Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne

Abstract

This book is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously neglected, misunderstood, and newly discovered material, it shows that arguments about Anne’s right to the throne were crucial to the construction of nascent party political identities. Literary texts were the principal vehicle through which contemporaries debated the new queen’s legitimacy. This book sheds fresh light on canonical authors such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison by setting their writing alongside the work of lesser known but nonetheless important figures such as John Tutchin, William Pittis, Nahum Tate, John Dennis, Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, and other anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Through close historical readings, it shows how this new generation of poets, preachers, and pamphleteers transformed older models of succession writing by Milton, Dryden, and others, and imbued conventional genres such as panegyric and satire with their own distinctive poetics. By immersing the major authors in their milieu, and reconstructing the political and material contexts in which those authors wrote, this book demonstrates the vitality of debates about royal succession in early eighteenth-century culture.

‘It Must End, or I Must End’: Castlereagh, Mental Health and Politics in Regency Britain

“…The final page of the same pamphlet contains an image that is particularly poignant, given Castlereagh's method of suicide only two years later; it shows all the government ministers scrambling to commit suicide and in the foreground is Castlereagh, about to cut his own throat. 65 In addition to popular satires, Castlereagh's character was frequently attacked in written works. As early as 1810, Irish journalist Peter Finnerty accused Castlereagh of corruption and torture during his time in Ireland, and this theme was continually used to condemn Castlereagh over the next 11 years.…”