The Restoration and Eighteenth Century
1660-1798
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Restoration: 1660-1700
1660: Charles II becomes King and reopens the theatres!
Restoration Theatre
o Unlike Elizabethan theatres, Restoration theatres had a proscenium arch (“frame”) separating
the audience from the stage, real changes of scenery, and female actors.
o Restoration theatre is best known for its comedic plays.
Religion and Politics •
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With the return of the monarchy, the established church also returned. While Charles II was willing to
pardon or ignore many former enemies (such as John Milton), church officials were not as tolerant.
o Parliament forced Charles II to establish the Test Act in 1673, which required that all holders of
civil and military offices take the sacrament in an Anglican Church and that they deny belief in
transubstantiation.
o Protestant dissenters and Roman Catholics were largely excluded from public office. They could
not attend university, own land, or vote.
In 1678, the report of the Popish Plot, in which Catholics would rise and murder their Protestant foes,
terrified London. Even though the charge turned out to be a fraud, the House of Commons exploited the
fear by trying to force Charles II to exclude his Catholic brother, James, duke of York, from succession
to the throne.
o Charles II was able to defeat the Exclusion Bill by dissolving Parliament.
o This crisis resulted in a division of the country between two new political parties:
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Tories, who supported the king, were landed gentry and country clergy, represented
conservative values, strongly supported the Crown and the Anglican church, and felt
that the Crown and church provided social and political stability.
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Whigs, the king’s opponents, were a more progressive and diverse group, consisting of
powerful nobles who were jealous of the powers of the Crown, merchants and financers
of London, bishops, low-church clergymen, and dissenters. They believed in tolerance
and commerce.
1688-1689 - The Glorious Revolution
o Religious differences resurfaced when James, Duke of York, the Catholic brother of Charles II,
became King. After coming to the throne in 1685 as James II, he claimed the right to make his
own laws, suspended the Test Act, and began to fill the army and government with fellow
Catholics. The nation became frightened of a Catholic dynasty when he had a son in 1688.
o In 1688, after secret negotiations, the Dutchman William of Orange, husband of Mary Stuart, the
Protestant daughter of James II, marched from southwestern England to London with a small
army.
o Instead of fighting, James II fled to France, hence the names “glorious” and “bloodless.”
o William III and Mary II ruled jointly until Mary’s death in 1694. William ruled alone until his death
in 1702.
o In 1689, William and Mary agreed to respect a Bill of Rights passed by Parliament. The bill
guaranteed the following:
§ Parliament has the right to approve all taxes.
§ The monarch is forbidden to suspend the law.
o England thus attained a limited, or constitutional, monarchy.
o Ask about Jacobites and the Act of Settlement in 1701.
1707: Act of Union joined Scotland to England and Wales, creating Great Britain.
By the time George I became the first Hanover king in 1714, the government was securely in the hands
of the Whigs.
o The ministerial government also continued to develop. The first prime minister of the nation was
Robert Walpole, who entered office in 1721 during the reign of George I.
Harris, H English IV
Prentice Hall Literature—Unit 3
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors—Seventh Edition
The Nation Changes •
An Agricultural Revolution
o By the late 1600s, new farm tools made it possible for farms to produce much more food. With
more food available, the population surged upward. Because fewer farmhands were needed,
many people left the countryside.
o In the growing towns, people became the factory hands who ran the machines of the early
Industrial Revolution.
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The Industrial Age
o British inventions after 1750 made the spinning and weaving of cloth more efficient.
§ The steam engine was perfected and adapted to run a power loom.
§ Factories were built to produce vast quantities of cotton cloth.
§ Merchants sold the goods all over the world, adding gold to the nation’s capital.
o By the late 1790s, the majority of British people still earned their livings as farmers. Yet, the
economic revolution of the 1700s increased Britain’s wealth tremendously.
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World Power
o In 1763 The Treaty of Paris and Treaty of Hubertusburg, which ended the French and Indian
War and Seven Years’ War, established Great Britain as a world power. It consolidated British
rule over Canada and India, and not even the loss of the American colonies could interrupt the
rise of the empire. The nation was no longer an isolated island, but a nation with interests and
responsibilities around the world.
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The scientific revolution that made industry possible stemmed from a larger development in thought
known as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in all fields believed that, through reason and
observation of nature, human beings could discover the order underlying all things.
o In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published one of the touchstone works of the Enlightenment—
a monumental study of gravity.
o Skepticism and freethinking flourished during the late seventeenth century.
§ If a king could be executed, what authority was safe?
§ The skeptic argued that all knowledge derives from our senses, but because our
senses do not report the world accurately, reliable knowledge is impossible to achieve.
The safest course is to remember that most beliefs rest on opinion and not to hunger for
some ultimate, inaccessible truth.
§ The main line of philosophy—which runs from Bacon and Hobbes through John Locke,
George Berkeley, and David Hume—can be characterized broadly as empiricism, the
doctrine that regards all knowledge as derived from experience.
• Eighteenth-century philosophers typically shun metaphysics—the search for
essential or ultimate principals of reality, transcending the physical—in favor of
more practical concerns. Accepting the limits of human intelligence and power,
they settle for the possible.
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By 1750, Britain was rapidly industrializing, and the social theories of the Enlightenment were eclipsed.
Mills and factories belched smoke into the country air. Men, women, and children toiled at machines for
twelve to fourteen hours a day. Poor people crowded into the towns and cities, unable to find regular
work and barely able to survive. By the late 1700s, “progress” seemed to mean misery for millions.
Writers and intellectuals began to lose faith in the ability of human reason to solve every problem.
The Englightenment Harris, H English IV
Prentice Hall Literature—Unit 3
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors—Seventh Edition
Literature of the Period Neoclassicism
• Reacting against the difficulty and occasional extravagance of late Renaissance literature, writers and
critics called for a new restraint, clarity, regularity, and good sense.
o These writers are called neoclassical because the styles they used and admired were the styles
used by the writers of ancient Greece and Rome, such as Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. This
literature is often called “Augustan,” as those ancient writers flourished during the reign of
Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor.
o Donne’s “metaphysics and Milton’s bold storming of heaven,” for instance, seemed overdone to
some Restoration readers.
o Perhaps writers and readers yearned for peace and order after the violent extremism of the civil
wars.
o Neoclassical writers aimed not only to be classical, but new, using the ancient writers’ styles
and methods, but also making their work their own.
o Neoclassical writers wanted to formulate “correctness” and rules of good writing. Even
Shakespeare had sometimes been careless; while the writers could not expect to surpass his
genius, they might hope to avoid his faults.
• Neoclassicism favors generalities rather than the viewpoint of the individual and displays fondness for
satires that poke fun at society’s follies.
o Writers often expressed their thoughts in aphorisms—short, quotable sentences—such as, “The
proper study of mankind is man” (Alexander Pope).
• Which author brought neoclassical tendencies into focus during the Renaissance Period?
The Age of Prose
• Until the 1740s, poetry tended to set the standards of literature; however, the growth of new kinds of
prose took away that initiative.
• Poets of the time were afraid that the spirit of poetry might be dying, driven out by the spirit of prose,
uninspiring truth, and the end of superstitions that had once peopled the land with poetic fairies and
demons. In an age barren of magic, they ask, where has poetry gone?
• The melancholy poet withdrew into himself and yearned to be living in some other time and place.
The Expansion of the reading public
• During the eighteenth century, the literate population expanded greatly. The expansion included upperclass women and the prosperous men and women of the growing middle class. More people also turned
to writing. The distinction between “high” and “low” art became an issue as ordinary people began to
write about ordinary topics not found in “high” literature.
The Beginnings of the Novel
• The novel began to emerge during this period. This form of narrative would explode in popularity in the
nineteenth century and become the favorite reading matter of the growing middle class.
• Middle-class writers—e.g., Daniel Defoe, a member of the middle class himself—, did not seek upperclass readers (though Robinson Crusoe appealed to all classes). Instead he aimed at shopkeepers,
apprentices, and servants.
• For the first time in British history, a critical mass of female readers and writers carried weight with
publishers. Jane Baker and Mary Davys, along with many others, brought women’s work and daily lives
as well as love affairs to fiction.
• Identifying with characters in novels, readers might find themselves, thus adding to the novel’s
popularity.
• By the end of the eighteenth century, most of the leading British novelists were women.
Harris, H English IV
Prentice Hall Literature—Unit 3
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors—Seventh Edition
Important Authors of the Period
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John Dryden (1631-1700)
o dominated literature during the Restoration
o named poet laureate by Charles II
o wrote plays, satirical poems, and celebratory poems that hailed the achievements of humanity
o His essays about drama and his other prose compositions represent the first modern prose.
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Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
o His poetry, written in the early 1700s, is a shining example of the neoclassical style, exhibiting
wit, elegance, and moderation.
o His most famous work, The Rape of the Lock, is a satire on the war between the sexes.
o He had enormous influence as a critic.
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Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
o was a scornful critic of England’s rising merchant class, whom he viewed as shameless moneygrubbers.
o In his great satires, Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, he presents human nature as
deeply flawed, suggesting that moral progress must begin with a recognition of our intellectual
and moral limitations.
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Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
o wrote Moll Flanders (1722)
o wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719)
o Moll Flanders is considered the first English novel; however, others bestow this distinction on
Robinson Crusoe.
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Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729)
o wrote England’s first literary periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator, which were one-page,
crisply-written reflective essays and news addressed to the middle class.
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Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
o His advice helped nurture the careers of many younger talents.
o His most important work, The Dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1755. It was
the first dictionary to be considered a standard and authoritative reference work in English.
o The time period of his influence is known as “The Age of Johnson.”
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By the late 1700s, “progress” that had once been celebrated by Enlightenment thinkers seemed to be
causing millions to suffer. As they lost faith in the power of human reason, writers turned away from the
standards of neoclassicism. Writing in the language of everyday life, writers such as Thomas Gray
charged their poems with fresh, new emotion. The Age of Reason was coming to an end. Emerging
voices would make the 1800s a new literary age . . .
The Eclipse of the Enlightenment Harris, H English IV
Prentice Hall Literature—Unit 3
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors—Seventh Edition