‘If I Had Known Him, I Would Have Loved Him’: Bloomsbury Appropriations of the Scriblerian Coterie

Abstract

In 1988, writing at the end of a long career specialising in mostly eighteenth-century literature, the literary critic Donald Greene (1914–1997) reflected on the degree to which the taste of his generation differed from that of the generation before. When he was a young instructor at a Canadian university, he invited an older academic friend to listen to some of Bach’s harpsichord music. ‘I expected him to be, if not delighted, at any rate interested. I was wrong: I was told that the harpsichord sounds like someone twanging the wires of a birdcage with a toasting-fork, and that Bach’s compositions are dry, unemotional mathematical exercises, a boring display of intellectual ingenuity typical of the Age of Reason’.¹ This attitude, he discovered, pervaded the academy: ‘the only eighteenth-century English novel I ever heard discussed during my undergraduate years, in a course on the history of the novel, was Pamela, which was presented as an object of ridicule […] Nor were we encouraged to read Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews, no doubt for moral reasons. Best to dispose of them by assuming that, like most of the rest of eighteenth-century art, they were dead and never to be read again, except as historical curiosities’.² Greene’s encounters with these views reflect a wider rejection of eighteenth-century literature in the moment that followed it. Swinburne famously claimed that the eighteenth century was ‘a time when the very notion of poetry, as we now understand it […] had totally died and decayed out of the minds of men’.³ We see this rejection also in the early stages of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. After the first set of reading lists for the dictionary’s volunteers had been drawn up by the Philological Society, the society decided to give the task of reading eighteenth-century material to American readers, on the grounds, as explained in May 1860 by Herbert Coleridge, that such work ‘would have less chance of finding as many readers in England’.⁴