Abstract
In the second act of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777) the Scandalous College is in full flight, running through the names of their acquaintances and criticising them by turns. Even though the College consists of imaginary characters in a play talking about other people who are as it were even more non-existent as they are never more than names, the scene is entertaining, but slightly disconcertingly so: it is witty, but it essentially trades in the impure pleasures of improper gossip, and strictly, the absent victims are not so much criticised as anatomised:
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Notes
Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (Bungay: Methuen, 1968 ) p. 153.
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)(London: Dent, 1962) Book 1, Chapter 1.
Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964 ) p. 168.
Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) p. 1 and n.
David Nokes, Raillery and Rage: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Satire ( Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987 ) p. 94.
William Congreve, The Way of the World, in Four English Comedies of the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. J. M. Morrell ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950 ) p. 133.
Notably Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698).
Pat Gill, Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners ( Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994 ) p. 119.
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747–8), 4 vols (London: Dent, 1932), Letter 7 (1.32). Volume and page numbers in the text are to this Everyman edition.
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971 ) p. 20.
For the fullest account of the status of women in respect of property law see Beth Swan, Fictions of Law: An Investigation of the Law in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997), Chapters 2 and 3.
Gillian Beer, ‘“Our Unnatural No-voice”: The Heroic Epistle, Pope, and Women’s Gothic’ (1981), repr. in Leopold Damrosch, Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature ( New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 ) p. 383.
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© 1999 Andrew Varney
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Varney, A. (1999). Wit and Virtue: The Way of the World and Clarissa. In: Eighteenth-Century Writers in their World. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27763-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27763-6_2
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