Scriblerus Club (act. 1714)

Interpretation, Agency, Entropy: Annotating Pope's Dunciads

“…Martinus Scriblerus is in a sense already Pope's property, for he had been invented in the 1710s by Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot and others as a satire on false learning, a parodic scholar of the old school; so it is in a sense apt that he should now be developed as a character who can give his views on the Dunciad. 11 He addresses the reader, intimately but outmodedly, as 'thee', and elaborates an annotatory style characterised by archaism, hyperbole and hairsplitting; self-satisfied fuss is his default setting, and he shows little capacity to put his typically pettifogging concerns into anything like a normal perspective. More problematic than redeploying this inherited figure is the task of converting Pope's actual antagonists into commentators who will show off the poem to advantage; but here Swift had already shown the way in 1710 by incorporating into the fifth edition of his Tale of a Tub elements of a hostile but usefully scholarly critique by William Wooton.…”

“…Taken aback by the furore about the alleged heresy and impiety of An Essay on Man in the late 1730s, Pope had been enormously impressed by the vigour, ingenuity, and zeal in his defence of the lawyer and clergyman William Warburton (1698-1779) (Pope,Dunciad in Four Books,(11)(12). Pope, now largely bereft of his Scriblerian friends (for Swift, by now the lone survivor, had not visited England since 1728), met Warburton in 1740, made him a collaborator on The Dunciad in Four Books, and bequeathed him the literary property in all his works on condition that he wrote notes on them: this meant that Warburton's future standing, both financial and cultural, depended on becoming Pope's authorised annotator.…”

“…Warburton made a particular contribution to the apparatus and annotation of the fourbook Dunciad that related to a major bugbear whom Pope had long held in reserve, namely the distinguished editor and philologist Richard Bentley (1662-1742) (Pope,Dunciad in Four Books,ed. Rumbold,(11)(12). This was an old resentment, dating back to Bentley's attack on Sir William Temple's casual acceptance, in his 1690 'Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning', that the so-called Epistles of Phalaris really had been composed by the sixth-century BC Sicilian tyrant (Temple,.…”