Three Theories of Augustan Waste

Abstract

The Living Waste of Milton and Shaftesbury Originally written in 1644 with the sole purpose of persuading Parliament to abolish prepublication licensing, Milton's Areopagitica proved surprisingly popular in the eighteenthcentury, going through several stand-alone editions throughout the period. 1 In particular, Milton's famous description of printed works as "not absolutely dead things," but the "season'd life of a man preserv'd and stor'd up in books" strongly cohered with the dominant opinions of a literary culture steeped in questions of poetic production, labor, and the effects of literature on its readers. Milton's metaphor (if not his actual argument) 2 offered one possible resolution to eighteenth-century anxieties of production in suggesting that even seemingly poor or debased works contain the potential to reveal "the Image of God" to readers with open minds and clear hearts: "to the pure," he echoes St. Paul in affirming, "all things are pure." 3 Areopagitica's description of literary production collapses together and applies to print two senses of waste or excess familiar to Early Modern readers: for Milton, books are both those "leftovers" of moral and intellectual growth not pruned away in the process of publication, and the fertile "wasteland" in which new ideas grow uncultivated. 4 If, as Sophie Gee describes, 1 For a detailed eighteenth-century reception history of Areopagitica, see Erik L. Johnson, "'Life Beyond Life': Reading Milton's Areopagitica through Enlightenment Vitalism," Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 353-70. 2 Infamously, Milton excludes books of "tolerated Popery and open superstition" from his call for freedom from licensing, on the basis that such works are incompatible with the republic of "brotherly dissimilitudes" he envisions. See John Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1957), 716-49 pp. 747. 3 Ibid. 720, 727. 4 Put another way, Milton largely elides the distinction later made by Georges Bataille between useful excesses which "can be used for the growth of the system" and the "accursed share" which "must necessarily be lost without profit." See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (Cambridge: Zone Books, 1991) pp. 21. As Denise Gigante notes, however, Milton does observe a similar distinction to Bataille's when it comes to non-literary economies: see Denise Gigante, Taste (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) pp. 24-31. Practically speaking, the effect of these legal reforms on the book publishing industry was mild at best-modern historians have generally found that economic factors played a far greater part in the eighteenth-century expansion of printing than the lapse of the Acts 8-but this in no way diminished the popular perception that England was entering an era of printed abundance vastly different from those which came before. Addison's Spectator, Swift's A Tale of a Tub, and Pope's Dunciad all respond to this ph...