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'"To aim at one thing and shoot another": Defoe and Sacheverell on Trial
Where: Villanova University School of Law 1st Annual Law and Literature Symposium: Law, Literature, and Religion Dates: 1st October 2010 - 2nd October 2010 When: 1st October 2010
This paper takes as its subject two texts and their receptions: Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1703) and Henry Sacheverell’s The Perils of False Brethren (1709). An examination of the reception of these divisive texts – in literature and the courtroom – betrays the manner in which readings of such texts were not just politically motivated, but shaped methodologically by the politico-legal system they were upholding.
Defoe’s piece – an impersonation of High Church divines (like Sacheverell) – attempts to expose the malevolence behind their metaphorically fierce writings by way of literalisation. His political opponents disregarded Defoe’s professed intention (that he made “other people’s thoughts speak in his words”) and instead took the piece – which recommended the extermination of Dissenters – at face value. Defoe was tried for seditious libel and pilloried. Some six years later, Defoe’s target, Henry Sacheverell, preached a sermon entitled The Perils of False Brethren on November 5th, a day reserved in the Whig calendar for a celebration of the double deliverance from the Powder-Treason, and the defeat of ‘popery’ in 1688/9’s revolution. Sacheverell, however, preached a scathing attack upon Low Churchmen and dissenters. Most significantly, his sermon denied the right to resist temporal governments. The Whig administration saw this as an attack on the post-revolution constitution, and Sacheverell was impeached before the House of Commons for High Crimes and Misdemeanours. The Whig prosecution, like Defoe before them, perceived a Jacobite/‘Popish’ intent beneath his text’s equivocations. His Tory defence (led by Simon Harcourt, who had presided over Defoe’s prosecution) insisted that his words be read at face value – they were confusing, granted, but not seditious. The revolution itself was on trial, and the readings enacted by each party were subject to an epistemological model which directly reflected their political positions (passive obedience; the right to resist).
LikePast talks
'The Warming Pan Scandal, 1687-8'
Where: English Seminar, Bristol University When: 19th March 2009
'The Pre-natal Disinheritance of James Francis Edward Stuart by the British Press'
Where: British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference Dates: 6th - 8th When: 8th January 2009
Paper given for 'Lives Unlived' - a panel organised by Claudine van Hensbergen and I.
It is said that Jacobitism was born in 1688. It may also be argued that its gestation began with the exclusion debates of nearly a decade before. Its labour pains, then, began with the rumours of Mary of Modena’s pregnancy in late 1687. A flurry of responses in the press (and in manuscript) ensued, insisting that the pregnancy was false, and that plans were afoot to impose a suppositious heir to the Stuart throne upon the nation, by way of the straight-from-farce device of a Warming Pan. Such a Jacobite shuffle would, of course, perpetuate the nascent absolutist and catholic regime.
This paper will trace the pre-natal ‘life’ of James Francis Edward, a life ‘lived’ in print, for the most part, whilst he was still in the womb. Still unborn, the potential king was not yet even a prince; the polemic surrounding Mary’s pregnancy and labour sought to ensure that he remained excluded from power. This anti-catholic polemic, filling the empty warming pan with a suppositious child, may be read as a cultural reaction to the emptiness of the throne following James’s departure, and the constitutional ambiguity of the events of 1688/9. It many ways, the fictional account of a suppositious child was no more fictional than the suppositions foisted upon the public by the Convention following the revolution: motives were shared, of course, between both sets of fictions. Indeed, the Warming Pan fiction (or rather, James Francis Edward’s vaunted illegitimacy) was simply one more string to the already over-strung Williamite bow. The political vacuums created first by the unverifiable contents of Mary’s womb, and then by James’s departure, thus become sites for the kinds of historiographical manipulation that characterise the partisan discourse of the period.
‘Pigeon Holing Partridge: Making Sense of the Epistolary Traces of an Astrologer’
Where: “I remain, &c.”: Addressing the Eighteenth Century Letter - 12th Sept. 2008 Dates: 11th September 2008 - 12th September 2008 When: 12th September 2008
This paper will appear in revised form in a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life (forthcoming)
This paper examines the letters to, from, and about John Partridge, a late-Stuart astrologer known to most through Swift’s Bickerstaff hoax. It examines the fictionality of the authentic and the authenticity of the fictional, and assesses how these letters affect our impression of the man. In particular, the paper focuses on a letter from Partridge to Isaac Manley, postmaster-general for Ireland and acquaintance of Jonathan Swift. This letter appears to confirm Partridge’s reputation as a witless dunce, but upon closer examination reveals important things about the nature of Swift’s hoax, and the usefulness of untruths in historical research.
‘“A Rebel in His Principles”: John Partridge and Swift’s Bickerstaff Hoax’
Where: BSECS Graduate Conference, University of Winchester, 27th June 2008 Dates: 27th June 2008 - 27th June 2008 When: 27th June 2008
Paper given on a panel, 'Forging Literary Identity', organised by Claudine van Hensbergen, Stephen Bernard and I.
This paper is an examination of the manner in which Swift’s 1708 Bickerstaff papers have succeeded in duping criticism. The hoax, in which Swift predicts the death of John Partridge, a prominent astrologer, presents its target to posterity as insignificant, the familiar dunce of traditional literary history as initiated by the Scriblerians. This paper will undo this duping on the part of Swift, with two effects. Firstly, John Partridge will emerge as a figure fundamentally associated with radical Whig politics, a previous activist and exile in the Netherlands. His career as a spokesperson for radicalism (and the public’s knowledge of this career) will then feed in to a reappraisal of the Bickerstaff hoax as a mock-heroic political action, which, whilst discursively neutering the astrologer, does so by a methodological parody that is charged with partisan meaning. Ultimately, it will transpire that by way of his parody of Partridge, Swift effects a criticism of the fictionality of the post-1688 political settlement.
‘“A Rebel in His Principles”: John Partridge and Swift’s Bickerstaff Hoax’
Where: Restoration to Reform Seminar Series When: 12th May 2008
http://restorationtoreform.blogspot.com
‘To aim at one thing and shoot another: Defoe and Sacheverell on Trial’
Where: ‘Reading: Images, Artefacts, Texts’, Cardiff University, 29th June 2007 Dates: 28th June 2007 - 29th June 2007 When: 29th June 2007
This paper forms part of a thesis examining how the dynastic ruptures of the late seventeenth century, and the formation of a bi-partisan political culture, shaped reading habits in the years between 1680-1720. Central to this thesis is the potentiality of doubleness in language of the period. The paper takes as its subject Daniel Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1703) and Dr. Henry Sacheverell’s The Perils of False Brethren (1709). An examination of the reception of these texts betrays the manner in which readings of such texts were not just politically motivated, but shaped methodologically by the political system they were upholding or expositing.
These texts have been selected for their prominence in contemporary print culture, and because they foreground the political volatility of figurative language. Defoe’s text attempts to expose the malevolence he perceived behind High church divines’ metaphorically crowded writings, by way of a literalising impersonation. His political opponents – and those responsible for his subsequent prosecution – disregarded Defoe’s professed intention (that he made “other people’s thoughts speak in his words”) and read the pamphlet literally. In this reading Defoe advocated the extermination of all Dissenters. He was tried for seditious libel and pilloried. Some six years later, Defoe’s target, Henry Sacheverell, preached a Sermon entitled The Perils of False Brethren on November 5th, the Whiggish anniversary of the double deliverance from the Powder-Treason, and the oppression of popery in 1688’s revolution. Sacheverell, however, attacked dissenters and Low-Churchmen (castigating them as ‘False Brethren’ undermining the Church). Most significantly, his sermon rubbished the right to resist temporal governments. The Whig government, reading this as an attack on the post-revolution constitution, impeached Sacheverell before the House of Commons. The Whig prosecution, like Defoe before them, perceived a Jacobite/Popish intent beneath his text’s equivocations. His Tory defence insisted that his words be read at face value – they were confusing, granted, but not seditious. It was not just Sacheverell’s sermon on trial here, but the revolution itself: the readings enacted by each party were subject to an epistemological model which directly reflected their political positions (passive obedience; the right to resist).
This paper endeavors to foreground the formative relation between reading and politics, presenting politics itself as a kind of figuration, a figuration which must be interpreted through other readings.
'To aim at one thing and shoot another': Defoe and Sacheverell on trial
Where: English Graduate Conference, English Faculty, University of Oxford, 8th June 2007 Dates: 8th June 2007 - 8th June 2007 When: 8th June 2007
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