"Partial to Some One Side": The Advice-to-a-Painter Poem as Historical Writing

Abstract

This essay argues that many Restoration and eighteenth-century satires and panegyrics were intended and received as interventions in a tradition of English historical writing. Using the advice-to-a-painter poems of Edmund Waller and Andrew Marvell as my chief examples, I suggest that the partiality derogatorily ascribed to satire and panegyric by Restoration historians not only enabled satirists and panegyrists to adopt a biased political stance; it also facilitated a narrowing of formal perspective—partiality in the sense of partialness—that allowed for the development of more detailed forms of historical representation.

John Wolcot and “The Anecdotic Itch”: Peter Pindar, Biography, and Historiography in the 1780s

“…37 In the next section I want to turn to some of Wolcot's further examinations of the relationship between writer and subject, and the problems of being a public writer in a period where virtue has been replaced by celebrity and where it feels like there is no longer a relevant public language of praise. 39 Wolcot's own position is of course tending in the other direction in terms of its conclusions, focussing on the potentially negative consequences of the 'narrowing lens.' Yet it is important to be alert to the fact that he is working within a recognised tradition, albeit coming to a different conclusion than many that had come before, since it is another example of a way in which Wolcot's preoccupations can be seen within the context of a larger historiographical and intellectual framework.…”