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Eighteenth-Century Satires of Didacticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2025
Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle produced a series of satires in a distinctive mock-didactic mode, the mock art. Originally Swift used it to attack a ‘mechanical’ dissenting clergy. Later he adapted it to larger issues concerning the fragmentation and uncontrolled accumulation of knowledge in the modern age. John Gay broadened the theme by exploring its cognitive dimensions. It was in political polemic, however, that mock-technical satire achieved its widest circulation, as a critical trope against state-craftsmen and artificial politicians. Finally, in Peri Bathous Pope and John Arbuthnot imagined a wholly artificial poetic art. Their critical thought-experiment ends this line of development in the mock-art idea. With each successive iteration, its basis in the social denigration of skilled workers receded, and the satire became more ambivalent. Pope, at first the most abusive of the denigrators, at last produced the most balanced and experimental of all the Scriblerian mock arts.
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