ABSTRACT
The ‘Augustan Age’ is generally reckoned to cover the first four decades of the eighteenth century. Named for the Roman Emperor Augustus, during whose reign admirable good sense was supposed to have dominated public discourse, it showed itself now in a concern for dignity, calmness and attention to external appearances. Writing and culture was seen as a social gesture between friends, or potential friends, which emphasised intelligence, good manners and proper sentiment at the expense of boorishness. It was adopted by the upper crust of society – the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Duke of Newcastle, Archbishop Tillotson as well as intellectuals like Isaac Newton and John Locke and writers like the old schoolboy chums, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. They valued ‘wit’, which Locke opined must be tempered by ‘judgment’, and which led to their brilliance in satire and irony. These, however, were to be tempered with sentiment, the ability to feel, though in practice sentiment easily tipped over into sentimentality. It was manifested dramatically when, for example, the good apprentice and the bad apprentice meet in the gaol at the end of George Lillo’s The London Merchant and weep together, or when, in Steele’s The Conscious Lovers, Bevil Junior asserts sententiously and also perhaps tearfully, ‘To hope for perfect happiness is vain’.
