Abstract
In his second Moral Essay on the subject of ‘the Use of Riches’ Pope describes how the unnatural and uncomfortable ostentatious grandeur of Timon’s villa will in the course of time be repossessed by nature:
Another age shall see the golden Ear Imbrown the Slope, and nod on the Parterre, Deep Harvests bury all his pride has plann’d, And laughing Ceres re-assume the land.1
The gold which Timon so lavishly squandered will be displaced by a more productive gold in the ears of corn. The villa is not going to revert to wilderness; it is going to be transmuted into a productive estate working in harmony with opulent nature. The process will be a kind of laundering of bad money.
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Notes
Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (Bungay: Methuen, 1968), ‘Epistle to Burlington’, 11. 173–6.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City ( St Albans: Paladin, 1975 ) p. 59.
Cedric Watts, Literature and Money: Financial Myth and Literary Truth ( London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990 ) p. 105.
Arthur Young, Annals of Agriculture, vol. 2 (1784) p. 381.
James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–1789 (London and New York: Longman,1986) p. 69.
The details of some contemporary writers’ engagement with, and in some cases (Pope, Gay) investment in, the South Sea scheme are traced in Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ) Chapter 2.
Douglas Chambers, The Reinvention of the World: English Writing, 1650–1750 ( London and New York: Arnold, 1996 ) p. 34.
David Nokes, Raillery and Rage: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Satire (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), p. 42.
The Spectator ed. Donald E Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) 2.187.
John Dyer, Poems (1761) (Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1971) ‘The Fleece’, Book 3, p. 138.
Daniel Defoe, The Review 6 March 1705 (repr. New York, 1938) 2.9.
Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 ( London and New York: Guild Publishing with Oxford University Press, 1989 ) p. 4.
Jonathan Swift, Prose Works ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1940) 3.6
Ian A. Bell, Defoe Fiction ( London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985 ) p. 187.
Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. Jane Jack (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969 ) p. 169.
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971 ) p. 189.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed. P. Lazlitt (Cambridge, repr. 1963) e.g. p. 286.
Beth Swan, Fictions of Law: An Investigation of the Law in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction ( Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997 ) Chapter 2.
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees ed. E B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) ‘The Grumbling Hive’, 1.18–20.
Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 3–4. On luxury see, e.g., J. Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought from Eden to Smollett ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977 ).
John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728) in Eighteenth-Century Comedy ed. W. D.Taylor (London: Oxford University Press, 1929) Act 1.1.
Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction ( London: Methuen, 1986 ) p. 57.
Ian Donaldson, “‘A Double Capacity”: The Beggar’s Opera’, in The World Turned Upside Down: Comedy from Johnson to Fielding ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970 ).
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© 1999 Andrew Varney
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Varney, A. (1999). Money and Government: Roxana and The Beggar’s Opera. In: Eighteenth-Century Writers in their World. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27763-6_3
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