English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century

Too ill to deliver them himself, Leslie Stephen had these Ford Lectures read at Oxford in 1903 by Herbert Fisher of New College; printed the following year as five chapters, they ask how English writing was shaped by the society that paid for it, read it and argued over it. Stephen works through three periods, 1714 to 1739, 1739 to 1763 and 1763 to 1788, following literature out of a world of patrons, clubs and coffee-houses into the harder commercial market of booksellers and Grub Street. Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding and Johnson appear less as isolated geniuses than as writers working under particular economic and political pressure. Stephen’s insistence on reading books against the philosophy and social conditions of their moment makes this an early piece of what later became the sociology of literature.