1 - The character progress as an Augustan phenomenon

Summary

In spite of substantial and at some levels decisive continuities in grammar and vocabulary, no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors … What really changes is something quite general, over a wide range, and the description that often fits the change best is the literary term “style” … For what we are defining is a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a Period.

Raymond Williams, on “structures of feeling”

If a significant structure of feeling connects English Augustan authors, the best evidence of it should perhaps rest less in shared thematic preoccupations than in common stylistic and formal expressions of a mode of perception and analysis. Looking for a period style, in other words, an observer may hope to fasten on features not primarily decorative and to find a style of experiential construction as well as reconstruction, a style of knowing as well as a manner of speaking. One way of beginning is to study a mode of presenting character that seems peculiar to the period from roughly the 1670s to the 1740s, a kind of character sketch I will call the character progress. The most immediately memorable examples are Hogarth's Harlot's Progress and Rake's Progress and the brilliant series Marriage à la Mode. Literary counterparts to (and possible influences on) these visual progresses are brief narratives, generally in poetic satire where they range from about twenty to over a hundred lines, that portray a character by giving his or her ill-fated career, a career that may run from birth or early adulthood to death, disaster, or an ironic success.