"The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century" is the rather unwieldy name we give to the literary period that lies between two great revolutions—the English Revolution, which ended definitively in 1660 with the Restoration of Charles II, and the French Revolution, which began in 1789 and ushered in the Romantic era. Although no comparably dramatic upheavals occurred in the intervening century, this period nevertheless witnessed enormous social, technological, and literary change. More and more people were reading in this period, and more were writing, including small but significant numbers of women, non-white, and working-class authors. The subjects these authors chose to write about were no less various than their backgrounds—science, sex, and slavery; the condition of women and the criminal underworld; sleepy villages and exotic imaginary realms.
This growing heterogeneity of subject matter was matched by what at first glance looks like increasing formal homogeneity. Poets and critics placed emphasis on elegant simplicity, formal "correctness," and the avoidance of excess and unruliness in manner and matter. The dominant form in poetry was the heroic couplet. This form did not encourage poets to develop a highly individual style; instead, it provided a sort of common language in which a wide range of ideas could be powerfully and memorably expressed. Notable triumphs achieved with the heroic couplet range from John Dryden on political conspiracies:
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings;
to Jonathan Swift on London's open sewers:
Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell
What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell;
to Alexander Pope on the human condition:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man;
and Mary Leapor on the condition of women:
Woman—a pleasing but a short lived flower
Too soft for business and too weak for power:
A wife in bondage, or neglected maid;
Despised if ugly—if she's fair, betrayed.
The sessions that follow focus on some of the themes that excited the imagination—and often the indignation—of poets, prose writers, and playwrights in the Restoration and eighteenth century. These themes include the role of women, the horrors of the slave trade, the wonder and danger attached to scientific discovery, and the changes taking place in the city and the countryside. One session concentrates on the literary mode many writers turned to when dealing with these issues: the not-so-gentle art of satire.