Augustan prose
Augustan prose is somewhat ill-defined, as the definition of "Augustan" relies primarily upon changes in taste in poetry. However, the general time represented by Augustan literature saw a rise in prose writing as high literature. The essay, satire, and dialogue thrived in the age, and the English novel was truly begun as a serious art form. At the outset of the Augustan age, essays were still primarily imitative, novels were few and still dominated by the Romance, and prose was a rarely used format for satire, but, by the end of the period, the English essay was a fully formed periodical feature, novels surpassed drama as entertainment and as an outlet for serious authors, and prose was serving every conceivable function in public discourse. It is the age that most provides the transition from a court-centered and poetic literature to a more democratic, decentralized literary world of prose.
The precondition of literacy
Literacy rates in the early 18th century are difficult to estimate accurately. However, it appears that literacy was much higher than school enrollment would indicate and that literacy passed into the working classes, as well as the middle and upper classes. The churches emphasized the need for every Christian to read the Bible, and instructions to landlords indicated that it was their duty to teach servants and workers how to read and to have the Bible read aloud to them. Furthermore, literacy does not appear to be confined to men, though rates of female literacy are very difficult to establish. Even where workers were not literate, however, some prose works enjoyed currency well beyond the literate, as works were read aloud to the illiterate.For those who were literate, circulating libraries in England began in the Augustan period. The first was probably at Bath in 1725, but they spread very rapidly. Libraries purchased sermon collections and books on manners, and they were open to all, but they were associated with female patronage and novel reading. Circulating libraries were a way for women, in particular, to satisfy their desire for books without facing the expense of purchase. Inasmuch as books were still regarded principally as tools for work, any book that existed merely for entertainment was subject to a charge of frivolity. Therefore, the sales of novels and light entertainments testify to a very strong demand for these books indeed.
The essay/journalism
's "essais" were available to English authors in the 18th century, both in French and in translation, and he exerted an influence on several later authors, both in terms of content and form, but the English essay developed independently from continental tradition. At the end of the Restoration, periodical literature began to be popular. These were combinations of news with reader's questions and commentary on the manners and news of the day. Since periodicals were inexpensive to produce, quick to read, and a viable way of influencing public opinion, their numbers increased dramatically after the success of The Athenian Mercury. In the early years of the 18th century, most periodicals served as a way for a collection of friends to offer up a relatively consistent political point of view, and these periodicals were under the auspices of a bookseller.However, one periodical outsold and dominated all others and set out an entirely new philosophy for essay writing, and that was The Spectator, written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. By 1711, when The Spectator began, there was already a thriving industry of periodical literature in London, but The Spectator was far and away the most successful and significant periodical of the era. Each issue was a single, folio sheet of paper, printed front and back, sometimes with advertisements, and issues were not only read throughout London, but also were carried out to the countryside. Up to twenty years after publication stopped, people were counting collections of the issues among their inheritable goods. Addison's prose style was magisterial, placid, and with perfect balance of clauses. Steele's prose style was more direct than Addison's, and more worldly. The journal developed a number of pseudonymous characters, including "Mr. Spectator," Roger de Coverley, and "Isaac Bickerstaff". Both authors developed fictions to surround their narrators. For example, Roger de Coverley came from Coverley Hall, had a family, liked hunting, and was a solid squire. The effect was something similar to a lighthearted serial novel, intermixed with meditations on follies and philosophical musings. The paper's politics were generally Whig, but never sharply or pedantically so, and thus a number of prominent Tories wrote "letters" to the paper. The highly Latinate sentence structures and dispassionate view of the world was essential for the development of the English essay, as it set out a ground wherein Addison and Steele could comment and meditate upon manners and events, rather than campaign for specific policies or persons and without having to rely upon pure entertainment. Further, the pose of the Spectator allowed author and reader to meet as peers, rather than as philosopher and student.
One of the cultural innovations of the late Restoration had been the coffee house and chocolate house, where patrons would gather to drink coffee or chocolate. Each coffee shop in the city was associated with a particular type of patron. Puritan merchants favored Lloyd's, for example, and founded Lloyd's of London there. However, Button's and Will's coffee shops attracted writers, and Addison and Steele became the center of their own Kit-Kat Club and exerted a powerful influence over which authors rose or fell in reputation. Addison's essays, and to a lesser extent Steele's, helped set the critical framework for the time. Addison's essays on the imagination were highly influential as distillations and reformulations of aesthetic philosophy. Mr. Spectator would comment upon fashions, the vanity of women, the emptiness of conversation, and the folly of youth.
After the success of The Spectator, more political periodicals of comment appeared, including the vaguely Tory The Guardian and The Observer. Edward Cave created the first general-interest magazine in 1731 with The Gentleman's Magazine. He was the first to use the term "magazine" on the analogy of a military storehouse of varied material. The Gentleman's Quarterly began soon after. Some of these journals featured news more than commentary, and others featured reviews of recent works of literature. Many periodicals came from the area of the Inns of Court, which had been associated with a bohemian lifestyle since the 1670s. Samuel Johnson's later The Rambler and The Idler would self-consciously recreate the pose of Mr. Spectator to give a platform for musings and philosophy, as well as literary criticism.
However, the political factions and coalitions of politicians very quickly realized the power of the press, and they began funding newspapers to spread rumors. The Tory ministry of Robert Harley reportedly spent over 50,000 pounds sterling on creating and bribing the press. Politicians wrote papers, wrote into papers, and supported papers, and it was well known that some of the periodicals, like Mist's Journal, were party mouthpieces.
Philosophy and religious writing
In contrast to the Restoration period, the Augustan period showed less literature of controversy. Compared to the extraordinary energy that produced Richard Baxter, George Fox, Gerrard Winstanley, and William Penn, the literature of dissenting religious in the first half of the 18th century was spent. One of the names usually associated with the novel is perhaps the most prominent in Puritan writing: Daniel Defoe. After the coronation of Anne, dissenter hopes of reversing the Restoration were at an ebb. Further, the Act of Settlement 1701 had removed one of their prime rallying points, for it was now somewhat sure that England would not become Roman Catholic. Therefore, dissenter literature moved from the offensive to the defensive, from revolutionary to conservative. Thus, Defoe's infamous volley in the struggle between high and low church came in the form of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church. The work is satirical, attacking all of the worries of Establishment figures over the challenges of dissenters. It is, therefore, an attack upon attackers and differs subtly from the literature of dissent found fifteen years earlier. For his efforts, Defoe was put in the pillory. He would continue his Puritan campaigning in his journalism and novels, but never again with public satire of this sort.Instead of wild battles of religious controversy, the early 18th century was a time of emergent, de facto latitudinarianism. The Hanoverian kings distanced themselves from church politics and polity and themselves favored low church positions. Anne took few clear positions on church matters. The most majestic work of the era, and the one most quoted and read, was William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life . Although Law was a non-juror, his book was orthodox to all Protestants in England at the time and moved its readers to contemplate and practice their Christianity more devoutly. The Meditations of Robert Boyle remained popular as well. Both of these works called for revivalism, and they set the stage for the later development of Methodism and George Whitefield's sermon style. They were works for the individual, rather than for the community. They were non-public and concentrated on the priesthood of all believers notion of an individual revelation.
Also in contrast to the Restoration, when philosophy in England was so fully dominated by John Locke that few other voices are remembered today, the 18th century had a vigorous competition among followers of Locke, and philosophical writing was strong. Bishop George Berkeley and David Hume are the best remembered major philosophers of 18th-century England, but other philosophers adapted the political ramifications of empiricism, including Bernard de Mandeville, Charles Davenant, and Adam Smith. All of these figures can be considered empiricists, for they all begin with the relative certainty of perception, but they reach vastly different conclusions.
Bishop Berkeley extended Locke's emphasis on perception to argue that perception entirely solves the Cartesian problem of subjective and objective knowledge by saying "to be is to be perceived." Only, Berkeley argued, those things that are perceived by a consciousness are real. If there is no perception of a thing, then that thing cannot exist. Further, it is not the potential of perception that lends existence, but the actuality of perception. When Samuel Johnson flippantly kicked a rock and "thus...refute Berkeley," his kick only affirmed Berkeley's position, for by perceiving the rock, Johnson had given it greater reality. However, Berkeley's empiricism was designed, at least partially, to lead to the question of who observes and perceives those things that are absent or undiscovered. For Berkeley, the persistence of matter rests in the fact that God is perceiving those things that humans are not, that a living and continually aware, attentive, and involved God is the only rational explanation for the existence of objective matter. In essence, then, Berkeley's skepticism leads inevitably to faith.
Image:David Hume.jpg|thumb|right|200px|David Hume
David Hume, on the other hand, was the most radically empiricist philosopher of the period. He attacked surmise and unexamined premises wherever he found them, and his skepticism pointed out metaphysics in areas that other empiricists had assumed were material. Hume attacked the weakness of inductive logic and the apparently mystical assumptions behind key concepts such as energy and causality. Hume doggedly refused to enter into questions of his faith in the divine, but his assault on the logic and assumptions of theodicy and cosmogeny was devastating. He was an anti-apologist without ever agreeing to be atheist. Later philosophers have seen in Hume a basis for Utilitarianism and naturalism.
In social and political philosophy, economics underlies much of the debate. Charles Davenant, writing as a radical Whig, was the first to propose a theoretical argument on trade and virtue with his A Discourse on Grants and Resumptions and Essays on the Balance of Power. However, Davenant's work was not directly very influential. On the other hand, Bernard de Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees became a centerpoint of controversy regarding trade, morality, and social ethics. It was initially a short poem called The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn'd Honest in 1705. However, in 1714 he published it with its current title, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits and included An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue. Mandeville argued that wastefulness, lust, pride, and all the other "private" vices were good for the society at large, for each led the individual to employ others, to spend freely, and to free capital to flow through the economy. William Law attacked the work, as did Bishop Berkeley. In 1729, when a new edition appeared, the book was prosecuted as a public nuisance. It was also denounced in the periodicals. John Brown attacked it in his Essay upon Shaftesbury's Characteristics. It was reprinted again in 1755. Although there was a serious political and economic philosophy that derived from Mandeville's argument, it was initially written as a satire on the Duke of Marlborough's taking England to war for his personal enrichment. Mandeville's work is full of paradox and is meant, at least partially, to problematize what he saw as the naive philosophy of human progress and inherent virtue.