Augustan Age

Age of the Roman emperor Augustus (31 BC–AD 14), during which art and literature flourished. It is also used to characterize the work of 18th-century writers who adopted the style, themes, and structure of classical texts. See also English literature.

The term is used with particular reference to the works of the Augustan poets, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. In 18th-century literature, major Augustan writers include the English poet Alexander Pope, Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, English poet, essayist, and dramatist Joseph Addison, and Irish essayist and playwright Richard Steele, as well as French writers under Louis XIV. Major writers, and later writers, were sceptical and even contemptuous of the term, as was Pope in ‘The Dunciad’ (1728). The term is also applied to the culture of the 18th century, as contrasted with the 19th-century Romantic age.

Augustan literature in English The Augustan period in English literature involved the development of both the themes and the structure of the classics. The poet Alexander Pope, for example, translated and paraphrased classical texts as well as imitating and parodying their style and structure (for example, in The Rape of the Lock, 1712–14). While some writers in the period were entrenched in classical style, at the same time there was a development in English literature. In prose, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison developed the satirical essay in Tatler (1709–11). The novel was also developed; Samuel Richardson wrote Pamela (1740–41) and Clarissa (1747–48), which were both in the form of the epistolary novel (in letter form), and which served to popularize the novel. Henry Fielding both parodied Richardson's achievements (Shamela, 1741) and developed the narrative form of the novel via his novels Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). Tobias Smollett, like Fielding, wrote comic-adventure type novels (such as Humphrey Clinker, 1771), and Laurence Sterne, also a novelist of this period, experimented with the novel form in his Tristram Shandy (1759–67).

The neoclassical standards established by the Augustans were maintained by Samuel Johnson and his circle of fellow artists, which included Irish politician and writer Edmund Burke, English painter Joshua Reynolds, and Irish dramatists Oliver Goldsmith (whose works include She Stoops to Conquer, 1773), and Richard Sheridan (whose plays include The Rivals, 1775 and School for Scandal, 1777). Goldsmith and Sheridan continued the tradition of witty and satirical drama, although Goldsmith was also a poet (The Deserted Village, 1770) and a novelist (The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766). Another influential literary figure of the period was English writer Daniel Defoe, whose works were particularly unconventional, especially Moll Flanders (1722) and Journal of a Plague Year (1722), in which he fictionalized the unstructured jottings of a survivor of the Great Plague of 1665. Both works are noted for their realistic nature. His most famous work, Robinson Crusoe (1719) pretends to be a factual account. Irish satirist Jonathan Swift is noted for his political satire Gulliver's Travels (1726), and also for the satirical pamphlet A Modest Proposal (1729), in which he suggested that the children of the poor should be eaten. Religious writing in the period was also strong, and includes the hymns of Isaac Watts (‘O God, our help in ages past’, ‘How doth the Little Busy Bee’, 1715) and the writings of John Wesley, the English founder of Methodism.

The classical model and ideal was challenged by the themes of Romanticism much earlier than is popularly supposed. The English poet William Collins, for example, began writing in the classical mode and then adapted the form to increasingly romantic subjects (Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands, 1749). The English poet Thomas Gray, who is regarded as a forerunner of Romanticism, wrote Elegy in the Country Churchyard in 1751.