45 pages • 1 hour read
Alexander PopeThe Dunciad
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1743A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Decline of Literary and Intellectual Standards
Alexander Pope’s strongest motivation for writing The Dunciad was to highlight what he considered to be the dumbing down of literature in his time. Every individual named as or implied to be a Dunce in the poem was, in Pope’s view, somehow contributing to that decline. Some were active contributors, like publishers and authors, and others contributed through patronage or other means of support. It is the driving theme of the poem, appearing in virtually every line.
It is implied in Book 1 that Dulness’s first reign began to lose power once man invented written language. Pope sees her rising again, however, thanks to critics, political hacks, plagiarizers, and a dozen other devious actors. He criticizes the flash and excess of the stage and accuses dramatists of being less interested in art than in spectacle. He derides the poets who produce polemics on command without thought or care for what their own beliefs might be. He routinely bashes opera, which he considers to be the lowest of all art forms, though he implies that the German English composer George Frideric Handel may redeem it. All around he sees cheats, charlatans, liars, and thieves debasing the arts he loves.
Pope goes to great lengths to make himself clear from the very beginning, as evidenced by one of the earliest notes, in which he attributes the glut of bad poetry not to the bad character of the poets themselves but to Dulness, “and not so much to Dulness as to Necessity,” thus beginning his satire by “mak[ing] an apology for all that are to be satirized” (1: R13). This apology amounts to a recognition that market forces have created a demand for more and more writing, regardless of its quality, and the hack writers and mercenary booksellers he calls Dunces are merely stepping in to fill that demand.
Pope extends his satire to take in not only the producers of bad literature but the consumers who are its driving force. He calls out those whose library shelves are stocked only for show as well as the publishers who print books only to look good upon those shelves. He singles out the nobleman who travels Europe without learning anything new in Book 4: “All Classic learning lost on Classic ground” (4: 321). Rather than the beacons of light and learning that they were for centuries, books have become mere adornments for the wealthy.
In order to contrast the mediocrity of the day with the standard Pope wishes to see, he structures The Dunciad as a mock-epic. This provides him with endless opportunity for allusions to the classical works that he loves. By frequently citing masters like Virgil, Homer, and Milton, Pope maintains the moral and artistic high ground. He isn’t merely complaining or bashing his rivals for the fun of it but providing guidelines for how to revive the glorious traditions and tools of his craft.
The Corruption of Mercenary Literature
One of the saddest scenes in The Dunciad appears in Book 2, during the games that Dulness throws in Cibber’s honor. After the booksellers have competed for the right to publish the phantom poets, the authors themselves compete to flatter a rich man into providing them with patronage: “He chinks his purse, and takes his seat of state: / With ready quills the Dedicators wait” (2: 197-98). One after another, the authors debase themselves in the hope of securing funding for their work, but ultimately patronage is given to a young unknown who offers the lord his sister.
While there is irony in the result, Pope’s intention was to draw focus to the sad need for writers to prostrate themselves in such a way. Pope himself was one of the first writers ever to earn a living through his writing, but he did so while placing aesthetic and moral values ahead of profit. He was disgusted by the practice of selling one’s pen to the highest bidder, writing whatever one was asked to write. Pope singles out Elkanah Settle so much in The Dunciad not because of the quality of his occasional poems but because he lowered himself to writing occasional poems at all.
There are many facets to this issue for Pope. Poetry and poverty are mentioned together several times, highlighting the plight of those authors who are forced to sell and debase their writing to eat. But Pope also points out the hypocrisy of the booksellers, who often choose to publish wealthy nobles with little talent because they know their books will sell. The description of the phantom poet in the first competition is very telling: “No meagre, muse-rid mope, adust and thin, / In a dun night-gown of his own loose skin; / But such a bulk as no twelve bards could raise, / Twelve starv’ling bards of these degen’rate days” (2: 37-40). This well-fed figure is named More—a reference to the playwright James Moore Smythe, a minor nobleman whose sole play was purchased for 130 pounds (far above the going rate for a play by an unknown playwright) despite a disappointing production run that lasted only six nights.
Even worse are the critics, who produce nothing and tear down everything, all for the sake of selling a few copies. Pope assaults critics throughout the entirety of The Dunciad, and most of the named Dunces are individuals who had published negative commentaries on his previous works.
Pope lived and wrote at a time when literature was being professionalized at an unprecedented rate. He himself is often considered one of the first professional writers. His view of this sweeping change is one of the most ambiguous aspects of the book. Given that he and many of his friends wrote for money, and given that he reserves some of his harshest criticism for those aristocratic dilettantes who didn’t need to earn a living, his critique of mercenary writing should not be taken as a critique of all writing for pay. Rather, he criticizes those writers who sacrifice their own judgement for the sake of money, putting their skills in the service of whoever pays the most.
The Intermarriage of Poetry and Politics in 18th-Century England
It is difficult to get a full sense of the scope of Pope’s satire when so much of the nuanced political commentary is lost to modern readers. In the early 1700s, it was impossible to separate poetry and politics. Political hacks and pamphleteers flooded the streets, and well-known authors like Daniel Defoe were paid by the various parties to support their platforms. Everyone from the royal family down to the local gentry patronized the arts, and a well-placed dedication could lift an author into loftier social circles. As a poet who claimed to value integrity and truth above profit, Pope was disgusted by this intermarriage of poetry and politics.
Pope includes a few overt references to government and church officials, the monarchy, and members of Parliament, but most of The Dunciad’s political criticism lies under the surface. This is hardly surprising given the power that these individuals and institutions wielded. Brazen though he was, Pope didn’t dare to openly criticize the royal family in the same manner that he criticized his peers or to address men like Prime Minister Robert Walpole by name. Luckily there were plenty of other political targets for his ire. The choice of Cibber as King of the Dunces echoed the very political choice to name Cibber Poet Laureate. Any mention of the Church of England was also inherently political, as Pope was a Catholic with fewer rights than Anglicans. In critiquing the church, even obliquely, Pope was also criticizing the discriminatory social system that excluded him from full participation on the basis of his religion. It’s worth noting that Pope did not shy away from criticizing the Catholic Church as well, noting that the Church of Rome was responsible for much of the purported darkness of the Middle Ages.
The most obvious digs are saved for the political hacks who specialize in starting trouble. These writers exemplified Pope’s distaste for sophistry—using rhetoric to support positions one does not truly believe in—and their relative lack of power meant that he could air his grievances without fear of the serious consequences he might incur by openly mocking people in authority. Dulness provides political hacks with their own muck-flinging competition in Book 2, and Pope names several of the biggest offenders. He also mentions the countless, often anonymous political papers that were cheaply and endlessly produced, comparing them to unwanted puppies drowned in the Thames. “Next plung'd a feeble, but a desp’rate pack, / With each a sickly brother at his back,” he writes: These periodicals were so inconsequential that they were sometimes printed on the back of already used paper (2: 305-06). They are “just buoyant on the flood” and hardly make a ripple in the competition (2: 307). These hacks might espouse one opinion for one paper and the complete opposite for another—in Pope’s view, fomenting civic strife for no genuine purpose.
Pope’s Dunciad is itself in many ways a political work, of a piece with much satirical writing of the era. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729), for example, is a mock newspaper editorial lampooning callous attitudes toward poverty by suggesting that the best solution is to eat the children of the poor. Similarly, Pope uses irony to mock not only profit-driven literature but also the Church of England, the Catholic Church, and (obliquely) many of the most powerful political figures in England at the time. This is an inherently political act. In Pope’s view, however, the key distinction between himself and the political writers he mocks is that he writes in service of his own views, not those of his employers.
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