This chapter introduces the so-called ‘profession of letters’ during Swift’s lifetime: an idealised mode of study that included reading and conversing as much as publishing. Like his friend Alexander Pope, Swift defined his writing against a culture of production dependent on cheap popularity, the machinations of booksellers, and government bribery. Swift took aim against this culture in A Tale of a Tub (1704), which bristles with paratexts parodying standard-issue front matter. Unlike Pope, who implicitly acknowledged his status within the commercial print culture of the early eighteenth century, Swift, this chapter argues, always maintained ambivalence towards the literary marketplace.

This chapter examines what ‘popular’ and ‘fiction’ may have meant to Defoe before ‘popular fiction’ was a generic category, and then looks at Defoe’s own fictions as an anxious attempt to avoid alignment with those established forms of literature known and demonized as ‘romances’ and ‘novels’. Defoe takes the sex out and puts the ‘history’ in, along with a large moral dose of religious prophylaxis; the whore biography and criminal/pirate life were alike turned into moralistic stories of economic redemption. Yet, given his status as a businessman and exile from elite literary circles, Defoe’s resistance to popular fiction was ambivalent, and he was always aware of the supplementary pleasures of his texts. The individual survival stories, with their incident-rich, class-dissolving, non-classical mode of contemporary, evolving prose, were of high price but often rendered ‘popular’ by the publishing industry itself, which filleted them for chapbook consumption by any literate person.

Juvenal was the satirist’s satirist, a writer whose output consisted only of poems in that genre. An uncompromising cataloguer of the crimes of Romans, Juvenal was also intensely masculine, his oeuvre implicitly addressed to men, with one satire (vi) devoted to the shameful derelictions of women (the source of much unimaginatively imitative misogyny during the Restoration). Juvenal’s obscenity, and the exclusion of women from classical learning, added to the sense that Juvenal was not suitable source material for aspirant women writers. This chapter, however, working from Penny Wilson’s sense of an “economy of makeshifts” in women’s engagement in classical literature, examines the cracks in that monolithic facade, starting with Juvenal’s own text, which contains an oddly sympathetic female satirist. Women did read Juvenal fairly extensively, albeit often in translation, and women writers did confront, adapt, and rework Juvenalian phrasing and attitudes in a wide range of forms – poetry, fiction, journalism, diaries. While there was no linear process of rapprochement between women writers and the foundational text of male satire, nor any single “female” mode of responding to that legacy, women writers found a surprising number of ways to absorb and transform it in their own satiric work.

In the year before he died, Pope planned an epic on the story of Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, who, in patriotic legend, had voyaged from Troy to found Britain. Brutus consists of a fragment, one sentence long:

This is not the familiar Pope of expertly weighted ironic couplets, but a Pope of epic aspirations, engaging with the national myth in Miltonic guise. The fragment is a reverse of Shelley’s later sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, the toe of a monument never built; so far as the verse goes, nothing beside remains. Yet Brutus represents a key element of Pope’s imagination, harnessing the energy of classical legend for national purposes, as Virgil used Aeneas to found Rome through the appropriation of Greek epic. Where Keats consoled himself with the thought that he would be among the English poets after his death, Pope’s is the rare instance of a poetic career which seems single-mindedly devoted from the outset to ensuring a position in the kind of canon which this book represents. Labouring like his own ‘Patient Chief’, Pope had always appeared determined to build a literary monument – akin to the ‘monumentum aere perennius’, the ‘monument more lasting than bronze’, that Horace claimed to have erected (Odes 3. 30, line 1) – as ‘My Countrys Poet’, however vexed his Englishness sometimes needed to be.

Poetry and punishment in the early works

Punishment was more physical, and more visible, in Pope's day than it is in ours. The pillory was still in use at various locations around London, as were public whippings. Eight times a year those condemned to death were taken from Newgate Prison to Tyburn to be hanged: crowds lined the route and gathered for the show. Crime and punishment spawned their own literature, and Pope's lifetime coincided with an explosion in crime-related writing of all kinds. “Proceedings” at the Old Bailey were published regularly from the 1680s. Trials and punishments were widely reported in the newspapers; criminal biography (in both documentary and fictional forms) flourished. On the other side, as it were, there was considerable professional crossover between law and writing: many writers were educated at the Inns of Court, including such notable friends of Pope as Congreve, Rowe, and Warburton. Pope was friendly with several lawyers; one of them was celebrated in “Presentation Verses to Nathaniel Pigott,” and another, William Murray, later the Earl of Mansfield, was the addressee of the Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated.

Owen Ruffhead, Pope's first official biographer and himself a barrister, declared that Pope intended his work as a “supplement to the public laws,” and the metaphorical “lash” of satire was regularly invoked as his model. But Pope's attitude to crime and the law was actually much more complex than this. In an early letter to Henry Cromwell (1 November 1708 [Corr, i, pp. 51-2]), Pope jokingly compared his entry into print to a public execution, and likened Tonson's Miscellanies to the regular collections of malefactors' lives put out by the Ordinary (Chaplain) of Newgate.

A key moment in Fielding’s first novel finds Parson Adams holed up (as often) in an inn, reading his beloved manuscript of Æschylus. Suddenly he notices Fanny Goodwill, the virtuous dairymaid under his protection, swoon: 'Adams jumped up, flung his Æschylus into the Fire, and fell a roaring to the People of the House for Help'. At once Joseph Andrews, on his way home to see Fanny and providentially located in the next room, appears, and the lovers are for the time being reunited. But the manuscript, 'his dear Friend, which was the Work of his own Hands, and had been his inseparable Companion for upwards of thirty Years' (155), is gone for ever.

We might think about this moment in relation to Henry James’s point, in the classic essay ’the Art of Fiction', written in 1884, that there is no essential distinction between novels of incident and novels of character. True, an early reader of the novel, Thomas Gray, finds himself led to separate the aspects in a letter to Richard West of 8 April 1742: ’the incidents are ill laid … but the characters have a great deal of nature, which always pleases even in her lowest shapes. Parson Adams is perfectly well; so is Mrs Slipslop'. It is also true that the understanding of 'character' here does not have a subtle, extended, Jamesian depth, but is derived from the principle Fielding learned in comic drama, that selfhood has to be quickly recognizable and not subject to much change or development. The crabstick-wielding Adams, with his finger-snapping, forgetfulness, indomitable energy ('brisk as a Bee'), sexual innocence (despite his prodigious brood of children), fearless generosity of spirit, and mildly culpable pride in learning, was always the 'character' that readers were tempted to extract from the book.

Systematic literature reviews

Methods for reviewing and evaluating the scientific literature range from highly formal, quantitative information syntheses to subjective summaries of observational data. The purpose of a systematic literature review is to evaluate and interpret all available research evidence relevant to a particular question. In this approach a concerted attempt is made to identify all relevant primary research, a standardized appraisal of study quality is made and the studies of acceptable quality are systematically (and sometimes quantitatively) synthesized. This differs from a traditional review in which previous work is described but not systematically identified, assessed for quality and synthesized.

Advantages

There are two major advantages of systematic reviews (or meta-analyses). Firstly, by combining data they improve the ability to study the consistency of results (that is, they give increased power). This is because many individual studies are too small to detect modest but important effects (that is, they have insufficient power). Combining all the studies that have attempted to answer the same question considerably improves the statistical power.

Secondly, similar effects across a wide variety of settings and designs provide evidence of robustness and transferability of the results to other settings. If the studies are inconsistent between settings, then the sources of variation can be examined.

Thus, while some people see the mixing of ‘apples and oranges’ as a problem of systematic reviews, it can be a distinct advantage because of its ability to enhance the generalizability and transferability of data.

Disadvantages

Without due care, however, the improved power can also be a disadvantage. It allows the detection of small biases as well as small effects.

Readers will naturally wish to know how good the reviewed research is and why you have excluded some studies that address the question at issue. In both situations you need to explain your judgments, which will usually be based on your assessment of study quality and applicability.

The process will usually need to be done in two stages; firstly, an initial screen for basic eligibility criteria and secondly, a detailed appraisal of quality. The eligibility screen might ask whether the study addresses the question and achieves some minimal quality criteria. For example, for an intervention question this might be evidence of a control group. This process is outlined in Figure 3.1.

Standardizing the appraisal

Providing an explicit and standardized appraisal of the studies that have been identified is important for two reasons. Firstly, a systematic review should try to base its conclusions on the highest-quality evidence available. To do this requires a valid and standardized procedure to select from the large pool of studies identified so that only the relevant and acceptable quality studies are included in the review. Secondly, it is important to convey to the reader the quality of the studies included as this indicates the strength of evidence for any recommendation made.

What study features should be assessed?

Overall, the study features that are most important to assess are those that involve selection and measurement bias, confounding and follow-up of participants. In Part 2 these features are examined for each question type under the following headings:

1. Has selection bias (including allocation bias in randomized controlled trials (RCTs)) been minimized?

2. Have adequate adjustments been made for residual confounding?

3. Have the final outcomes been adequately ascertained?

4. Has measurement or misclassification bias been minimized?