This book has grown from a reading of Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, and Parnell as a group - as members of the Club called Scriblerus. Charles Kerby-Miller’s learned edition ofThe Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus,their principal project as a group, gives an account of the background of the Club (1-22). Swift is perhaps most properly described as the founder, at least in so far as the group that finally emerged in 1714 came from his desire for a congenial society of friends with common and preferably literary interests. His first attempt at such a society, the Saturday Club, with...

No one currently working on individual members of the Scriblerus Club can complain of inadequate editorial and critical work for their subject. The Twickenham edition of Pope is now well over thirty years old, as is Sherburn’s edition of the correspondence. The Oxford Swift is nearly as old and is supplemented by the five volumes of letters. A scholarly edition of Gay’s plays appeared in 1983. Burgess provided the letters long ago, and in 1974 Beckwith and Dearing gave all the rest. Partially because of the pioneering work of Patricia Koster in the fifties, Erickson and Bower have been able...

Nearly half the fourth chapter of the first book ofTom Jonesis given to a description of Mr All-worthy's house and its natural setting. Both house and grounds incorporate every feature thought essential in houses and landscapes of the period - essential because they embodied a complete and harmonious world: "TheGothickstile of Building could produce nothing nobler than Mr.Allworthy'sHouse. There was an Air of Grandeur in it, that struck you with Awe, and rival'd the Beauties of the bestGrecianArchitecture; and it was as commodious within, as venerable without" (1.4.42). This balance of styles,...

When Mr Allworthy retreats to his study at the end of chapter 4 in Book I ofTom Jones,leaving the foundling to the tender mercies of Miss Bridget and Mrs Deborah, he does not exit like Horace'sbeatus vir,central to the retirement topos in the gardens and parks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is not bound for creative reflection and action in the styles of Pope's Trumbull, Lansdown, Cobham, Bathurst, and Burlington. Rather he goes as one of those solitary figures who increasingly populate the novelistic scene, eloquent or semieloquent I's:¹ saddlers living uncertainly through a...

Somerset and London are, if not opposite, at least diagonal poles in English geography. The halls of Paradise and Shandyland are, at least on the surface, spiritually as far apart as garden and city, park and ruin are, on the surface, diametrically opposed. The critical phrase is “on the surface,” for although his door hinges work, Mr Allworthy’s estate is in danger, not just from the projected improvements of the ill-fated Cap tain Blifil (2.8.108—9) or the more morally destructive schemes of his cold and calculating son. We are so used to hearing of the perfect plot ofTom...