Order and Chaos in Dunciad

Order and Chaos in The Dunciad Variorum [1]

Utility ought to be the principle intention of every publication. Wherever this intention does not plainly appear, neither the books nor their authors have the smallest claim to the approbation of mankind. (qtd. in Fadiman xxv)

William Smellie, in his 1768 preface to the Encyclopædia Britannica, exhibits the distinctively eighteenth century penchant for didactic literature. Satire, Augustan literature’s foremost genre--besides being the only bona fide Latian invention--at least ostensibly is supported by pillars of didacticism and is the choicest of choices for both Pope specifically and Neo-classicists generally. Utility then, in one aspect or another, practical or moral or, as in Richardson’s Pamela, practically moral, shows itself as the virtual driving force behind much eighteenth century literature. The utility of Smellie’s Britannica—-initially a modest collection of bound pamphlets--and that pursued by Pope in his versificated satires is, of course, differentiated by much more than this practical/moral dichotomy and is keenly described by their respective audience as a fundamental philosophic schism.

With entries as varied as “BUG: Cheap, easy, and clean mixture for effectively destroying [bed] Buggs,” [2] (Fadiman 65) which goes on to provide a comprehensive recipe; “MELANCHOLY AND MADNESS . . . Melancholy may be looked upon as the primary disease, of which madness is only the augmentation”;(22) and “WOMAN, the female of man”;(29) the first edition of Britannica, besides providing a literary dig of eighteenth century relics, might reasonably be taken as a symbol of the democratisation of knowledge--a work that embodies an inclusive philosophy that points to the future. Pope’s The Dunciad, as neo-classical tractate, is essentially elitist and embodies an exclusive philosophy that points instead to the past. The Encyclopædia Britannica and The Dunciad then maintain utilitarian goals and reliance upon...