the myth of scriblerus

The Myth of Scriblerus

A S H L E Y M A R S H A L L

Scholars rarely discuss eighteenth-century satire without invoking theScriblerians. The importance of the Scriblerus Club has been almostuniversally assumed by modern critics, many of whom have taken forgranted that its members believed they were carrying out a joint enterprisethroughout much of their writing lives. Scholars now apply the ‘Scriblerian’label to many very disparate works, while paradoxically treating Scribleriansatire as a distinct, widely influential mode of writing. But where exactly didthe concept of ‘Scriblerian’ writing come from? Investigation of the Club and‘Scriblerus’ in the eighteenth century yields highly problematical results, andsuggests that we ought to reconsider both the terminology and the broaderassumptions behind it. Some basic questions need to be asked. Was the Clubas significant to its members and to their readers as scholars have supposed?Did a well-defined Scriblerian ‘mode’ exist in the eighteenth century? Andcan we, as some critics have suggested, legitimately identify some twentieth-century writers as ‘Scriblerian’?

I. Modern Uses of the Term ‘Scriblerian’

When scholars describe a satire as ‘Scriblerian’, or discuss Scriblerian targetsand techniques, what exactly do they mean? They certainly include underthe banner of ‘Scriblerian satire’ those texts written by Club members andsigned ‘Martinus Scriblerus’. Five such works exist: Peri Bathous (1728), theDunciad Variorum (1729), the very minor Origine of the Sciences and VirgiliusRestauratus (both 1732), and The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, andDiscoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1741).1 Many critics extend the ‘Scriblerian’label to everything written by the core Club members – Pope, Swift, Gay,Arbuthnot and Parnell. By this account, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), The Beggar’sOpera (1728) and the other versions of the Dunciad (1728; 1742; 1743) are themajor Scriblerian successes, though the label is also applied to a long list ofother works, from A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gay’s Wine (1708) to Stradlingversus Stiles (1728), Memoirs of P. P. Clerk of this Parish (1728)2 and Polly(1729).3

The Scriblerian label is applicable to these works, critics maintain, becausethe Club members had a shared literary agenda. Michael Seidel argues thatthey were motivated by a mutual desire ‘to create a composite satiric project inwhich they would represent under the rubric of a modern scribbling pedant’s

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 31 No. 1 (2008)

© 2008 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

memoirs all they viewed in the age as corrupt, banal, stupid and tasteless’.4

The Club members had a common enemy, and those works in which(collaboratively or individually) they attacked that enemy can be safely dubbed‘Scriblerian’. So strong was the collective spirit of the Club, scholars contend,that the short-lived association produced great and lasting results. BonamyDobrée explained in 1959 that it ‘had numerous offshoots’, and Maynard Mackhas claimed that later texts (for example, Gulliver’s Travels) ‘eventually werehatched’ from its meetings.5 According to these accounts, the Club providedthe intellectual energy that inspired the masterpieces of its members.

Critics sometimes use ‘Scriblerian’ more broadly to refer to a ‘type’ ofwriting – one originating with the Club members but appropriated anddeveloped by others. Brean S. Hammond, for example, has argued for a‘satiric mode that we can confidently designate “Scriblerian” ’. For Hammond,Scriblerian satire has ‘relative autonomy from the historical moment thatproduced it, so that it might make sense to say of Beckett or of Borgesthat their satire is in some respects Scriblerian’.6 Patricia Carr Brückmannhas likewise promulgated a concept of ‘Scriblerian literature’ that spanscenturies.7 Following Hammond and Brückmann, Christopher Fanningasserts that Scriblerian writing ‘has a tradition of its own, fromcontemporaries such as Samuel Garth through immediate successors such asHenry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, continuing into the twentieth centurywith the likes of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov’.8

I would point out that Garth’s best-known work, The Dispensary, appeared in1699 (when Pope was eleven), and that he died in 1718 (four years after theClub’s few meetings). The reader can determine for him- or herself the extentto which Garth would have been influenced by Pope’s circle, and whether ornot ‘Scriblerian’ has any real meaning when extended as far as writers suchas Borges and Nabokov. In any case, the term’s broad application indicatesthat it now carries some meaning independent of the Club. What are thecharacteristics of Scriblerian writing, as conceived by modern scholars?

Few critics offer a precise definition of ‘Scriblerian satire’, but they dogenerally list what they understand to be its qualities. Maximillian E. Novak,for example, maintains that Three Hours after Marriage is ‘a typical product ofthe Scriblerians in its satire on pedantry’.9 Other critics use the term moregenerally to characterise works designed, for example, to ‘deal with a worldthat is envisioned as foolish and corrupt’.10 For yet others, a Scriblerian workis ‘a parody of serious forms of art’, or one that participates in the ‘crusadeagainst modern dullness’.11 Hammond explains the form as ‘a harder-hittingand more muscular attempt to distinguish the chaff from the bran ofcontemporary learning’, a type of satire ‘aimed at the new scientificmethodology that was being injudiciously applied (as the Scribleriansthought) to the entire world of learning’.12 Although the meaning of‘Scriblerian’ is inconsistent and usually rather vague, the term has enteredour critical vocabulary and is used as if it were self-explanatory: scholarsspeak of ‘the Scriblerian formulation’, ‘the Scriblerian moment’, and ‘the

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© 2008 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Scriblerian milieu’, and they label works as ‘pre-Scriblerian’ (for example,Swift’s Tale and Gay’s Pastorals) and even ‘neo-Scriblerian’.13 These usagespresuppose the existence of a distinct satiric form, a readily identifiable ‘type’– but how similar is the frivolous satire of Three Hours after Marriage to theapocalyptic fourth book of the Dunciad?

Critics tend to presume that the Club exerted significant influence onits members, that we know who those members were, and that Pope’scontemporaries (and immediate successors) identified Scriblerian writingas a well-known, easily recognisable form. But hardly anyone has worriedabout what knowledge we actually have of a ‘Club’ or of eighteenth-centuryconcepts of ‘Scriblerian’ writing. Evidence for the Club’s importance in theeighteenth century turns out to be disconcertingly meagre, and the use of theterminology is virtually nonexistent.

II. ‘Scriblerus’ in the Eighteenth Century

What do we know about the Scriblerus Club, and how do we know it? I wantto look in particular at the following:

(1) What Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot and Parnell say about the Club;(2) Commentary from contemporaries, friends and early biographers; and(3) Eighteenth-century works publicly associated with ‘Scriblerus’.

What do our ‘Scriblerians’ say about the Club and its agenda? Pope isusually regarded as the group leader, so I begin with him. On 23 October 1713,he writes to Gay that ‘Dr. Swift much approves what I proposed, even to thevery title, which I design shall be, The Works of the Unlearned, publishedmonthly, in which whatever book appears that deserves praise, shall bedepreciated ironically.’14 Nothing else is said of this work in the survivingcorrespondence, and based on Pope’s letters we have no definite reason toconnect this project with the Club of 1714. By the next year, Pope is talkingnot of The Works of the Unlearned but of the life of Scriblerus. In a letter toSwift (18 June 1714), he writes that Arbuthnot imagines that the Dean’s(Pope, Correspondence, i.231)

only design 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, and I wishI could promise so well of you. The top of my own ambition is to contribute tothat great work, and I shall translate Homer by the bye.

Pope’s enthusiasm is evident, but the letter is dated roughly a week after thelast known Club meeting (of which more shortly); the long delay before theappearance of ‘Martinus Scriblerus’ in print (1728) suggests that his fervourabated. Swift’s reply does not echo Pope’s excitement about the project: ‘Imust be a little easy in my mind before I can think of Scriblerus’.15

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Parnell and Pope write together to Arbuthnot on 2 September 1714,referring to the group as a thing of the past. ‘It is a pleasure to us’, Parnell says(Pope, Correspondence, i.249-50),

to recollect the satisfaction we enjoyed in your company, when we used to meetthe dean and Gay with you. [...] Then it was that the immortal Scriblerus smiledupon our endeavors, who now hangs his head in an obscure corner, pining forhis friends that are scattering over the face of the earth.

This passage is all we ever hear from Parnell on the subject, and in whatfollows, Pope explains that Parnell (Pope, Correspondence, i.250)

mentions the name of Scriblerus to avoid my reproaching him, yet is heconscious to himself how much the memory of that learned phantom which isto be immortal, is neglected by him at present. But I hope the revolutions ofstate will not affect learning so much as to deprive mankind of the lucubrationsof Martin, to the increase of which I will watch all next winter.

Like Swift’s response (‘I must be a little easy’), Arbuthnot’s reply (7

September) is melancholic, and neither man shows any interest in pursuingthe Scriblerus project. Arbuthnot had earlier encouraged Swift to ‘rememberMartin’,16 but the doctor’s attachment to the enterprise appears quickly tohave diminished. A nineteenth-century editor of Pope’s letters reflected that‘The vein of Scriblerus was to make merry with the follies of mankind, andthe present crisis was too serious for jest’17 – but the crisis soon passed, and wehave nothing to suggest that happier times revived the old enthusiasm.

Swift mentions ‘Martin’ only on one other occasion, in a letter toArbuthnot of 3 July 1714 (Swift, Correspondence, i.630):

To talk of Martin in any hands but yours, is a folly. You every day give betterhints than all of us together could do in a twelve-month; and to say the truth,Pope who first thought of the hint has not genius at all to it in my mind. Gay istoo young; Parnell has some ideas of it, but is idle.

Although Pope’s 1714 correspondence reflects the greatest zeal for‘Scriblerus’, Swift gives most of the credit to Arbuthnot – whose response toPope’s prodding suggests that he had cooled on the project by the end of theyear.18 Exactly how the enterprise was conceived and by whom, at this or anyother time, we have no way of knowing. Swift’s letters contain no furtherreferences to Scriblerus, to Martin, or to the Club. Despite Lester M. Beattie’sclaim that the Dean’s ‘experience as a Scriblerian’ must have shaped hisoutput in the 1720s,19 the scarcity of comment even in 1714 undercuts thenotion that he identified strongly with the Club or saw it as important to hiscareer – now conducted largely from Ireland.

Gay refers to the group meetings in his letters, but only twice and thenvery much en passant. Compare David Nokes’s assessment of the Club’s

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importance to Gay – he ‘felt himself privileged to be included in a small butinfluential group’20 – with the writer’s own remarks (our only insight into hispoint of view): ‘The Dean & I met as usual at Dr Arbuthnot’s & the Earle wasangry that we did not make him the usual Compliment, Martin still is underthe Doctor’s hands, & flourishes’ (to Parnell; April-May 1714); and: ‘We hadthe Honour of the Treasurer’s Company last Saturday when we sat uponScriblerus’ (to Swift; June 1714). Gay may have felt fortunate to be ‘included’,but he does not say so.21

A basic but important question presents itself at this point. Did theScriblerus Club exist? The query smacks of absurdity, but we need to thinkseriously about the answer. None of our Scriblerians describes himself as partof the ‘Scriblerus Club’. They refer on occasion to Martin, to Scriblerus, and tothe Memoirs. Arbuthnot writes to Swift (12 June 1714) that, ‘I am to meet ourclub at the Pall Mall’, and one of the verse invitations is signed ‘by order of ye

Club’22 (though we should remember that ‘club’ meant many different thingsin the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and usually carried only veryinformal connotations). Later eighteenth-century commentators referred tothis coterie as ‘the Scriblerus (or Scribblerus) Club’,23 but that particular labelseems to be an ex post facto appellation. Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot andParnell may have thought of themselves as the Scriblerus Club – but we haveno record of it. Neither do we have much evidence that they consideredthemselves ‘Scriblerians’. I have found only a single usage of the term bythe Club members: Pope concludes a 1714 letter to Arbuthnot with a shortpoem, composed by him and Parnell, ‘after the Scriblerian manner’ (11 July1714; Pope, Correspondence, i.235). Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock’s editionof Parnell’s works includes a section entitled ‘Scriblerian Epigrams’ – butParnell’s title was only ‘Epigrams’. The descriptor was added by the editors, asthey point out in a note in the textual apparatus.24 Whether Parnell thoughtof the poems as ‘Scriblerian’ is anyone’s guess, but he did not employ theterm. Making assumptions in this realm is dangerously easy. Seidel goes so faras to claim that Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay and Parnell ‘mockingly namedthemselves the Scriblerians’ (249), but he does not cite a source and I havefound nothing to suggest that any of the Club members applied the label tohimself or to the others.

Beyond a few references in letters, we have several of the verse ‘invitations’by which Oxford was summoned to the meetings. For example:

The Doctor and Dean, Pope, Parnell and GayIn manner submissive most humbly do pray,That your Lordship would once let your Cares all aloneAnd Climb the dark Stairs to your Friends who have none:To your Friends who at least have no Cares but to please youTo a good honest Junta that never will teaze you.

From the Doctor’s Chamberpast eight.25



What can we learn from such verses? Beyond the fact that Arbuthnot, Swift,Pope, Parnell and Gay wanted their friend to spend a few evenings with them,the poems suggest very little. Two of the invitations are dated 1718, but thatneed not suggest a revival of the activities from 1714 (whatever thoseactivities included) – they make no mention of Martin or the Memoirs. CharlesKerby-Miller printed the 1718 invitations for the first time in 1950, and helabels them ‘Scriblerian Verses, 1718’. (George Sherburn prints the sameinvitations in his edition of Pope’s letters, but alters the heading, labellingthem ‘Scriblerus to Oxford’.) These titles, however, are fabrications: the sourcemanuscripts to which Kerby-Miller refers have no such headings. One has thefollowing endorsement: ‘Verses |Mr Pope. |Mr Parnel |Mr Gay July 8. 1718

|Mr E. Blynt came with the<m>’ (with some loss of text under the guard). Theother is simply dated ‘July 8: 1718’.26 The editors’ silent additions of‘Scriblerian’ and ‘Scriblerus’ are, at best, misleading.

The verse invitations are playful and informal – and of no use whateverin elucidating the particulars of the meetings. Robert J. Allen claims that themen ‘enjoyed Scriblerus as a relief from, rather than a further occupationwith, party matters’,27 and the relative absence of political satire from workssigned ‘Martinus Scriblerus’ lends some credence to his position. Kerby-Millerand other more recent scholars have speculated in the other direction,assuming that Pope and Swift saw the Scriblerus Club as the Tory counterpartto the group of Whig wits known as the Kit-Cat Club, and that the agenda ofthe ‘Scriblerians’ was predominantly political. Different critics have arguedfor a lesser or greater degree of seriousness or frivolity – but the bottom line isthat we have absolutely no reliable knowledge about the nature of the Club’sgatherings.

What do we know about the meetings? The members’ correspondenceconfirms that they met together at least four times. ‘The only meetings thatwe can specifically date’, Sherburn has observed, ‘took place in 1714 on 20

March, 14 April, 5 and 12 June’.28 We know very little about what was talkedabout, and neither do we know how much substantive discussion went on inthe meetings. Most of our knowledge about the 1714 ‘club’ comes from Pope’sfriend and admirer Joseph Spence. In an entry dated ‘1728?’ by James M.Osborn (without explanation), Spence says that

The design of the Memoirs of Scriblerus was to have ridiculed all the false tastesin learning, under the character of a man of capacity enough that had dippedin every art and science, but injudiciously in each. It was begun by a club ofsome of the greatest wits of the age: Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Oxford, the Bishopof Rochester, Mr. Pope, Congreve, Arbuthnot, Swift, and others. Gay often heldthe pen, and Addison liked it very well and was not disinclined to come into it.29

This account is problematic. Osborn dates Spence’s first interaction withPope, for example, sometime around 1726-1727 (i.xxiii-xxvii) – more than adecade after the Club’s dissolution. Osborn trusts Spence as a generally

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reliable witness, though he does observe that, ‘What Spence could not protecthimself against was ignorance, prejudice, or error on the part of the speakerswhose words he wrote down’ (i.xxxi). In any case, Spence describes events of1714 as told to him in 1728 or later, written down at an unknown date andpossibly edited sometime thereafter.

Sherburn relies on Spence in his discussion of the ‘Scriblerus Club’, butonly selectively. He asserts without explanation that although we can trustmost of the account, Spence is wrong to name Congreve among the Clubmembers. In fact, both Congreve and Addison were in London at the time andcould very well have been present at the meetings. Except for Swift and Gay,John C. Hodges suggests, Congreve was ‘perhaps Pope’s most intimate literaryfriend’.30 And Peter Smithers describes Addison, in 1712-1714, as ‘the naturalmonarch of a literary kingdom’, deeply interested and involved in currentsocieties of wits.31 If we are to accept Spence as a source we have no right topick and choose what we believe from his account, unless we have specificevidence ruling out or confirming details. Even if his account is true, it doesnot tell us much. Following the passage quoted above, he records that theoriginal plan ‘was stopped by some of the gentlemen’s being dispersed orotherwise engaged, about 1715’ (i.56). Spence’s references to Scriblerus, hereand elsewhere,32 are to a particular project, not to an ongoing Club – let aloneone that had a fundamental formative influence on its members. What heactually says is that several writers met a few times to talk about writing thememoirs of Scriblerus as a joint enterprise.

Pope’s early biographers tell us less. Pope is generally believed to be the‘leader’ of the group, in part because (as far as we know) he was primarilyresponsible for publishing the Memoirs – but how important did his firstbiographers believe the Club to be to his writing life? His 1744 biographerincludes one allusion to Martinus, in a passing reference to the Dunciad,33 and‘Scriblerus’ is also referred to only once in William Ayre’s Memoirs of the Lifeand Writing of Alexander Pope (1745).34 The Remarks on ’Squire Ayre’s Memoirs(also 1745) does not mention Scriblerus, and neither does the entry on Pope inthe Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) or H. N. Dilworth’sThe Life of Alexander Pope (1759). A decade later, Owen Ruffhead’s biographylinks Scriblerus only to the Memoirs (written by ‘Pope, Arbuthnot, andothers’). Ruffhead mentions the Club itself once in a footnote; of the plan towrite a collaborative satire, he says, ‘the separation of our author and hisfriends, which soon after happened, with the death of one, and the infirmitiesof the other, put a final period to their design’.35 Joseph Warton’s Essay on theGenius and Writings of Pope (4th edn, 1782) states – without explanation – thatArbuthnot ‘had a very large share’ in the Memoirs of Scriblerus.36 He neithermentions the Club nor connects the Memoirs to an earlier friendship betweenits members.

Samuel Johnson, too, seems oblivious to the Club’s supposed importance.Unimpressed by its achievements, he attributes to it only the Memoirs. The lifeof Scriblerus extends, he says, ‘only to the first book of a work, projected in



concert, by Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot, who used to meet in the time ofQueen Anne’. His account of the Memoirs is withering:

If the whole may be estimated by this specimen, which seems to be theproduction of Arbuthnot, with a few touches perhaps by Pope, the want ofmore will not be much lamented; for the follies which the writer ridicules are solittle practiced, that they are not known; nor can the satire be understood but bythe learned: he raises phantoms of absurdity, and then drives them away. Hecurses diseases that were never felt. For this reason the joint production of threegreat writers has never obtained any notice from mankind; it has been littleread, or when read has been forgotten, as no man could be wiser, better, ormerrier by remembering it. The design cannot boast of much originality.37

Though Rawson has argued that Johnson’s criticism of the Scriblerianshas to do with his opposition to Fielding,38 Johnson does not appear to havethat writer in mind. Fielding’s name is not mentioned in the volume fromwhich this passage comes, and though Johnson certainly criticised him, Ihave found no evidence that he associated Fielding with the Scriblerians.Johnson’s comments (called ‘sweeping and ill-considered’ by Kerby-Miller,p.66) suggest that his low estimation of the Club’s achievement derives fromhis dismissive evaluation of the Memoirs as satire. His remarks also indicatethat he saw no connection between the Club and the later achievements ofits members.

At this point we need to ask a broader question: who was ‘Scriblerus’ in theeighteenth century? Looking at the works signed by ‘Scriblerus’ will help usunderstand his importance to the Club members as well as to contemporaryreaders. Rawson has claimed that, by the late eighteenth century, ‘TheScriblerus name would be familiar from several works by members of thegroup as well as from those Fielding plays purporting to be annotated by H.Scriblerus Secundus’ (Satire and Sentiment, 180n.). If we are going to discussScriblerian satire as a recognisable and influential mode of writing, we need avery precise timeline. We need also to attend to the facts: how many workswere publicly linked to Scriblerus, by whom were they written, and what didthey do?

The first known publication associated with ‘Scriblerus’ is the Memoirs ofthe Life of Scriblerus (1723). Because the piece did not originate in the Club,and because it appeared well before any of the publications of ‘Martinus’, ithas posed problems for scholars. Beattie has argued that the text was writtenby ‘someone who knew vaguely of the doings of the club’, and that it was a‘mysterious foreshadowing’ of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (p.264,263).39 A slow-going narrative of the life of Tim Scriblerus, the work is usuallybelieved to have been written by a spy/imitator who wanted to undercutthe Club’s planned production but whose performance is lacklustre incomparison with the output of the ‘real’ Scriblerians. Uninspired or not, thework’s existence raises uncomfortable questions. If the author stole theidea from the Club, then he apparently sat on it for a decade before producing

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his feeble attack; if he did not thieve it, then we need to entertain thepossibility that ‘Scriblerus’ was little more than a handy pseudonym variouslyemployed by hacks and by great writers-to-be to mock the pretensions of theirenemies.

The next work connected with ‘Scriblerus’ is Peri Bathous, which appearedin volume three of the 1728 Pope–Swift Miscellanies.40 The word ‘Scriblerus’appears only twice in that 483-page compilation, on the title page of PeriBathous and in a fine-print footnote at the start of the same text, where theauthor forecasts the arrival of the life of Martinus Scriblerus. (Promises aside,readers had to wait more than a decade.) Pope and Swift remark in the prefacethat on some of the collected pieces they worked with Gay and Arbuthnot;they do not specify the works or the nature of the collaboration. Is the Pope–Swift Miscellanies a ‘Scriblerian’ volume?41 In fact, that descriptor is extremelymisleading. Pope, Swift, Gay and Arbuthnot knew and helped each other –they were recognised and often identified in print as friends and allies – butthere is no hint that this collection was the product of a shared enterprisebegun fourteen years prior in something called the Scriblerus Club. And PeriBathous is followed by a series of Swift’s poems, beginning with Cadenus andVanessa, Baucis and Philemon and A Description of a City Shower – none ofwhich has significant commonalities with Peri Bathous. Neither these poemsnor the other texts in the volume are ‘Scriblerian’ in even the loosest sense ofthe word.

What would readers have thought of Scriblerus after the publication ofPeri Bathous in the Miscellanies? Two authors did connect ‘Scriblerus’ to Popeand Swift. In The Metamorphosis: a Poem, Shewing the Change of Scriblerusinto Snarlerus (anonymous; 1728), both Pope and Swift are accused of malice;in Gulliveriana (1728), Jonathan Smedley lists ‘Scriblerus’ as one of severalpseudonyms for the Dean (others are ‘Examiner’, ‘Drapier’, ‘Bickerstaff’,‘Remarker’, ‘Journalist’ and ‘Sonnetteer’) and for Pope (the ‘Scriblerus ofTwickenham’). At this point the term seems little more than a sobriquet – andnot a complimentary one.

Before 1729, the career of Scriblerus was undistinguished and obscure.Between the publication of the Pope–Swift Miscellanies and 1730 (whenFielding began using ‘Scriblerus Secundus’), four works were signed by orinvoked Scriblerus. Only the first satire was written by a member of Pope’scircle:

(1) The Dunciad Variorum (1729): prolegomenon and notes by ‘MartinusScriblerus’;

(2) The Curliad (1729): does not invoke Scriblerus on the title page. LinksScriblerus to Pope and to the Dunciad;

(3) Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility examin’d (1729): attacks theDunciad, which Pope published ‘under an Appellation very proper tohimself, I mean that of Scriblerus’ (p.15). Of the ‘Club’ members, Popealone is mentioned;



(4) John Roberts, An answer to Mr. Pope’s preface to Shakespeare (1729): signedat the end (p.49) by ‘Anti-Scriblerus Histrionicus’.

Only these works and Peri Bathous would have been associated with‘Scriblerus’ when Fielding attached the pseudonym ‘Scriblerus Secundus’ toThe Author’s Farce and Tom Thumb in 1730. His use of that signature has beentaken as evidence that he was ‘consciously and ostentatiously grasping thecoattails’ of Pope, Swift and Gay,42 but if that is the case, then we mustbe thinking primarily of the 1729 Dunciad. Nothing in print had connectedGay with Scriblerus, including The Beggar’s Opera. Neither have we reasonto believe that contemporaries would have identified the other major successof the 1720s, Gulliver’s Travels, with Scriblerus: the pseudonym appearsnowhere in that text, which came out before Peri Bathous and the Miscellanies.Two other works by ‘Scriblerus’ were published in 1730: The Candidate forthe Bays (signed ‘Scriblerus Tertius’) and The Bays Miscellany, or ColleyTriumphant (signed ‘Scriblerus Quartus’). The authors’ surnames suggestthat these works appeared after Fielding’s ‘Scriblerus Secundus’. Theseanonymous squibs provide a salutary reminder that even on the occasionswhen Scriblerus was invoked, there was not necessarily any connection to bemade to the output of Pope, Swift and Gay.

When Fielding first used the pseudonym in 1730, more Scriblerus works hadbeen written by non-Club members (six) than by Pope’s circle (two). ThomasLockwood has argued that Fielding’s use of ‘Scriblerian authorship [in 1730] ismeant to recall the heroically dull-witted and pedantic character of MartinusScriblerus originally projected by Swift, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot duringthe early days of their Scriblerus Club’.43 The implication is that Fieldingis ‘recalling’ the central figure of a work that did not appear until four yearsafter his career as a playwright had ended in 1737. Critics have assumedthat Fielding loved Peri Bathous and the Dunciad and wanted to exploit thepopularity of Scriblerus. A more realistic supposition is that he thought thepseudonym appropriate for a playful satire on the contemporary fascinationwith popular entertainments – and that he used it again because The Author’sFarce had been such a success (running forty-one performances in less thanhalf a season at Little Haymarket).44 If Fielding were trying to invoke Pope,then his use of the term is in all probability ironic rather than deferential. He isfar likelier to have been mocking the gloomy and self-righteous severity of theDunciad than declaring his allegiance to Pope’s cohort. In a discussion ofThe Tragedy of Tragedies, Howard D. Weinbrot rightly observes that lumpingFielding with the Scriblerians ‘makes heavy weather’ out of an essentiallylight-hearted play.45 This judgment is absolutely correct, and it has broaderimplications. Fielding was not associating himself with ‘them’ when he signed‘H. Scriblerus Secundus’ – no ‘them’ existed in the minds of contemporaries.

I have found thirty-two works signed by ‘Scriblerus’ (or some versionthereof) between 1731 and the end of the century. Those works written by amember (or members) of Pope’s circle are marked (†):

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(1) Fielding, The Letter-Writers (1731): signed ‘Scriblerus Secundus’.(2) Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731): with the annotations of

‘H. Scriblerus Secundus’.(3) Fielding, The Welsh Opera (1731): signed ‘Scriblerus Secundus’.(4) Fielding, The Grub-Street Opera (‘1731’ [not made public until 1755]):

signed ‘Scriblerus Secundus’.46

(5) The Genuine Grub-Street Opera (1731): signed ‘Scriblerus Secundus’.(6) Whistoneutes: or, Remarks on Mr. Whiston’s [...] Life of Dr. Samuel Clarke

(1731): dedication signed ‘Simon Scriblerus’, but the text has noconnection to previous works by ‘Scriblerus’.

(7) Gorgoneicon: Being a Supplement to Whistoneutes (1731): signed ‘AndrewScriblerus, First Cousin to Simon’. Like Whistoneutes, it makes noreference to Martinus or to Pope’s circle.

(8)† Annus Mirabilis: the piece appeared separately in 1722, but only in the1732 edition of the Swift–Pope Miscellanies did it add ‘by Mart.Scriblerus’.

(9)† An Essay of the Learned Martinus Scriblerus, Concerning the Origine of theSciences (in 1732 Miscellanies).

(10) The Tamiad (1733): signed by ‘Erasmus Scriblerus, Cousin-German’ toMartinus. A response to the Dunciad; the author connects ‘Scriblerus’with Pope; no mention of Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot or Fielding.

(11) The Art of Scribling (1733): signed by ‘Scriblerus Maximus’. Noreference to Martinus.

(12)† The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life [...] of Martinus Scriblerus (1741):the first appearance in print of the supposed 1714 project.

(13) R. O. Cambridge, The Scribleriad (1742): ‘Scriblerus’ not on title page.In the preface Cambridge claims that he continues Pope’s Memoirswithout making direct allusion to that work.

(14) Cricket, an Heroic Poem (1742?; rpt 1770): notes by ‘ScriblerusMaximus’.

(15) Paul Whitehead, The Gymnasiad (1744): prolegomenon by ‘ScriblerusTertius’.

(16) An Essay on Increasing the Inhabitants and Riches of Ireland (1747): ‘byMartinus Scriblerus, the Younger’.

(17) The Marrow of the Tickler’s Works (Dublin, 1748): preface signed‘Scriblerus’. Non-satirical ballad. No connection to Pope’s circle or totheir projects.

(18) Remarks on Mr. Pope’s Epistle of Taste (1751): ‘By Galfridus Scriblerus’,son of Martinus. Mentions Pope and the Memoirs, but not the other‘Club’ members.

(19) The Modern Justice, in Imitation of the Man of Taste (1755): ‘By ScriblerusMinimus’. Alludes neither to Pope’s circle nor to Martinus.

(20) The Censor [...] Containing a Variety of Curious Matters (1755): ‘ByStephanus Scriblerus’, brother to Martinus. Does not mention Pope’scircle.



(21) Proposals for printing [...] a Commentary [...] Upon the learned Mr. WilliamWarburton’s [...] Dedication to the Reverend Dr. Henry Stebbing (1756): ‘byMartinus Scriblerus Jr’.

(22) The Thimble, in Dramatic and other poems [...] by W. Hawkins (1758):signed ‘Scriblerus Secundus’.

(23) The Race, by Mercurius Spur, Esq. (1765): with notes by ‘FaustinusScriblerus’.

(24) Remarkable Satires (1760): includes the Pasquinade, with NotesVariorum, one of which is signed ‘Scriblerus Illustratus’.

(25) J. E., The humours of Harrogate (1763): with notes by ‘MartinusScriblerus’; does not mention the Memoirs or any member of Pope’scircle.

(26) The Ants: A Rhapsody (1767): preface signed ‘Martinus Scriblerus,Junior’.

(27) The ode on dedicating a building, and erecting a statue, to Le Stue (1769):with notes by ‘Martinus Scriblerus’; alludes to ‘Arbuthnot’s Dissertationon Dumpling’, but does not mention Pope, Swift, Gay or the Memoirs.

(28) Alexander Crowcher Schomberg, Ode on the Present State of EnglishPoetry (1779): signed ‘Cornelius Scriblerus Nothus’.

(29) An Epistolary Treatise [...] to which is added, a Dissertation, by MartinusScriblerus (1780).

(30) William Cook, The Royal Naval Review (1781): with notes ‘By adescendant of the great Scriblerus’; does not mention anyone fromPope’s circle or the Memoirs.

(31) The unsespected [sic] observer, in the spirit of the late famous MartinusScriblerus (1792): refers to the Memoirs (attributing that work to Popealone) and does not mention Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot or Fielding.

(32) The Call of the House (1796): signed ‘Scriblerus Republicanus’.

What conclusions can we draw from this list? How much could ‘Scriblerus’have meant to eighteenth-century readers? Would the name have beenobviously and inevitably linked to the Club or its members? We would do wellto remember a few facts: in 1713-1714, Arbuthnot’s most successful works,the John Bull pamphlets, had not been publicly attributed to him; Gay hadwritten only minor pieces by that time (Wine, The Mohocks, Rural Sports, TheFan and Shepherd’s Week); and Parnell was never famous in the eighteenthcentury. Would contemporaries have known about a ‘Club’ that had dissolvedlong before ‘Scriblerus’ appeared in print? If so, how? Forgetting whathindsight tells us is immensely difficult, but we must do precisely that if we areto make rational judgments about Scriblerus’s contemporary reputation.

One point is certain: most of the works signed by ‘Scriblerus’ were notwritten by our ‘Scriblerians’. That fact could be understood as evidence of thegroup’s influence: we could suppose that a few works from them incitedmany imitations and responses. Such a hypothesis seems dubious, however,especially since (of their ‘Scriblerus’ publications) only the 1729 Dunciad had

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much public notoriety. Pope and Swift were associated with Scriblerus, butonly in a very small number of occasional pieces responding directly tosatires to which Pope’s and Swift’s names were attached (for example,The Metamorphosis, listed above). We have nothing to indicate that anyoneidentified a particular mode of satire or connected any publications to anearlier ‘Club’.

What was ‘Scriblerian’ satire in the first half of the eighteenth century?The question is impossible to answer. The works explicitly associated with‘Scriblerus’ differ radically from one another: some attack pedantry, someattack Pope and some attack harsh satires on bad writers; some are gloomyand pessimistic, some are playful and some are somewhere in between. Howmuch does Tom Thumb have in common with the Dunciad? Does The Letter-Writers resemble Peri Bathous in any meaningful way? Would the ‘Scriblerus’label have been enough to suggest a connection between these works, andwhat sort of connection would that have been? That the pseudonym is somanifestly generic is problematic – if dozens of works, after the Key to the Lock,had been signed ‘Esdras Barnivelt Junior’, we might plausibly conclude thatPope’s satire had started a trend. But many works signed by any ‘Scriblerus’are fairly generic, largely because the name itself is so nonspecific. Theroot word (‘scribbler’) had been in usage since the sixteenth century,47 andwriters of all stripes attacked their literary adversaries by charging them with‘scribbling’ well before Pope was born (for example, News from the press [...]being a satire against scribling, 1673). Later usages of the pseudonym couldimaginably have been coming off the generic term, rather than directlyinvoking the other ‘Scriblerus’ pieces. If they were referring to previous‘Scriblerus’ publications, then how sure can we be that the authors werethinking of our ‘Scriblerians’? For readers in the second half of the eighteenthcentury, the name did not always call to mind Pope and his friends. A 1776

work connects Scriblerus to Pope and Arbuthnot, and a 1779 poem alludesto ‘Scriblerus’, explaining the reference, ‘Vide: Swift’s Scriblerus’ – but awriter in 1769 links ‘Scriblerus’ with Richard Owen Cambridge (author ofThe Scribleriad).48 Some people (such as Jonathan Smedley) most definitelyassociated Scriblerus with Pope and Swift – but not everyone did so. Scribleruswas by no means invariably connected with Pope’s circle.

Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot and Parnell were friends, and they spentsome time together in 1714. But, as the delay of nearly three decades beforepublication suggests, the Memoirs project was not pressing in the minds ofits creators. If the satire were politically subversive, we could understandthe interval between conception and publication, but the piece is no riskierthan Peri Bathous and far less likely to provoke a negative response than theDunciad. Exactly who wrote what part of the Memoirs – or when – there is noway to know. The correspondence of Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot and Parnellgives us very little grounds for assuming that the Club’s aims figured verycentrally in their lives. If any of our ‘Scriblerians’ understood the meetings of1714 as life-changing, or as the inspiration for later successes, we have no



evidence of those sentiments. And, while some of their contemporariescertainly recognised the group members as personal friends and politicalallies, I have found nothing to suggest that the men were seen as a‘Scriblerian’ cohort at any time during the eighteenth century. How, then, didwe get from Johnson (who has little to say about the Club, and nothing good)to twentieth-century claims about the prevalence of the Scriblerian model ofsatire?

III. Sherburn, Kerby-Miller and the Twentieth-Century Myth

We have reason to believe that our original ‘Scriblerians’ met four times in1714, but beyond that we know very little about the Club. We have a fewpassing comments and a lot of works not publicly connected to Scriblerus. Wealso have many awkward holes in our knowledge. Why did the Memoirsappear so long after the Club’s dissolution? Who wrote what parts of theScriblerus works? When? Did the writers conceive of themselves as part of agroup, and if so, at what date and with what degree of commitment to acommon cause? We have no way to answer these questions, and no good basisfor guessing. How do we explain the radical discrepancy between eighteenth-century evidence and the modern concept of ‘Scriblerian’ satire?

If we trace the critical history of the Scriblerus Club, we will discover thatScriblerus rose to eminence – and Scriblerian satire became central to theeighteenth-century – almost 200 years after the deaths of Pope and Swift.Late-eighteenth-century commentary was scarce, and not much changedin the nineteenth century. In 1880, Leslie Stephen argued that the groupmembers ‘amused themselves’ with the Club, ‘a body which never had,it would seem, any definite organization’. It ‘languished’ after 1714, heobserves, though Pope eventually revived and published the ‘dormant’Memoirs.49 This seems a fair account. Edith Sitwell’s 1930 biography of Popementions the Club only once – and this in a chapter entitled, ‘Minor Episodes,1713-14’. Her claim that Gulliver’s Travels and the Dunciad ‘must have beendiscussed’ at the meetings is purely suppositious, but in any case Sitwell hasvery little to say about the Club or its productions.50 From the mid-eighteenthcentury through the 1920s, attention to the Scriblerus Club and to‘Scriblerian’ material was scant.

In the 1930s, the situation abruptly changes. The Club and itsachievements are treated at length in three separate studies: Robert J. Allen’sThe Clubs of Augustan London (1933), George Sherburn’s The Early Career ofAlexander Pope (1934), and Lester M. Beattie’s John Arbuthnot, Mathematicianand Satirist (1935). The sudden promotion of Scriblerus originates inCambridge, Massachusetts: both Allen’s and Beattie’s books were publishedby Harvard University Press, and Sherburn taught at Harvard. Beattieacknowledges his debt to Allen, and Allen thanks Beattie; Sherburnencouraged Kerby-Miller’s edition of the Memoirs (published in 1950). Thesethree studies jointly transformed the Club from a ‘minor episode’ into what

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scholars started to see as a formative association that seriously influenced itsmembers and the directions taken by English satire in the eighteenth century.

Allen devotes considerable space to the Scriblerus Club, acclaiming it as agroup that ‘eclipsed’ other eighteenth-century clubs ‘both in fame and inliterary fruitfulness’.51 He was apparently the first to expand the discussion ofthe Club’s output beyond works signed by ‘Scriblerus’ (and Gulliver’s Travels)– he argues that ‘independent works of the various members’ should also beincluded in discussions of the Scriblerus Club.52 Allen does not list titles,however, and neither does he make claims about the Club’s importance towriters outside the group. He believes that the members inspired each otherand that the Club provided stimulation that had lasting results. Beattie is,of course, centrally interested in Arbuthnot’s activities, and he tries todetermine the doctor’s contributions to Peri Bathous and the Memoirs.Beattie’s role in the formation of Scriblerian scholarship is slighter than thatof Allen’s, but he gives some twenty pages to the Club and its projects.

Sherburn is the first to treat the Scriblerus Club as a major organisationwhich turned out a number of important satires that were publicly identifiedas part of a Scriblerian mission. Applying logic that is hard to fathom,he describes Swift’s Tale as something of a herald of the Club’s scheme. Heexpands the canon well beyond the Dunciad, Peri Bathous and the Memoirs,and also beyond Gulliver’s Travels. Those works are certainly ‘due’ to the Club,he avows, but so too are several ‘smaller pieces of importance’53 – includingthe Key to the Lock (1715), God’s Revenge against Punning (1716), Three Hoursafter Marriage (1717) and Annus Mirabilis (1722). His argument tends towardspeculative exaggeration: Peri Bathous ‘was translated into French at least asearly as 1749’, he asserts, ‘and thus may have had an international influenceon the art of the eighteenth century’ (p.82). However bold the claim, withoutevidence it is little more than hot air.

Sherburn’s conclusions about the Club and its significance depend almostentirely on conjecture. He contends, for instance, that The Art of Political Lying(1713) ‘is an example of what the group early meditated as a pattern for theirsatire’ (p.76). He points out, however, that an attack on John Dennis (CriticalSpecimen, 1711) ‘antedates the Art of Political Lying as a satire of this type’.Like the 1723 Memoirs, Critical Specimen creates an awkward problem: itundercuts the notion of The Art of Political Lying as an early exemplar of aunique satirical mode. Sherburn’s response is to suggest (without proof orexplanation) that Critical Specimen ‘possibly came from some member of thisgroup’ (p.75, n.2). He struggles elsewhere to explain the genesis of the 1741

Memoirs, which he presents as an obvious ‘substitution’ for The Works of theUnlearned. He argues that although the life of Martinus Scriblerus was notlikely to have been written in 1714, the meetings provided the first cause, and(‘in all probability’) allowed the members ‘to make preliminary drafts ofindividual episodes’ for later publication (p.77, 80). About those members, heis adamant – Swift, Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot and Parnell, he maintains, were theonly major participants. We have, however, neither an attendance list nor a



set of minutes for the meetings: Sherburn’s assertions are undocumented andundocumentable.

Sherburn inflates the importance of the Scriblerus Club, and he is the firstto suggest that the members evolved a coherent ‘scheme’ that affected theirwriting lives. He connects to the initial set of meetings several disparate worksproduced a decade or more after the original association. Sherburn does notadd to the evidence used by earlier biographers (who had the letters andSpence’s account when they wrote their studies).54 He extrapolates at lengthfrom the same limited material – without pointing out that his conclusionsare radically different from those of his predecessors. Scriblerian satire is notfor Sherburn what it is for twenty-first-century scholars, but the myth-making definitely begins with him.

The overstatements multiply in a big way with Kerby-Miller. Prefixed to his1950 edition of the Memoirs is a seventy-seven-page history of the Club –‘begun some years ago’, he says, ‘under the encouragement’ of Sherburn,55

and he continues his mentor’s work. Kerby-Miller’s account of the originsand achievements of the Club has often been cited as definitive – but how wiseare we to accept his claims? From the Club’s ‘earliest beginning to thepublication of the principal piece’, he argues, ‘the activities which may belabeled Scriblerian spanned a period of almost three decades’ (p.1). Whatthose activities include, and how they are ‘Scriblerian’, he does not say. Hisaccount is light on fact and heavy on amplification – which is perhaps notsurprising, given that the Memoirs itself takes up only eighty-six of theedition’s 408 pages. In a review of the edition, Maurice Johnson complainedthat ‘Kerby-Miller perhaps reaches past what can be proved’, and theobjection is fair – in fact, too lenient.56 Unfortunately, Johnson’s warning wassimply ignored.

Kerby-Miller exaggerates what little information we have about the Club. InPope’s letter to Gay about The Works of the Unlearned (quoted in section II), hefinds reason to describe the proposed venture as ‘the first direct move towardthe formation of the Scriblerus Club’, bluntly declaring that Swift’s approvalof Pope’s plan ‘was to bring about the Scriblerus Club’. He does not cite eitherof the writers on this subject, insisting only that, ‘It may be assumed thatthereafter active steps were being taken toward the future Scriblerus scheme.’He piles inference upon unfounded inference: ‘It seems likely’, he proposes,‘that the first active steps to set up the club were taken shortly after the end ofthe Christmas season’. Elsewhere, he explains that, ‘It is to be assumed that thebusiness of the formal meetings was to shape the project as a whole and topass upon the suggestions and drafts offered by individual members’ (p.14, 20,22, 26, 27-8, emphasis added).

Kerby-Miller’s account of the provenance of Gulliver’s Travels is likewisedangerously over-speculative. Spence suggests that the idea for the Travelscame in part from the projected Memoirs (i.56), but we have no way ofknowing whether that is true. The connection is tenuous at best. Wehave nothing to indicate that contemporaries linked the Travels to the Club;

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late-eighteenth-century commentators thought perhaps the Travels wasmooted in 1714; nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century critics propose thatthe work ‘must have been’ discussed at Club meetings; by the mid-twentiethcentury, in the wake of Sherburn, the Travels are airily assumed to haveoriginated at those meetings. Kerby-Miller claims outright that Swift’scontributions to the Memoirs became, ‘by evolutionary process’, Gulliver’sTravels (p.50) – but his lengthy commentary on the relationship betweenthe travels chapter of the Memoirs and Swift’s Travels rests wholly uponsupposition. ‘Though Swift never publicly said so’, he asserts, ‘it seems likelythat he actually began writing the travels as a direct contribution to the clubscheme’ (p.315, emphasis added). We cannot disprove Kerby-Miller’s account– but, in the absence of evidence, the picture should never have beenadvanced.

The problem with scholarship following Sherburn is that it begins withSherburn. He massively inflated the significance of the Club without havingadded new evidence on which to base his rather grandiose claims, and thefullest history of the Club was written with his help and under his influence.Both Sherburn’s and Kerby-Miller’s accounts are pure moonshine – offeringprecious little proof of the importance of Scriblerus and Scriblerian satire tothe Pope circle or their contemporaries – and subsequent scholars haveneither challenged nor verified their claims.

IV. Conclusion

What is the evidence for a collective ‘Scriblerian’ enterprise? Despite Allen’sassertion that the ‘significance of the club which so knit together the lives offive of the foremost wits of the time is not likely to be overrated’ (The Clubs ofAugustan London, p.283), the critical industry now surrounding Scriblerusrests entirely upon overstatements. Modern scholars take for granted that thegroup members were deeply committed to a Scriblerian enterprise, thatScriblerian satire was a recognisable model for their contemporaries to follow,and that Scriblerus was a celebrated icon of the eighteenth century.

What we actually know is that the ‘Club’ members spent some timetogether in 1714; they were friends and even political allies; at different timesand to varying degrees, they were in touch with each other and occasionallymade suggestions about each other’s work. In the advertisement to ThreeHours after Marriage, for example, Gay acknowledges having received help‘from two of my friends’ (unnamed; Pope and Arbuthnot?). In a letter dated8 March 1726/7, Pope reports to Swift that, ‘Our Miscellany is now quiteprinted’, warmly observing that, ‘methinks we look like friends, side by side,serious and merry by turns, conversing interchangeably, and walking downhand in hand to posterity’ (Pope, Correspondence, ii.426 – not published until1741). What do such remarks tell us? Not much. The flowery rhetoric ofPope’s letter of 1727 notwithstanding, I have found nothing in the presumedgroup members’ published comments that could have signalled a shared



‘Scriblerian’ agenda to their contemporary readers. Neither have I foundevidence that they saw themselves as participants in a longstandingcollaborative enterprise.57 Eloquent expressions of gratitude and camaraderiealone hardly demonstrate significant influence or shared goals, especiallywhen we consider that, whatever help and encouragement they providedeach other, our ‘Scriblerians’ wrote very different kinds of work.58 Does a coregroup of writers carry on a joint enterprise after 1714? The answer is no. If wewere to present all known evidence to an impartial arbiter, what conclusionswould he or she reach? That a disinterested historian would credit the notionof the ‘Scriblerus Club’s’ importance to Pope and his friends, as touted bySherburn and Kerby-Miller, seems wildly unlikely. The case is just not there.

No doubt this conclusion will be upsetting to scholars who have boughtheavily into the idea of ‘Scriblerian satire’. Surely so widely used and long-employed a concept must have some value? Perhaps so – but the burden ofproof ought to be on those who want to preserve it. We might rememberthat phlogiston was fervently believed in by a lot of eighteenth-centurychemists, and the denial of its existence was fiercely resisted in some quarters.Disabusing ourselves of a long-cherished myth can indeed be painful.

The ephemerality (and apparent historical insignificance) of the ‘Club’ isone thing, the possible utility of the generic term another. As the debate over‘Augustan’ in the last thirty years makes plain, critics prepared to grant theartificiality or defects of a label are not always prepared to abandon it. Weneed to ask whether the absence of a historical basis for ‘Scriblerian satire’ asa group enterprise negates the term’s value as a descriptor. Not necessarily –but what exactly does the ‘Scriblerian’ label gain us? I would suggest thatwhat we actually see in post-Sherburn discussions of ‘Scriblerian satire’ is anexercise in ‘retrospective genre building’ of the sort that was employed inconstructing ‘Jacobean City Comedy’ in the 1960s and 1970s. If scholarswant to use ‘Scriblerian’ to define a literary mode, and are willing to admitthat it is an ahistorical critical convenience, this is in principle admissible. Thequestion then becomes how we are to test the soundness of groupings thathave long been accepted as obvious, established and almost sacred.

Conventional wisdom tells us that Gulliver’s Travels, The Beggar’s Opera andthe Dunciad represent the peak of the ‘Scriblerian moment’ – but do theyconstitute a genre of any sort? Swift’s satire is a scatter-shot attack on anynumber of targets, some readily comprehensible and some not. Precious littleconsensus has been reached about what he was actually trying to do inGulliver.59 Gay’s satire is wonderfully bouncy, but his conclusion – ‘The Worldis all Alike’ – destroys the difference between Good and Bad so fundamental tothe major satires of Pope and Swift. Whereas Gay implies that the satirist is nobetter than his targets, Pope savages the loathsome dunces and energeticallyseparates himself from them. In technique, tone, targets and aim, these arevery different satires. Thematic comparisons can be and have been fruitful,but I see little basis for understanding these works as related manifestations ofa shared satiric impulse.

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In what sense are these three satires ‘Scriblerian’? Definitions of that termare alarmingly inconsistent, but most critics associate it with attacks onpedantry, false learning and cultural degradation. Brean S. Hammond’saccount is perhaps the most systematic attempt to define a public identity forthe ‘Scriblerians’:

This cultural politics issues in the deployment of parodic literary forms – mockforms, hybrid forms – the common achievement of which is to borrow energyfrom the sincere forms they wish to explode, and recycle that energy insubversion. ‘Cultural politics’ implies an understanding of politics broaderthan the direct representation of issues on the party-political agenda. For theScriblerians, the most important ideological struggle was that concerningthe effect of the political and commercial organization of culture on thedevelopment of imaginative forms. [...] The Scriblerians found their subject-matter and their most compelling forms, tropes, and techniques in theconfusion generated by the growth of the literary market-place and in theirresistance to the imperative of adjusting to it. Books, entertainment, theatre,and music [...] were the battlegrounds of most significance. Theirs was acultural, more than a partisan, politics.60

Pope in the Dunciad and Swift in parts of the Tale are unquestionablyconcerned with the corruption of modern culture – but how much of Gulliveris explained by ‘cultural politics’? The Beggar’s Opera is a yet more bewilderingcase. Is Gay’s satire concerned with ‘the confusion generated by the growth ofthe literary market-place’? This seems a stretch. Wherein lies Gay’s attack onfalse learning? Is parody of a serious art form (opera) enough to qualify awork as ‘Scriblerian’? By any critical standard I can think of, The Beggar’sOpera is woefully badly described by that label; had it been a little-noticedfailure produced by an anonymous author, I suspect that few scholars wouldhail its Scriblerianism. What warrant do we have for lumping such disparateworks as Gulliver’s Travels, The Beggar’s Opera and the Dunciad together andaffixing the ‘Scriblerian’ tag? Neither the known friendship of the authors northe woolly details of the ‘Scriblerian’ connection would seem to justify thelong-standing certitude that these works somehow ‘go’ together. And if wewant to enlarge our ‘canon’ to include anyone from Garth to Nabokov, thenwe are on even shakier ground. The impulse to believe in something simplybecause we have always believed it is one best resisted.

The ‘Scriblerian’ label has been applied casually, inconsistently andahistorically; it has been badly used and appallingly over-used; and it hasimposed a set of blinders on critics who wish to discuss eighteenth-centurysatire. Like a falsehood that escalates with each teller, the myth of Scriblerushas grown over time, and we now accept as fact truisms for which we have noevidence – and some of which are manifestly false. The unhappy truth is thatour ideas about Scriblerian writing are based largely upon legend andanecdote and about seventy-five years of wishful thinking. Neither the namenor the notion would have made sense to an informed observer of the English



literary scene in 1750. The concept of ‘Scriblerian satire’ has taken on apowerfully influential life of its own – but it is a creation and phenomenon ofthe twentieth century, not the eighteenth.61

NOTES1. Peri Bathous was published in the last volume of the London edition of the Swift–Pope

Miscellanies (1728), which also included several minor poems (unattributed in this collection,but now regarded as Swift’s). It was published in the Dublin edition (vol. ii) in the same year; thatcollection also included the Key to the Lock and Memoirs of P. P. Clerk of this Parish. Pope and Swiftare named on the title page of the Dublin edition, but not of the London edition (in the latter,they sign the preface). The 1729 Dunciad Variorum appeared separately with Pope’s name on thetitle page, and was accompanied by notes and a prolegomenon signed ‘Martinus Scriblerus’. Thefirst separate printing of The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus was a 1741 Dublin edition (withPope’s name on the title page). The work appeared in London that year in The Works of Mr.Alexander Pope, in prose, vol. ii. Virgilius Restauratus (in Latin) and the Origine of the Sciences firstappeared in Miscellanies, the Third Volume (1732). Although critics now think of this collection asSwift’s Miscellanies, his name did not appear on the title page or elsewhere in the volume. Thevolume also includes Annus Mirabilis. Both Virgilius Restauratus and Origine of the Sciences wereprinted in A Supplement to Dr. Swift’s and Dr. Pope’s Works (Dublin, 1739), but had not beenpreviously attributed to any author.

2. Stradling versus Stiles and Memoirs of P. P. first appeared in the second volume of the 1728

Dublin Miscellanies; both were published in London in 1731 (Miscellanies, vol. ii). We have noway of knowing which member or members of Pope’s circle wrote these satires.

3. Other works often regarded as ‘Scriblerian’ include the following: A Description of theMorning (1709), A Description of a City Shower (1710), The Mohocks (1712), The History of JohnBull (originally published in five pamphlets in 1712), The Art of Political Lying (1713), Rural Sports(1713), The Shepherd’s Week (1714), the Key to the Lock (1715), The What d’ye Call It (1715), theanonymous God’s Revenge against Punning and In Defense of the Ancient Art of Punning (both1716, and commonly attributed to Arbuthnot), Trivia (1716), Three Hours after Marriage (1717),Annus Mirabilis (1722), An Epistle to Dr. W—d—d from a Prude (1723; probably by Arbuthnotand/or Gay), Gay’s Fables (1727, 1738). We should remember, however, that the first six of thesetexts (and Tale of a Tub and Wine) pre-date the known Club meetings of 1714.

4. Michael Seidel, ‘Systems Satire: Swift.com’, The Cambridge History of English Literature,1660-1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.235-58, atp.249.

5. Bonamy Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1700-40 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1959), p.210; Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1985), p.238.

6. Brean S. Hammond, ‘Scriblerian Self-Fashioning’, Yearbook of English Studies 18 (1988):108-24, at 118.

7. Patricia Carr Brückmann, A Manner of Correspondence: A Study of the Scriblerus Club(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), p.15.

8. Christopher Fanning, ‘The Scriblerian Sublime’, Studies in English Literature 45 (2005):647-67, at 665, n.15. Fanning describes Scriblerian writing as a mode: ‘the self-reflexiveattention to the status of writing – in its materiality and the questionable identities of itsprofessionalized producers – is the central characteristic of Scriblerian satire’ (651).

9. Maximillian E. Novak, Eighteenth-Century English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1983),p.77.

10. Thomas Lockwood, Post-Augustan Satire: Charles Churchill and Satirical Poetry, 1750-1800(Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1979), p.141.

11. Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift, the Man, his Works, and the Age, vol. iii (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1983), p.556; Roger D. Lund, ‘The Eel of Science: Index Learning, ScriblerianSatire, and the Rise of Information Culture’, Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 18-42, at 20.

12. Hammond, ‘Scriblerian Self-Fashioning’, p.110.13. The sources for these phrases and terms are respectively: Frank Palmeri, ‘Martinus

Scriblerus, Diderot’s Dream, and Tiepolo’s Divertimento: Eighteenth-Century Representations ofAggregate Identity’, Comparative Literature Studies 38 (2001): 330-54, at 333; Judith Hawley,

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‘Margins and Monstrosity: Martinus Scriblerus and his “Double Mistress” ’, Eighteenth-CenturyLife 22 (1998): 31-49, at 42; Catherine Gallagher, ‘Political Crimes and Fictional Alibis: The Caseof Delarivier Manley’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1990): 505-21, at 514; Brückmann, AManner of Correspondence, p.26; Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace:Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.6.

14. Pope, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1956), i.195.

15. Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. David Woolley, 3 vols (New York: PeterLang, 1999-2001), ii.233.

16. In a letter dated 26 June 1714, Arbuthnot wrote to Swift, ‘Pray remember Martin, who isan innocent fellow, and will not disturb your solitude’ (Swift, Correspondence, i.625). This‘Martin’ seems likely to be Martinus, though not incontrovertibly so. In any case, Arbuthnotappears to have lost interest after the death of the Queen; if his interest later revived, we have noevidence of it.

17. The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Whitwell Elwin and John Courthope, 10 vols (London:J. Murrary, 1871-1889), vii.473, n.3.

18. As Charles Kerby-Miller justly observes in his discussion of early attempts to ‘revive’ theClub, ‘The surviving correspondence of the men during this period [1715] reveals very littleabout their joint activities and nothing concerning their “new designs” for the Memoirs’ (p.45).See his Introduction to The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of MartinusScriblerus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950).

19. Lester M. Beattie, John Arbuthnot, Mathematician and Scientist (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1935), p.271.

20. David Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),p.138.

21. The Letters of John Gay, ed. C. F. Burgess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p.7, 8.22. Arbuthnot is quoted in Swift, Correspondence, ii.151; the invitation is printed in Memoirs of

the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Kerby-Miller, p.355.23. The earliest published reference to the ‘Scriblerus Club’ that I have found is in Oliver

Goldsmith, The Life of Thomas Parnell (London: T. Davies, 1770), p.37. Joseph Spence uses theterm (see below, n.32), but we have no way of determining when he wrote what parts of hisAnecdotes.

24. The Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, ed. Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock (Newark, DE:University of Delaware Press, 1989), p.648.

25. Kerby-Miller’s edition of the Memoirs includes all of the known poems of this sort(Appendix i.351-9).

26. I am indebted to Dr Kate Harris, curator of the Longleat Historical Collections, forsupplying this information about the original manuscripts.

27. Robert J. Allen describes ‘the jovial and productive meetings over the works of Martinus’;The Clubs of Augustan London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), p.266. Mackexplains that, ‘Much time went to wining and dining, much to batting about ideas for Martinus’sworks, much to jests and jollity’ (Alexander Pope, p.237). Many modern scholars have speculatedalong these lines, and they may be right – but we have no actual evidence to go on.

28. George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), p.78.29. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M.

Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), i.56, no 135.30. John C. Hodges, William Congreve the Man: A Biography from New Sources (New York:

Modern Language Association of America, 1941), p.106.31. Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p.233-4.32. Spence mentions the Memoirs in the next two entries (i.57, nos 136 and 137; dated

1735), and in two entries on the following page (nos 139 and 140; dated 1743 and 1755). Herefers to the Club in an entry dated June 1739, but he does not treat it as a long-standingassociation: ‘Lord Oxford was not a very capable minister, and had a good deal of negligenceinto the bargain. He used to send trifling verses from court to the Scriblerus Club almost everyday, and would come and talk idly with them almost every night, even when his all was atstake’ (i.95, no 218).

33. Anon., The Life of Alexander Pope, Esq.; with a True Copy of his Last Will and Testament(London: Charles Corbett, 1744), p.25.



34. In his account of the Dunciad, Ayre says: ‘Scriblerus in particular, who was deeper in Mr.Pope’s Interest than any Man (nay, sometimes we believe he has wrote under that Name himself)mentions them as Things contemptible, and fit Subjects for Satire’ (ii.91-2).

35. Owen Ruffhead, The Life of Alexander Pope, Esq. Compiled from Original Manuscripts(London, 1769), p.403n, 208.

36. Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols, 4th edn (London:J. Dodsley, 1782), ii.404. The original edition of Warton’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope(1756) mentions neither Scriblerus nor the Memoirs.

37. Samuel Johnson, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, 10 vols(London: J. Nichols, 1779-1781), vii.193-4.

38. Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment 1660-1830: Stress Points in the English AugustanTradition (1994; rpt New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p.217.

39. The title page of this satire attributes the work to ‘D. S—t’, and the author refers to ‘P—e’– but also, among others, to ‘J—n D—s’.

40. The Miscellanies appeared again in 1731, 1732, 1733, 1736 and 1738 (without title pageattribution, but with a preface signed by Pope and Swift). After the ‘Club’ members were dead,some volumes of the Miscellanies appeared with Swift, Pope and Arbuthnot named on the titlepage. The 1731 volume was bulky, and also expensive and hence probably of limited circulation:volume three of The Monthly Catalogue for 1725-1729 advertised the work priced at 8s 6d (June1727; p.63), and then at 5s 6d (March 1728; p.26).

41. Pat Rogers describes this work as the ‘Scriblerian Miscellanies of 1727-8’; ‘NamelessNames: Pope, Curll, and the Uses of Anonymity’, New Literary History 33 (2002): 233-45, at 237.

42. Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1967), p.52.

43. Henry Fielding, Plays, Volume One, 1728-1731, ed. Thomas Lockwood (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 2004), p.189.

44. Robert D. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728-1737 (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1988), p.68.

45. Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies: Papal Fallibility and ScriblerianSatire’, Harvard Library Bulletin n.s. 7 (1996): 20-39, at 21.

46. In 1973, L. J. Morrissey argued that The Grub-Street Opera almost certainly did not appearin print in 1731, but was actually published in 1755 with a false imprint. See Morrissey’s editionof The Grub-Street Opera (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1973), p.18-23. Lockwood agrees withMorrissey: ‘The edition we do have was included in [Andrew] Millar’s 1755 nonce collection ofthe Dramatic Works and can be traced no farther back than that’. See Fielding, Plays, Volume Two,1732-1734, ed. Lockwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p.28.

47. The OED dates the first usage of ‘scribbler’ in 1553, defining the term as ‘one who scribblesor writes hastily or carelessly; hence “a petty author; a writer without worth” ’.

48. These works are, respectively, as follows: James Beattie, Essays (Dublin: William Creech,1776), p.476; the anonymous Bath, – a simile (London: T. Whieldon and R. Faulder, 1779), p.10;The Works, in verse and prose, of William Shenstone, vol. iii (London: J. Dodsley, 1769), p.347.

49. Leslie Stephen, Alexander Pope (London: Macmillan, 1880), p.111, 114.50. Edith Sitwell, Alexander Pope (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), p.98-9.51. I am questioning the ‘literary fruitfulness’ of the Club in this essay, but I flat deny its

‘fame’. ‘Martinus Scriblerus’ was known to some people, but the Scriblerus Club was just aboutinvisible in the eighteenth century. Allen’s notion of the Club’s prominence is preposterous.

52. Allen, Clubs of Augustan London, p.260, 269.53. Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope, p.80.54. Osborn, introduction to Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, i.xxix.55. Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Kerby-

Miller, p.ix.56. Maurice Johnson, review of The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life [...] of Martinus

Scriblerus, ed. Kerby-Miller, Modern Language Notes 67 (1952): 571-3, at 572.57. The assumption of Scriblerian collaboration and interaction is widespread. One of the

most fervent believers in the idea of a group enterprise is Moyra Haslett, Pope to Burney, 1714-1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Haslett defines the ScriblerusClub as ‘the most significant’ of the ‘literary groups’ (or ‘literary communities’) in theeighteenth century (p.35), and she confidently celebrates the ‘literary camaraderie evidentamong the Scriblerians’ (p.40). Her discussion of the Club members’ self-conception as

98 ASHLEY MARSHALL


‘Scriblerians’ and of their public identity as a group (esp. p.35-40), however, is noticeably shorton factual detail.

58. Phillip Harth is the first critic seriously to challenge the image of Pope and Swift as satirictwins; see ‘Friendship and Politics: Swift’s Relations with Pope in the Early 1730s’, Reading Swift:Papers from the Third Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann J. Real and HelgardStöver-Leidig (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998), p.239-48.

59. For discussion, see Ashley Marshall, ‘Gulliver, Gulliveriana, and the Problem of SwiftianSatire’, Philological Quarterly 84 (2005): 211-39.

60. Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670-1740: ‘Hackney forBread’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p.239-40.

61. For helpful advice and criticism on previous drafts, I am grateful to Marshall Brown,Kathryn Hume, Robert D. Hume, Thomas Lockwood, Judith Milhous, David Wallace Spielmanand Ryan J. Stark.



the myth of scriblerus

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