historyanalysisThe Conversation: Arts + Culture (US)18th century · Britain
Some of the most trusted political voices in 18th-century Britain were fictional – why this tradition lives on
In eighteenth-century Britain, several writers invented fictional narrators who wrote satirical periodicals and became trusted voices. Jonathan Swift created Isaac Bickerstaff in 1708 as a hoax against an astrologer, and Richard Steele then used the persona as the editor of The Tatler. Eliza Haywood wrote The Parrot (1746) through a parrot named Poll, who used his outsider status to argue against prejudice about women and other groups. Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World used a Chinese philosopher, Lien Chi Altangi, to make familiar British customs look strange. Christopher Smart's Mary Midnight, a midwife, gave him a voice freer than his public persona as a Cambridge scholar. Repetition gave each character a personality that readers came to trust, sometimes beyond the joke that created them.
The pattern explains why characters such as the modern joke candidate Count Binface can gain real political credibility. Satire works best when it gives an argument a recognisable face, and these examples show the technique is centuries old.
Christopher Smart performed as his character Mary Midnight on the London stage, so a fictional editor became a stage performer.
The Conversation
Illustrative photo · Richard Doyle (illustration), Punch Magazine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
