrams, first published in 1982, some directed against the Button’s clique of Ambrose Philips and Thomas Tickell. He was making progress on his version of the pseudo-Homeric Battle of the Frogs and Mice, which appeared in 1717, and aiding Pope on the apparatus to the Iliad. Mock epic was one of the tools employed to create the group’s brand. It is worth adding that Parnell made over his copy money from the bookseller to his colleague John Gay.
As for Gay’s activity, he set out his credentials from the task in hand with A Wonderful Prophecy (1712) on the panic created by the supposed street criminals know as the Mohocks. The Shepherd’s Week (1714) burlesques Philips’s pastorals and by implication endorses those of Pope. In 1715 Gay produced a lively genre-bending play, The What D’ye Call It, labelled a “A Tragic-Comic-Pastoral Farce,” once more making fun of stale conventions in the theatre. It is one of the most concentrated parodies that the team ever attempted. Around 1716, he was responsible for a classic Scriblerian exercise, unpublished until it came out in the Miscellanies. This was A True and Faithful Narrative of what pass’d in London during the General Consternation of all Ranks and Degrees of Mankind, which meets several criteria. It gives a quasi-journalistic account of a meteorological event (this time a comet); it fixes on the dramatic prediction of an apocalyptic happening by Willam Whiston; and it describes a complete breakdown of order in London, across the whole of society, until the supposed threat passes.
After John Bull, Arbuthnot’s most important contribution lay probably in two items. The first was a characteristic squib, The Longitude Examin’d (1712), attributed to the nonexistent Jeremy Thacker, ridiculing the fanciful proposals that had been advanced to solve the burning question of the moment. The second was perhaps written in 1714, but not published until its appearance in the Miscellanies as An Essay of the Learned Martinus Scriblerus, Concerning the Origine of Sciences, an exploitation of the anthropological ideas of Edward Tyson, shifted absurdly to prove that an ancient race of pygmies were responsible for the growth of human knowledge.
Some attempts were made to revive the original programme in 1715, when Pope moved from the country to live in Chiswick, closer to his associates. But Homer remained an obstacle, while the Jacobite rising meant that Catholics like Pope had to tread carefully, while Arbuthnot was under suspicion owing to the fact that his brother, a banker in Rouen and Paris, was paymaster for the campaign of James Edward Stuart. The next year showed a sharp increase in activity. From Pope’s hand came two scabrous pamphlets on the rogue publisher Edmund Curll, whose relevance to the ongoing project an be deduced from what their author wrote in April 1716 regarding “Item, a most ridiculous quarrel with a bookseller, occasioned by his having printed some satirical pieces on the Court under my name. I contrived to save a fellow a beating by giving him a vomit, the history whereof has been transmitted to posterity by a late Grub-street author….Item, new designs with some of my friends for a satirical work, which I must've formerly mentioned to you.” Also from this year, in all probability, are a few collaborative works. Some, like Memoirs of P.P. Clerk of this Parish, assault the recently deceased Bishop Gilbert Burnet—as did Homer in a Nut-shell and Notes and Memorandums of the Six Days, both of which have all the hallmarks of Arbuthnot’s mature tone, style and concerns in his satirical writing. He could well have been involved in God’s Revenge against Punning, which is one of a number of pamphlets stemming from the group that predict some large-scale eco disaster. It is possible that any or all of Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot could have been responsible for Mr. Joanidion Fielding His True and Faithful Account of the Strange and Miraculous Comet, a topic that yielded regular material for comic ends in the hands of Club members. On this occasion the prime target is John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal.
Soon after this crowded year came to an end, there arrived the tumultuous first night of Three Hours After Marriage at Drury Lane on 16 January 1717. This is a jocular farce with a wide range of targets that manages to pack some serious punches regarding the quality of metropolitan life. Calhoun Winton describes it as “the most Scriblerian of all Gay’s plays, and no doubt the one most embodying the advice of Arbuthnot and Pope.” In the hubbub that succeeded the premiere, critics were immediately able to identify the two friends who had assisted Gay in putting the drama together. In much of the onslaught that followed, those denouncing the play were in a position to blast “the Confederates,” to pick out “the Triumvirate,” and to write off the enterprise as mounted by “the Wags, who boldly did adventure / To club a Farce by Tripartite Indenture.” Here can be no need to emphasise the hidden implications of tat word “club.” John Dennis and John Woodward stand at the heart of the action, as they so often did: the cast also includes an actor manager who in some ways resembles Cibber, who actually took this role at the opening performance. The setting of The Confederates lies around Drury Lane and the Strand, where stood the shop of Bernard Lintot, who issued the text within a few days. All this suggests that everyone knew where they stood. The drama and the responses it elicited serve to illustrate a situation that could no longer be concealed: it was a straight fight— the Scriblerians versus the world, the translator of Homer and his allies against the Buttonian coterie of Addison, the irregular methods of Gay against the dogmatic certainties of Dennis and Cibber. Meanwhile, we can be sure that work was still continuing on the original Memoirs. A draft survives of a passage used in Chapter XIV of the published text: it is written in the hand of Arbuthnot, on a set used by Pope to compose his Iliad around the end of 1717.
Renewed Energy
In the following year Parnell made a brief return visit to London. He had sent Pope his version of The Battle of the Frogs and Mice,” with ancillary materials including notes by the Zoilus, the Greek scholar of the fourth century BC, notorious as “the scourge of Homer.” There was also a life of Zoilus, but along with pedantic remarks attributed to the critic, this is really part of the Scriblerian assault on minute textual scholarship. The life refers to “this celebrated Person, from whom so many derive their Character.” Since the ancient writer was “celebrated” chiefly for his nitpicking malignity, we don’t have to look for a modern equivalent. Zoilus is merely a stand-in for John Dennis. While Parnell was in England, he joined with Pope and Gay to send a doggerel invitation in the old Club manner to Lord Oxford to attend a reunion.
In 1719, a hotly contested “Smallpox War” broke out involving leading figures in the medical and scientific world of London, headed by Dr. John Freind and Dr. John Woodward. A crucial issued related to the merits of inoculation as a cure for the disease. Research in late years has shown that Arbuthnot was heavily involved in the efforts by the government to determine the efficacy of the treatment. Equally, examination of two comic pamphlets that were published at this time indicates that he is by far the likeliest author: One of them, The History and Adventures of Don Bilioso de l’Estomac, is a Cervantic parody, and the other, An Account of the Sickness and Death of Dr. W—dw—d, a savagely precise attack on the group’s bête noire. The second one in particular uses the familiar devices of learned wit, portraying the main character as falling into delirium (as did men like Curll, Dennis and Whiston in Scriblerian hands).
The Club members had certainly not given up on the rascally publisher. A pamphlet from 1720 describes Curll’s adoption of Judaism and a botched operation to circumcise him by members of the Jewish community in the City of London. It now survives only in its reincarnated form within the Miscellanies. There it appeared anonymously as A Strange but True Relation How Edmund Curll, of Fleetstreet, Stationer, Out of an Extraordinary Desire of Lucre, went into Change Alley, and was Converted from the Christian Religion by certain Eminent Jews, but not long afterwards it was included in a collection of Arbuthnot’s works. Like many other items in the canon of the group, it has been attributed to Swift on patently absurd grounds. Either Pope or Arbuthnot is a possible author. In its deliberate scholarly blunders, its unblushing scurrility, and its portrayal of hero’s descent into an abject state of misery, it follows a line consistently taken by the satirists.
1722 saw the appearance of Annus Mirabilis: or, the Wonderful Effects of the Approaching Conjunction of the Planets Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn. By Abraham Gunter, Philomath. A Well-Wisher to the Mathematics. This was short pamphlet in a mock astrological form, yet one more favourite device of the team. Successive editions of the Miscellanies attributed the item to “Dr. Arbuthnot and Mr. Pope,” although it also appeared among Miscellanies by Dr. Arbuthnot (Dublin, 1746). By 1750, however, it came to be ascribed to Swift, and was included in at least eighteen editions of the Dean’s works up to 1784, with several more in the nineteenth century. Recently the balance has swung to allotting the major responsibility to Arbuthnot, with Pope as possibly involved as co-author or editor of the 1732 version. The basic joke is to imagine the effects of a universal sex-change. Again the results lead to social chaos, and again the setting is London.
From 1723, we have A Supplement to Dean Sw--t’s Miscellanies: By the Author. The contents are sufficient to show that Swift did not write the pamphlet, but that one of the Clubmen did, most probably Arbuthnot. Among the three items contained, the most worthy of attention are the second, “An Essay upon an Apothecary”; and the third, “An Account of a Surprizing Apparition,” which describes a spectre that alarmed two bystanders as they made their way along Ludgate Circus. The year 1724 saw Reasons Humbly Offered by the Company Exercising the Trade and Mystery of Upholders, against Part of the Bill for the Better Viewing, Searching, and Examining Drugs, Medicines, &c. It is a satirical petition to the House of Commons by the undertakers. Arbuthnot was centrally concerned in the implementation of the act on behalf of the Royal College of Physicians: it has several times been reprinted as his work, with abundant justification. The same applies to an earlier effort, The Humble Petition Of the Colliers, Cooks, Cook-Maids, Black-Smiths, Jack-Makers, Brasiers, and Others (1716), directed to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London (this one was admitted to the Miscellanies). This too lived on chiefly in the pages of editions devoted to Swift’s writings. By now Arbuthnot was working up a head of steam as a comical enforcer of good sense in the face of inconveniences faced by Londoners. This is evidenced by The York Buildings Dragon (1725), a vivid and almost surrealist fantasy that spotlights the activities of the company, in particular the tower erected to lift water from the Thames to the residents of the centre of the city. It gives a ludicrous picture of several figures involved (with roles such as engineer, searcher for the longitude, surveyor, mathematician, even the tubthumping cleric John “Orator” Henley). One hovering on the edge of the satire is the Newtonian John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–17434), unaccountably listed in most catalogues as the author of the satire, rather than the victim of the collateral damage it wreaked. Scarcely any the work among the lesser known Scriblerian oeuvre displays such rhetorical brilliance.
A series of pamphlets published in 1726 and 1727 concern the arrival in London of “Peter the Wild Boy,” discovered wandering alone in a German forest. All have been attributed at times to members of the Club. Richard Nash adduces evidence to indicate that Swift may have been the author of It Cannot Rain but It Pours, while Gay may have had some connection. On the other hand, all the items appear in the Miscellaneous Works of Arbuthnot, and since the boy was consigned solely to the doctor for his care and education (so far as that was possible), there are additional grounds for thinking that these pamphlets may all spring from Arbuthnot, along with a follow-up, The Devil to Pay at St. James’s (1727). This last is accurately described by Nash as moving “rapidly and indiscriminately through a range of ‘news’ items.” These consist of:
Quarrels at the opera; Orator Henley; William Gibson, the Quaker; a carnival attraction known as "the flying man''; Peter, the wild boy; Mary Tofts, the rabbit breeder; the recent death of George I; the pending coronation of George II; the current popularity of the fabric “bumbazeen”; and, particularly, the recent return of Dean Swift to England and the Lilliputian pigs he is said to have brought with him.
The topics listed of course include matters of wide public interest. However, several were topics of obsessive concern to Arbuthnot at this date: he insistently recurs to Swift’s visit, while in addition to his role with the Wild Boy, he had become involved directly in the Mary Toft affair, and enjoyed a long connection with the opera (as one of Handel’s very closest friends when the composer came to England), as well as featuring Henley in The York Buildings Dragons and elsewhere. He had a more than average awareness of the change of monarch because he was the friend and physician to the new queen, Caroline (whom he presented to Swift in the previous year). We might note that in the last chapter of The Art of Sinking in Poetry (first published in March 1728, a collaboration between Pope and Arbuthnot), it is proposed that “flying man,” Violante, should be invited to join the combined patent theatres as a partner.
The Golden Years
The period between 1726 and 1730 is generally regarded as a halcyon age of English satire. This brief span of years saw the appearance of Gulliver’s Travels (1726); The Beggar’s Opera (1728); The Art of Sinking (1728); two versions of The Dunciad (1728, 1729); and A Modest Proposal. Swift’s two works are almost unique in that their setting is not in London, but nobody doubts their power, some which belongs to familiar Scriblerian devices (their uniquely untrustworthy narrators, for example, or the use of parallel histories in the third part of the Travels. There is no need to expatiate here on the way in which The Art of Sinking picks up on the original design to ridicule poor writing, or the sustained emphasis in The Dunciad on what had been identified in 1712 as “Editors, Commentators, and others, who are often Men of no Learning.” It is worth adding that the first three volumes of the Miscellanies did not just reprint some classical items, such as the Argument against Abolishing Christianity: they also introduced to the world several noteworthy shorter items. Among these were Pope’s finest ballad, Sandys’s Ghost, and many excellent poems by Swift, including the birthday verses to Stella. Other “novelties” would appear in the final volume, which emerged in 1732. All in all, the Miscellanies constituted the most extensive display of the pervasive Scriblerian idiom that would appear for a very long time to come.
Swift never again visited England after this time, and within a few years became gradually lost to dementia. The closest of his remaining prose works to the standard Club formula is An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities in the City of Dublin (1732), written in the guise of an extreme Whig citizen. Polite Conversation (1738) is a collection of stale clichés that has its Scriblerian moments, most obviously in the Introduction by the self-satisfied collector, Simon Wagstaff. Gay died in 1732 and Arbuthnot in 1735. This left Pope to carry on alone. His own productions were tending to move in a looser, less programmatic form of satire, as represented by the colloquial freedom of the Imitations of Horace. One last exercise in the old style is a prose pamphlet, A Master Key to Popery: or, A True and Perfect Key to Pope’s Epistle the Earl of Burlington, written around 1731 but not published until 1949. It seeks to show, in the straight-faced manner of A Key to the Lock, that “The Poet’s Design is two-fold, to affront all the Nobility & Gentry, and to Starve all the Artisans & Workmen of this Kingdom.”
The last few years of Pope’s life were devoted to a revision and expansion of The Dunciad (1742–43), along with the final completion and publication of The Memoirs of Scriblerus in 1741. We do not know how much of the text derived from the early phase of Club activity, or what share the participants took in its ultimate state. Most scholars believe that Pope had effective control of the project in its later phases, but that material by others, above all Arbuthnot, survive in the text. Chapter XVI presents the journeys of Martinus by way of an abstract of the travels of Gulliver, though whether Swift originally planned the story as an episode in the pedant’s career we cannot be sure.
Grub Street
The group did not invent the idea of Grub Street as a place given over to shoddy literature. Nevertheless, they did more than anyone else to solidify the concept by portraying its dwellers in a vividly realised concrete setting. The imaginative frontiers were drawn in A Tale of a Tub, starting in the dedication to Prince Posterity, but mainly coloured in as part of the opening section. Here is an anatomy of “the Writers of and for GRUB-Street,” and it is here that the narrating hack allocates his work to the “classis” (library shelf, hence department of literature)—here, too, that we find the Swiftian coinage “Grubean Sages,” already institutionalised in their own ambitious “Society.” The mean street has become part of the social fabric of London, a cultural resource to rival the prestige-bearing Gresham’s College and the fashionable literary coffee-house at Will’s. Swift manages a double play by providing the seedy author with an uncomprehending editor who supplies often redundant footnotes. One unintended irony occurred when Swift complained to his publisher about a key to the Tale assembled by Edmund Curll (1710) as “so perfect a Grubstreet piece.” It was, but in its way a useful confirmation of what the hack had been saying in his text.
A key text is obviously The Dunciad. While the dunces do not all represent Grub Street (some inhabit a loftier social sphere), there is a clear overlap. Moreover, the poem explores, among a variety of cultural issues, the topographic basis of London life, most specifically that of writers and the book trade. The “cell” which operates as the nerve centre of Dulness was originally located at Rag Fair, site of an old clothes market near the Tower of London. In later versions, the “Cave of Poverty and Poetry” was moved to an area adjoining Bedlam lunatic asylum. It is from hence that the whole range of popular forms of print culture emerge, whether the weekly miscellanies emanating from “Curll’s chaste press,” Lintot’s latest offerings, the dying speeches of criminals executed at Tyburn, flattering elegies by men like Elkanah Settle on the recently deceased, “New Year Odes” by the servile poet laureate, or other products of “the Grub-street race.”
Throughout the text, we are given constant reminders of the haunts of writers and booksellers, with a key motif allocated to the progress of the dunces through the city, in a direct parody of the annual Lord Mayor’s Show. Events are linked to particular segments of the town, so that urban ecology can provide a debased equivalent to legendary places (Helicon, Styx, Hades, Arcadia, Parnassus—the new “Haunt of the Muses” is Fleet debtors’ prison). By this means, The Dunciad gives a new focus to a critique of “the Illiterate World,” which had been running through Scriblerus productions from the start. Equally the Memoirs set out the group’s most sustained assault on misapplied learning, whether in science, medicine, scholarship, antiquarianism, or philosophy.
Yet the assault on Grub Street depends on a topographical hoax, or we might say a confidence trick. On one hand, the real dunces did not for the most part inhabit some of the less desirable corners of town to which the poem assigns them (Grub Street alleys, Rag Fair, Bedlam, Moorfields, the Fleet Prison and the surroundings of the Fleet Ditch, Bridewell, the redlight byways near Drury Lane, Hockley Hole, Monmouth Street, and Tyburn). Equally, the air of authority that the Club wishes to give derives in part from the locus of their activities—initially Arbuthnot’s apartment at St. James’s Palace, then his house in nearby Dover Street. It is true that the other members of the group were able to find temporary accommodation on either side of Piccadilly in what would soon become ”Clubland.” On his trips to London, for example, Swift regularly stayed in Pall Mall and the byways that ran off it, Rider Street, Bury Street and St. Albans Street, with one that he described as “a hedge lodging” and one (betrayingly) as “a little Grubstreet Lodging.” Here he was conveniently placed to walk in the Park, to meet his political patrons in Whitehall, and he could name the St. James’s Coffee-house as a poste restante to pick up letters from Stella Johnson and others. In 1711 the widow Vanhomrigh and her daughters (“Vanessa” was one) allowed him the use of a room at the home they rented in Bury Street: later the family moved to Great Rider Street. Swift was once supposed to preach before the Queen at St. James’ church, but it fell through. John Gay found refuge at the homes of his lofty patrons, Burlington House and later Queensberry House in Burlington Street. Parnell was staying at his “old Lodging in St James’s Place” in the summer of 1714, but had to return to Ireland later that year. As for Pope, he might pass a short spell with Charles Jervas in Cleveland Court, with Erasmus Lewis in Cork Street, or with Robert Digby in St. James’s Street—but he would never settle in central London, as he once planned.
What does this indicate? Swift could hobnob with his acquaintances at meetings of the elite Society club in Pall Mall, and call if he chose on Sir Andrew Fountaine in St. James’s Place. Pope could take a moonlit walk in the Park from his digs with Jervas, and refer facetiously in 1714 to his kind subscribers, admitting that “England is an excellent Climate, especially in the Latitude of St James’s & Pallmall.” But like Gay, both men remained sojourners even when residing in the city. They did not fully belong. None of these bachelors in the Club had a fixed abode of their own in this select quarter. It is their satire that effectively distances them from the plebeian world in which they force many of the dunces to operate.
Legacy
The most immediate influence of the Scribelerian mode on major literature was perhaps that visible in the work of Laurence Sterne. Features of the style appear in various forms of writing up to the present. Arguably, the most clearcut example is represented by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), in which the Martinus-like Dr. Charles Kinbote edits a long poem made up of four cantos in heroic couplets. By his laboured and obscurantist commentary, Kinbote casts the work of the poet John Shade into “the chequer’d shade” of dulness. Nabokov’s models in the eighteenth century would have understood his intent perfectly. This was the goal of their longstanding project, from its inception when the Club dined together in the days of Queen Anne.
For an argument, based on a very different selection of the evidence, that the cohesiveness of Scriblerian satire has been exaggerated, see Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770 (2015), Chapters 5 and 6. The best short history of the Club and its works remains that found in Charles Kerby-Miller (ed.), The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1950).