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Chapter 3 - Health and Sickness
- from Part I - Personal
- Edited by Joseph Hone, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
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- Book:
- Jonathan Swift in Context
- Published online:
- 02 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 09 May 2024, pp 18-25
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Summary
For Swift, sickness and health were personal, moral, and political. This chapter focuses on Swift’s articulation of disgust, in particular the disgust towards the female body that readers encounter in poems such as ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1732) and ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed’ (1734), as well as Gulliver’s revulsion at the monstrous Brobdingnagian breast. Swift depicted a sickeningly dirty world for a culture and class for whom politeness, civility and refinement were associated with cleanliness. In their own disgust and repulsion at Swift’s filthy rudeness, readers resist his satire’s collapse of dichotomies. The moral and the physical converge in his work as antinomies of health and sickness collide with oppositions of purity and filth.
Chapter 9 - Reputation
- from Part II - Critical fortunes
- Edited by Jack Lynch, Rutgers University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- Samuel Johnson in Context
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2011, pp 83-90
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Summary
REPUTA′TION. n.s. [reputation, Fr. from repute.] Credit; honour; character of good.
Versoy, upon the lake of Geneva, has the reputation of being extremely poor and beggarly. Addison.
Let’s begin with a paradox: in the monumental Dictionary that made his literary reputation in both senses of the word, the English author who gave his name to an age has little to say about reputation in its first neutral sense – “Credit” – and undermines his second definition – “honour” – with two ironic authorities he quotes to illustrate the word. Shakespeare’s Iago, having just destroyed the virtuous Cassio’s reputation, dismisses the concept entirely: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving: you have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser.” “Reputation” for “honest” Iago is only a social fiction. And the next quotation, Alexander Pope’s epigram from The Rape of the Lock – “At ev’ry word a reputation dies” – shows the true power of reputation’s “false imposition”: when it comes to the frivolous, cutthroat universe of polite drawing rooms, where surface appearance is all, reputation is a matter of life and death.
But perhaps this contradiction should not surprise us too much. That grand word lexicographer after all, is defined in the Dictionary as “harmless drudge.” Johnson concludes his preface to the completed volume with prideful despair:
In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much is likewise performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the authour, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. It may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed … I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise. (Works, 18:111–13)
This declaration of resolutely English authorial independence – most famously enacted in Johnson’s rejection of the Earl of Chesterfield’s belated offer of patronage in the famous letter of February 1755 – is shadowed by what the reputation that accompanies such achievement effaces: an interior self that is haunted by self-reproach, suffering, loss, and isolation. (Johnson’s wife Tetty died shortly before his labors ended. He never remarried.)
1 - Pope, self, and world
- Edited by Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope
- Published online:
- 28 April 2008
- Print publication:
- 06 December 2007, pp 14-24
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Summary
Behold it is my desire, that my adversary had written a book. Surely I would take it on my shoulder and bind it as a crown unto me.
(Job, xxxi, 35)I have heard Mr. Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of Cibber's pamphlets came into the hands of Pope, who said, “These things are my diversion.” They sat by him while he perused it, and saw his features writhen with anguish; and young Richardson said to his father, when they returned, that he hoped to be preserved from such diversion as had been that day the lot of Pope.
(Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, III, 188)Alexander Pope, eighteenth-century England's most prominent poet and his generation's most frequently portrayed celebrity, dominated the emergent literary marketplace as the first self-supporting, non-playwriting professional author (shrewd enough to rely on an aristocratic coterie of subscribers to get his start, yet savvy enough to supervise almost every aspect of the publication process), while fascinating his audience as a spectacle of deformity. Characterizing the life of a wit in the preface to the first published volume of his Works (1717) as “a warfare upon earth,” and complaining as a well-established poet and celebrity in his 1735 Epistle to Arbuthnot of “this long disease, my life,” which poetry and friendship served to ease, this protean master of the heroic couplet suffered a war between an exceptional mind and a body lambasted as “at once resemblance and disgrace” of humanity's “noble race.” Barely four and a half feet tall when grown, in Voltaire's words “protuberant before and behind” (current medical science attributes his deformity to childhood tuberculosis of the spine, otherwise known as Pott's disease, contracted from a wet nurse, while his contemporaries also considered trampling by a cow and excessive study as potential causes), socially disenfranchized for his Catholicism, Pope transformed his marginality into a source of creative self-reflection, self-possession, and self-legitimation. His life's work was the ultimate couplet of deformity and poetic form.