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Ashley Marshall The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770

The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 is a tremendously ambitious book. Ashley Marshall aims to survey and describe satiric practice in England in all its multifarious manifestations, modes, and genres over much of the long eighteenth century. The coverage starts in the milieu of the Restoration and ends with the generation that followed Swift and Pope. It is also a tremendously skeptical book. Marshall notes at the outset that the vast majority of scholarly works on the topic have relied on a highly selective evidentiary basis, privileging a handful of writers (Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson) and linking their works together in a chain of conscious influence that results in a coherent tradition (‘‘Tory’’ or ‘‘Augustan Satire’’). Whereas previous scholarship was often concerned with arguments that theorize the genre or that make sense of multiple satiric works, Marshall is more concerned to explicate individual works and to describe them with attention to contextual matters that often frustrate tidy narratives. Marshall states at the outset that privileging ‘‘a few largely atypical works and assuming their interconnectedness means missing much of what makes the culture of satire in the long eighteenth century so exciting’’ (1). The source of that excitement comes from the process of discovery that her book narrates. She describes her work as a ‘‘chronological but nondevelopmental’’ history of satire in the period, and that is an apt description (29). But something does develop as the book goes along: a profound sense of how narrowly focused prior scholarship has been and how much work there is yet to explore. And that is exciting. In essence, this book is an invitation to take up the task of exploring the scores of satiric works published in any given year in the eighteenth century that have been overlooked because they do not fit into the established critical definitions of Scriblerian or