Pope's Dunciad and the Queen of Night: A Study in Emotional Jacobitism

by Douglas Brooks-Davies

What is Alexander Pope's longest and greatest poem, The Dunciad, about? Dr Brooks-Davies examines this riddling and dizzyingly surrealist work from several points of view, focussing particularly on its dark queen, Dulness, its duncical laureate king, its lunatic coronation games, and its mysterious dream vision. He makes some startling discoveries that offer a compellingly coherent and original reading of the poem. The Dunciad, he argues, is primarily political and is best understood through the vocabulary of post-1688 political propaganda, both prose and verse. It is an embodiment of Jacobite mythology testifying to Pope's agonised commitment to the House of Stuart as exemplified in the last reigning Stuart, Anne. Her shadow dominates The Dunciad; it is she who is nostalgically invoked even while being rejected by her black opposite, Dulness. Dr Brooks-Davies takes as as his main text the three-book Dunciad of 1728-42, revealing for the first time just how indebted Pope is to Virgil's Georgics and Aeneid; examining afresh the extent and implications of its allusions to Milton's Paradise and showing that it is shot through with references to coronation ritual; the mystery religions of Isis and Ceres; and to alchemy. Pope's attachment to the memory of Queen Anne also produces in The Dunciad a deep commitment to the feminine principle which he holds up as an example to 'James III', the exiled king over the water. Even as he holds it up, however, he knows how futile the gesture is. Pope's Jacobitism must remain a matter for his emotions rather than a stimulus to political action. The book will give undergraduate students an informed, if controversial, interpretation of a major and very difficult eighteenth-century poem, and will give scholars of Pope and the period as a whole many provocative new insights. It will also be of considerable interest to students of early eighteenth-century English history.

190 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1985