Satire Instruction and Useful Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Long before the Industrial Revolution was deplored by the Romantics or documented by the Victorians eighteenth-century British writers were thinking deeply about the function of literature in an age of invention. They understood the significance of ''how-to'' knowledge and mechanical expertise to their contemporaries. Their own framing of this knowledge however was invariably satirical critical and oblique. While others compiled encyclopaedias and manuals they wrote ''mock arts''. This satirical sub-genre shaped (among other works) Swift''s Gulliver''s Travels Sterne''s Tristram Shandy and Edgeworth''s Belinda. Eighteenth-century satirists and poets submitted to a general paradox: the nature of human skilfulness obliged them to write in an indirect and unpractical way about the practical world. As a result their explorations of mechanical expertise eschewed useable descriptions of the mechanical trades. They wrote instead a long and peculiar line of books that took apart the very idea of an instructional literature: the Enlightenment Mock Arts.