The story is a satire on modern commercial interests where everything is subordinate
to money. What are your views on this? Support your answer with relevant
arguments. LONG ANSWER PLEASE FASTI WILL MARK YOU AS BRAINALIST
Answers
period between 1660 and 1760, Britain transformed itself from a small island economy with a relatively small population into a major naval power with an immense empire. This transformation was driven in part by the powerful forces of commercial capitalism which had been in the process of development for over a century but, as Brewer (1990) shows, Britain’s military success required increased taxation and deficit financing as well as the growth of a substantial public administration. These changes involved the creation of new forms of virtual property and a shift in authority away from the landed gentry towards merchants and financiers. They also involved an increased emphasis on contractual relationships between people and between subjects and the state (Moore, 2004). Modern literary critics have explored the relationship between the financial revolution and the literary revolution of the early eighteenth century and have found them to be intimately connected. Thus Sandra Sherman argues that the market in ideas and that constituted by commercial paper “generate a mutually inflecting discursive field around the notion of ‘fiction’” (Sherman, 1996, 2)1 while Colin Nicholson explores the reaction against the financial revolution in the ‘capital’ satires of Pope, Swift and Gay (Nicholson, 1994).
2Sherman’s subject is Defoe, whose own colourful life had included periods as a merchant, a bankrupt, a manufacturer, a prominent dissenter, a journalist, a spy and propagandist. Defoe was also a vigorous spokesman for the rising trading class and the celebrated author of Robinson Crusoe which many regard as the first English novel. In Crusoe, Defoe depicted a new type of Englishman, ‘empirical, self-reliant, energetic’ and with a direct relationship with God (Allen, 1969, 35). He also broke with the accepted canons of prose style―a sacrifice which enabled him to achieve realism and immediacy, both of which became characteristic of the novel (Watt, 1960, 29).
3If Defoe exemplifies the positive literary response to the growing importance of trade, to the decline of the landed aristocracy and the increasing power of those involved in trade and finance (Shinagel, 1968), Swift and Gay and Pope who formed the ‘Scriblerus club’ represent a counter trend. These authors voiced hostility to the arriviste elite composed of corrupt financiers, bankers and brokers who they saw as undermining the older, more stable political structures (Nicholson, 1994, 18-23). In Gulliver’s Travels, The Beggars Opera and the Dunciad, they were quick to satirize the mercenary spirit of their times but, as Nicholson has shown, they were also privately willing to exploit the opportunities for enrichment provided by the rise and fall of markets for stocks and shares. Swift, Gay and Pope were also amongst the first to take advantage of the developing market for printed matter, a factor which freed writers from dependence upon aristocratic patronage. While the willingness of the ‘Scriblerians’ to exploit the market they professed to despise might be interpreted as hypocrisy on their part, they made good use of the opportunities that had become available to rail against changes which were permanently altering the economic and political landscape and rendering obsolete the values that they themselves promoted.