On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, 'English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government'. It's certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment--the pillory--that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or
otherwise contentious meanings while rendering the meanings deniable.
As a work of both history and criticism, this book traces the rise and fall of seditious libel prosecution, and with it the theatre of the pillory, while arguing that the period's characteristic forms of literary complexity--ambiguity, ellipsis, indirection, irony--may be traced to the persistence of censorship in the post-licensing world. The argument proceeds through case studies of major poets and prose writers including Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Southey, and also calls attention to numerous little-known satires and libels across the extended period.
Industry Reviews
The study derives a substantial part of its vitality from the way in which it includes, alongside the big names, obscure political pamphlets such as Nero the Second, 'What Makes a Libel', and Isaac Dalton's Shift Shifted. Riveting, also, is its analysis of the pillory in visual culture, starting from Cromwellian woodcuts to Victorian illustrations by William Hogarth and Eyre Crowe ... Ultimately Poetics of the Pillory is a crucial study, particularly for our times, as social media platforms resurrect the pillory digitally, while governmental surveillance and censorship reach a crescendo in the developing as well as the developed world. * Doyeeta Majumder, Modern Lanuage Review *
For Thomas Keymer in his beautifully detailed history, such strategies of evasion are one of the things that make seditious literary texts worth reading, forms of energetic 'creativity and rhetorical complexity' for which, perhaps counterintuitively, we have the early modern political state to thank. * Clare Bucknell, London Review of Books *
There is a wealth of learning here. * Los Angeles Review of Books *
...a major addition to the well-established critical discussion about the links between literature and censorship. * Paul Keen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction *
Armed against any Whiggish optimism, Keymer traces the flexible boundary between literature and law across more than a century and a half with exceptional deftness-a huge amount of material has been digested and arranged here so as to be read with great ease and enjoyment. . . . A whole series of major authors emerge from Keymer's study in a fresh perspective-Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Pope, Daniel Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, and most strikingly Robert Southey. This is a book of the first importance. * David Womersley, Studies in English Literature *
Thomas Keymer's excellent new book is a combined history and critical study of the ways in which conditions of censorship shaped English literature during the long eighteenth century (1660-1820). The book began life as the Clarendon Lectures given at the University of Oxford in 2014-15; these have been expanded with rich archival and critical detail, without sacrificing the energy and lucidity of the lectures. * Niall Allsopp, Seventeenth-Century News *
