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Long before the Industrial Revolution was deplored by the Romantics or documented by the Victorians, eighteenth-century British writers were thinking deeply about the function of literature in an age of invention. They understood the significance of 'how-to' knowledge and mechanical expertise to their contemporaries. Their own framing of this knowledge, however, was invariably satirical, critical, and oblique. While others compiled encyclopaedias and manuals, they wrote 'mock arts'. This satirical sub-genre shaped (among other works) Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Edgeworth's Belinda. Eighteenth-century satirists and poets submitted to a general paradox: the nature of human skilfulness obliged them to write in an indirect and unpractical way about the practical world. As a result, their explorations of mechanical expertise eschewed useable descriptions of the mechanical trades. They wrote instead a long and peculiar line of books that took apart the very idea of an instructional literature: the Enlightenment Mock Arts.
List of contents
1. Introduction: enlightenment mock arts and industrial enlightenment; 2. Daedalus and Proteus: satire and useful knowledge in seventeenth-century England; 3. The Scriblerian mock arts: eighteenth-century satires of didacticism; 4. Anthropologies of the mechanical arts: Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's travels; 5. Ingenuity, industry, experience: eighteenth-century georgic; 6. Manuals of mock arts: the art of ingeniously tormenting and Tristram Shandy; 7. The art of teaching to invent: Maria Edgeworth and the lunar society.
About the author
Paddy Bullard teaches English Literature at the University of Reading. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His publications as editor include The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019), and A History of English Georgic Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With James McLaverty he co-edited Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, with Alexis Tadié, Ancients and Moderns in Europe (2016). With Timothy Michael he is co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope.
Summary
The early Industrial Revolution was not ignored by eighteenth-century writers. They addressed it in the Enlightenment Mock Arts, a curious genre of satires that fed into Gulliver's Travels, Tristram Shandy and Belinda. Paddy Bullard traces the oblique strategies that these authors used to avoid the constraints of Enlightenment instrumentalism.
