Three Theories of Augustan Waste

This thesis argues for the existence of a recognizable
rhetoric of “print waste” in works on literary evaluation in the
early eighteenth-century. It does so by first analyzing Milton and
Shaftesbury’s descriptions of printed works as metaphors for
“waste,” highlighting that word’s multivalent use as both a
negatively inflected term for abject or valueless writing, and as
an ambiguously laudatory reference to the generative “wastes” of
public land and Biblical paradise. Following that contextualizing
work, it proceeds to tease out a shared vocabulary used to refer to
bad (or “bad”) writing in the works of Addison, Swift, and Pope,
focusing in particular on how the Augustan critics use the terms of
print waste to suggest that certain authors and genres pose a
mounting and immediate threat to the literary taste of the public.
Throughout, the thesis continually draws attention to the moments
where this rhetoric of literary worth slips into rhetoric of human
worth, noting the manner in which the Augustan critics elide
ethical concerns and problematic realities through the use of the
tropes of print waste.

the necessary aesthetic and moral labor of literary evaluation. 13 The central difference between the two lies in the identity of the laborer: while Milton assumes work on the part of both the moral writer and interpreter, Shaftesbury denies that one could take a wholesome pleasure in the products of the "frothy distemper" of an essayist, and ridicules the notion that "the Reader [is] in truth any better entertained, when he is oblig'd to assist at the experimental Discussions of his of his practicing Author, who all the while is in reality doing no better than taking his Physik in public." 14 For Shaftesbury, the idea of deliberately testing oneself against the undigested public "evacuations" of others is not just questionable in terms of moral value, but fundamentally debased-the ur-critic of Shaftesbury's imagined golden age "taught the Publick to discover what was just and excellent in each Performance," while only the later and "inferior Order… of Etymologists, Philologists, Grammarians" and "Rhetoricians" employed themselves in "exposing the weak sides… of mere Pretenders." 15 Shaftesbury's regime heralds the arrival of a new way of thinking about Milton's printed wastes-not only as static symbols of virtue and testing grounds for one's moral taste, but as accumulating piles of debased matter that disrupt polite exchange by their nauseating stench.
Shaftesbury enlists this thoroughly unpleasant metaphor as a call to turn away from printing "crudities," but does not answer the question of how to deal with the piles that have already 13 As Price notes, Shaftesbury follows Plato in upholding the dialectic as a tool for the "redirection of the soul, an awakening of the sense-bound man to the realm his mind by its nature desires to inhabit." Where Shaftesbury differs from Plato is his insistence that this act take place away from the public eye and that it be undertaken with complete liberty from didacticism and abstraction, and his association of the process of dialectic with the "self-therapy" of criticizing one's own works. See Price, To the Palace of Wisdom 97-103. 14 Ibid. 15 Shaftesbury,. Note that Shaftesbury does not treat these classes of critic Swift's degree of contempt; while later and lesser than the ur-critic, the pedantic critics nevertheless play a valuable role in preventing flawed oration from "passing the public ear." accumulated in the public space, and now threaten to grow. For schemes of this nature, we must instead turn to the critics of the Augustan era, who responded to these accumulating street-heaps with solutions ranging from Addison's gentle crusade to cure the diseased taste of the English public, to Swift's imaginary retreat to a tasteful Utopia, to Pope's synthetic attempt to elevate the heroic poet above the chamber-pot of London's print industry-all, however, picked up on the Miltonic resonances of Shaftesbury's waste-language, noting with concern the unwholesome links between abundant wastelands and printed "crudities." Together, the writings of these three individuals reference and constitute a new rhetoric of literary evaluation, which heaps virulent (and occasionally hyperbolic) disesteem upon certain works of print literature and their readers. I have chosen to refer to these garbage literatures as "print waste," but in doing so I do not mean to suggest that they constitute a unified genre-on the contrary, I intend "print waste" to encompass "modern" books as formally diverse as William Wotton's Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning and Richard Blackmore's Arthurian epics (satirized in A Tale of a Tub and The Dunciad, respectively). Although by themselves these works have little in common, they are united by the anxious rhetoric of critics who refer to them by invoking Shaftesburian "crudities," and suggest that, rather than sit inert in their abjection, these putative pieces of literary garbage teem with the virulent potential to multiply themselves.
In developing this concept, I have been deeply indebted to Sophie Gee's concept of "literary waste," her term for the used "vessels of symbolic meaning" which populate so many eighteenth-century texts. 16 Like Gee's literary waste, print waste proves too abundant, too generative, and too worthless to be subsumed into conventional economies. This is why, as Gee suggests, detractors of printed waste resort so easily to sacred language to describe it: they are 16 See Sophie Gee, Making Waste 4-5.
relying on its ironic shared resonance with the religious experience as singular, and beyond value. 17 In this way, discussions of print waste inevitably return to the topoi of Miltonic waste, trading simultaneously and seamlessly in metaphors of empty wastelands, the verdant wastes of Eden, and the human bodies (or, more frequently, human bodily waste) that populate those spaces.
James Noggle's The Temporality of Taste has also been exceedingly useful in this project, in particular his distinction between the categories of "taste" and "a taste"-or, the capacity of an individual to immediately "respond sensitively and discriminately to nearly anything," and the historical and social experience of predilection for a particular pleasure. 18 As Noggle emphasizes, the two senses of "taste" are in theory distinct, but tend to collapse into one another in both eighteenth-century and contemporary rhetoric: one becomes an authority on taste by demonstrating one's delicacy and sensibility, which largely involved displaying the correct preferences in art and literature. 19 When in his Characteristics Shaftesbury writes that "the wellbred man" and "the real philosopher" both "aspire to a just Taste," he blends these ideas in a way familiar and intelligible to the eighteenth-century: Shaftesbury's ideal man aims to both know what is good through immediate sense, and to demonstrate this knowledge to those around him.
Although hardly unusual for Shaftesbury, the masculinist tone here obviates an issue that worried Addison and delighted Pope: how does a society built on the indivisible purchase, reflection, and teaching of taste reconcile that ideology with longstanding tropes of female indulgence? Although a relatively small part of my essay, the eighteenth-century problem of 17 Ibid. 14-16. 18 James Noggle, The Temporality of Taste (Oxford University Press, 2012) pp. 1-3, 10-12, 15-16. 19 Ibid.
women's tastes is emblematic of the anxieties generated by the intersection of taste and evacuation-if, as Laura Brown suggests, "the figure of the woman is the discursive means to the connection of imperialism and aesthetic theory," 20 what happens when women outside of the Augustan poetic tradition discharge their lived experience in poetic form? Although they would hardly conceive of it in such terms, my critics' shared concern for the effects of print waste reflect a fear of cultural contamination by lived experiences of alterity-so, for example, fears of genuine or imitation chinoiserie "feminizing" English culture 21 must be understood as stemming in part from an assumption that the evacuations of the female-coded Chinese self will affect the identity of those who consume them. While drawing this thread past the eighteenth century falls outside the scope of this essay, I encourage my readers to consider that the regimes of contamination which originate in these writings have survived the taste theories in which they were originally embedded-we are still, a great many insist, what we eat. 20 Laura Brown, Ends of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) pp. 104 21 For more on the intersections between chinoiserie and femininity in the eighteenth-century, see Jenkins Eugenia, "'Nature to Advantage Drest': Chinoiserie, Aesthetic Form, and the Poetry of Subjectivity in Pope and Swift," Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 1 (Fall 2009) Reason (New York: Norton, 2005) pp. 130-147 for an examination of Shaftesbury's opposition to egalitarian ideologies of taste. one more than in another" 24 -but his conception of beauty as defined by variety does "permit an aesthetic appreciation by potentially anyone of any form." 25 The openness of this vision of an aesthetic marketplace that caters to every taste seems incongruous when considered alongside Addison's insistence that the nation's readers indulged in a "Gothic taste" for "Epigram, Turns of Wit, and forced Conceits," that its "Scriblers of Lampoons" were "very barbarous and inhuman," and that society as a whole had degenerated into a "desperate State of Vice and Folly." 26 These sentiments can only co-exist with Addison's open vision of the aesthetic marketplace because he, like Milton, recognized the intersection of valueless crud and undefined potential present in printed works-"The Mind that lies fallow but a single day," says Addison, perhaps recalling the spartoi-birthing books of Areopagitica, "sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture." 27 In that vein, the purpose of this section of my essay does not consist of reading Addison in terms of his famously free and open theory of aesthetic taste, but instead concentrating on the moments in which he restricts those freedoms, positing instead a fundamentally diseased public taste in need of a collective cure.
In contrast to their philosophical differences, Shaftesbury and Addison held extremely similar political ideologies in which taste played a key role. The works of each affirm, in accordance with standard Whiggish principles and against the appetite-driven political philosophies of Hobbes and Mandeville, that the individual pursuit of aesthetic pleasure "is 24 The Spectator i. 416 25 Brown, The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage 78 26 These complaints originate in The Spectator i. 409, 23, and 10, respectively. 27 The Spectator i. 10. Compare to Milton's admission that "[books] are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men" (Complete Works 720) advantageous to social affection," and therefore benefits society when enabled by a refined understanding or "polite imagination." 28 This pursuit has certain caveats, however, as Addison follows Shaftesbury in insisting on the moral value of disinterested observation, 29 and so remains skeptical of any foundation of aesthetic pleasure in owned land. "The Man of Polite Imagination," Addison insists, "feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows than another does in the possession." 30 Addison thus privileges disinterested pleasures which accrue no additional value-most often, these are the pleasures of art, live entertainment, and literature accessible to the purchasing middle-class. The result consists of nothing less than a moral imperative to purchase access to objects of aesthetic pleasure, as dictated by the polite public taste, in order to refine one's own sense of taste and better participate in the logocentric society of refined individuals-that doing so demonstrated cultural and ideological cohesion with the increasingly wealthy and politically ascendant Whigs was a mere perk. 31 Fortunately for prospective men and women of taste, Whig economic theory treated wealth as an inexhaustible product of labor rather than limiting it by the availability of raw materials. 32 It is for this reason, perhaps in addition to that of political conformity, that Addison Spectator, which contains a description of the London Stock Exchange as a trans-national "Emporium for the whole Earth" so beautiful that Mr. Spectator's "Heart naturally overflows with pleasure at the sight of a prosperous and happy Multitudes," 33 provides a vision of the type of market utopia that Addison envisions. As Sophie Gee observes, Addison's Exchange is a "secular Eden" where all matter is both valuable and able to be converted freely and without excessive surplus through the abstract alchemy of commerce, finance and credit. 34 Purchasers and sellers are present, but incidental; "the Phillipick islands give Flavour to… European bowls" of their own accords, with the dirty realities of sugar plantations abstracted away. In this utterly regular and perfectly fungible economy, the absence of waste renders the processes of Miltonic repurposing or Shaftesburian evacuation unnecessary. As we shall see, however, this regularity and financial abstraction proves the fundamental difference between trading goods and printing one's crudities-ultimately, the trace of print waste proves more materially real to Addison than the naked monetary interests of trade, and therefore distresses his conception of a self-regulating, tasteful society to a far greater degree.
Addison's project of reforming English manners was, to a large extent, inseparable from the economic project of bringing about an ideal world of free exchange. To follow Simon Gikandi's reasoning in Slavery and the Culture of Taste, cultural institutions in general and the coffeehouse in particular were financially dependent on an increasingly politically aspirant class of plantation-owners, whose "largesse… enabled the cultivation of polite conduct and the growth 33 The Spectator i. 69 34 Sophie Gee,Making Waste 97,[137][138][139][140] in consumption that was essential to the emergence of the culture of taste." 35 The arrangement was simple: "closeted colonial barons" like Christopher Codrington directly patronized Addison and other writers while indirectly supporting the tasteful enterprise through a steady stream of accumulating foreign goods, and the taste makers in turn validated and uplifted the idea of international exchange, lending it cultural capital and legitimacy. 36 Addison's attempt to democratize taste and reform English society thus rests on an assumption of abstract fungibility between different types of goods and the positive effect that the private participation in those trades have upon the public-without coffee there could be no coffee-houses, and without coffee-houses there could be no Spectator. 37 Of course, in reality these abstracted, fungible "goods" included not just exotic comestibles but human beings. It is striking, if not altogether surprising, that Addison, never attempted to reconcile the exceedingly non-fungible waste of the slave trade with his market system-both the literal piles of corpses capturing and transporting slaves produced and the consequent toll of human suffering are almost entirely absent from his writings. 38 Instead, Addison populates his writings with panegyrics to "ships laden with the Harvest of every Climate" and "Traders of good sense" 39 -but, in a doubling that assumes paramount importance 35 Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton University Press, 2014) pp. 149-160 36 Ibid. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) pp. 316-317. 37 For the central importance of the coffee-house to both public life in general and newspapers in particular, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination 34-40. 38 Steele does recount a female friend's summary of the tragic version of the "Inkle and Yarico" story from Richard Lignon's True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes in The Spectator i. 11, holding up the moment in which Inkle sells his pregnant lover into slavery as an example of male cruelty. It is difficult to cite this moment as an example of Swiftian colonial awareness, however, given the "battle of the sexes across time" commonplace in which it is framed. 39 The Spectator i. 2 & 69 in Jonathan Swift's work, the human cost of Addison's tasteful reformation can never be entirely erased from its pages. When, as we shall see, print waste proves an intractable problem for Addison, and conceals beneath it a much greater issue of which he seems only dimly awarethat, in the eighteenth century, discussions of waste are impossible to separate from discussions of human worth.
April 14, 1711's issue of The Spectator, in which Addison recounts a visit to "a Lady's Library" and laments the corrupted taste and judgement of its owner, provides an example of the way in which the presence of print waste problematizes both the universally redemptive narrative of social taste and the unthreateningly generative surpluses of the Royal Exchange. 40 On its surface, the essay presents a perfect model of mild Addisonian satire-our spectating narrator visits his widowed acquaintance, describes her reading and other leisure activities, and returns home to lament that she wastes her intelligence and sensitivity on meaningless French romances and other diversionary literature. He does not suggest that reading these romances is personally harmful-indeed, they are "innocent entertainments"-but nevertheless paints them in terms anticipating the morally dubious acquisitive femininity of Pope's Belinda and Swift's Vanessa: the "finely-bound and gilt" folios are paired with "Octavos bound by tea-dishes," while the juxtaposition of "A Prayer Book: with a Bottle of Hungary Water [perfume] beside" is suggestive of a wide variety of tropes linking cosmetics, femininity, luxury, and impiety. 41 In describing the physical books as such, Addison suggests that Leonora's reading is excessive and useless, and he follows suit in typing Leonora as a childless widow, sequestered away from polite society "about an hundred Miles distant from London" as her "Mind naturally sinks into a kind of Lethargy, and falls asleep." 42 As a satire on poor taste, this issue of the Spectator seems at first to compliment the view of civil society indicated by the anecdote from the Exchange, as enlightened, logocentric trade by spectating men of established judgement contrasts easily with Leonora's debased, female-coded hoarding of material objects. 43 As David Porter observes in The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, Addison "pointedly situates [Leonora's] taste as both occupying and corresponding to a distinct material context, consisting largely… of Chinese porcelains," thus drawing a link between frequent characterization of both porcelains and romances as having "an aesthetic of strangeness and curiosity… and a pointed lack of verisimilitude." 44 Porter goes on to suggest that this linkage allows for a nationalistic satire of the supposed extravagance of feminine taste as misguided, emotional, and "debased" by foreign influence. 45 Lacking the structured framework of a rigorously efficient Whig market-ideal, Leonora's bad taste transforms the "delightful pyramids" of books into dangerously excessive heaps of uncirculating waste, as toxic to her own wellbeing as the market for foreign china was to the perceived economic 42 C.f. with the following passage from The Spectator i. 411: …[the Pleasures] of the Imagination… do not require such a Bent of Thought as is necessary to our more serious Employments, nor, at the same time, suffer the Mind to sink into that Negligence and Remissness, which are apt to accompany our more sensual Delights, but… awaken them from Sloth and Idleness, without putting them upon any Labour or Difficulty. What Improvements would a Woman have made, who is so Susceptible of Impressions from what she reads, had she been guided to such Books as have a Tendency to enlighten the Understanding and rectify the Passions, as well as to those which are of little more use than to divert the Imagination?
Clearly, however, Leonora does demonstrate a taste for Lockean moral education through her reading (and the fact that Addison does not list any of these books as "in wood" implies that she may indeed read them). Nevertheless, this refined educational regime fails: although she compares favorably to women who "employ themselves in Diversions less Reasonable, tho' more in Fashion," Addison still identifies Leonora with the printed waste she reads. As a consequence, he separates her from polite society as a participant, reducing her instead to a 46 Ibid. 6 47 Addison explicitly directs his readers to Of Human Understanding in the conclusion to Spectator i. 413. See also Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason 116 purely didactic literary type devoid of agency and meant solely for the observation of Addison's audience. 48 This moment, I argue, marks a critical turning point in the history of tasteful evacuation.
Leonora demonstrates a taste for learning, politeness, and gentility through her reading, actions, and associations-like the tasteful observer of Spectator 411, who "makes the Sphere of his Innocent Pleasures as wide as possible," Leonora "has turned all the Passions of her sex into a Love of books and retirement." In privacy she "converses chiefly with Men… but, it is only in their Writings," engaging in a process analogous to that described by Shaftesbury in his Soliloquy-after all, "Talking with a Friend is nothing else but thinking aloud." 49 While she may lack "understanding" as Shaftesbury would conceive of it, she indisputably demonstrates the polite imagination and receptive demeanor which Addison upholds as the central characteristics of men of taste-and yet, Addison sides with Shaftesbury in this instance, barring Leonora from his circle on the basis that true taste consists of more than reading the right books and associating with the right people.
This paradoxical denial of the individual's ability to improve their taste through market means is shared across a number of Addison's essays. March 29, 1711's Spectator concerns a letter from a young man who, by obsessively perusing medical texts, has literally read himself sick with imagined illnesses. 50 While Addison naturally refuses to indulge the man's hypochondriac need for "more certain Rules," neither does he deliver the expected Shaftesburian solution of privately "evacuating crudities." Instead, Addison "answers the gentleman" by paraphrasing a story from La Fontaine's Fables in which a farmer accidentally ruins his harvest after being given control of the weather by Jupiter. 51 In the fable, and in the Valetudinarian's dilemma, the very capacity to employ poor judgement presents a problem. Purification in such circumstances requires a quasi-miraculous transformation by means beyond the agency of those afflicted with bad taste or bad judgement-one can hardly detect a trace of the "tasteful selfmaking" which Gigante sees at work in Shaftesbury's writings, and which one would expect to find in Addison's. 52 In a twist peculiarly reminiscent of later Tory writers' skepticism towards the market-driven man of taste, 53 Addison here positions the tools of taste-making as means of damnation, and treats the individual's redemption from the pit of bad taste as peculiarly uncertain.
Although incongruous with both Shaftesbury's neo-Platonism and our modern conception of Addisonian philosophy, the seemingly irresolvable tensions between circulating markets and accumulating, agency-less collectors take on a semblance of logic when considered alongside a mode of thought which had become popular in France at the end of the seventeenthcentury. Referred to in popular and medical literature as La Biblomanie, the term had been in common quasi-medical use since at least 1654, when it began to assume an alarming resonance as a disease of collecting books. 54 54 Note that the English form of the term does not become a common topic for public discussion until the very late eighteenth-century, where it assumes a very different resonance connected to anxieties surrounding public libraries and the "institutional purchase" of rare books. The early eighteenth-century French concept of Biblomanie, by contrast, is connected more strongly to concerns of public taste and health than supply and demand. For more on the later Bibliomania, see James Raven, "Debating Bibliomania and the Collection of Books in the Eighteenth Biblomanié is a person, usually of a middling social class and very often a woman, in whom "the ability to read, joined with the inability to judge, and eventually the desire to write" perpetuates the debasement of a literary culture. 55 For virtually all writers on La Bibliomanie (and its advanced poetry-writing form, La Metromanié) the cause of the disease is clear and readily apparent: a lack of education on the part of the average reader of books results in both misevaluating their intellectual worth and misreading their contents. 56 Although there is no direct evidence that Addison had any familiarity with this concept (although such a supposition is hardly improbable, considering its popularity in France), his theory of bad taste shares with it a number of premises: Addison also views the "wretched taste" of those driving the "reigning Entertainments of the Politer Part" of his society as socially deleterious, 57 associates it with accumulation, and most importantly, assigns it a clear material It is no accident, then, that Addison frequently turns to medicine for his metaphors: in one Spectator he is a "doctor" prescribing "remedies" to the "seeds and principles" of bad taste, in another, he "dissects" a "Beau's Head and… a Coquet's Heart" to discover the roots of their respective distempers. 61 In each case, Addison presents Mr. Spectator as an expert physician protecting the literate public from itself through the application of specially selected medicinesin this case, the tremendous volume of literary recommendations, medical advice, and distilled philosophy available in The Spectator. 62 Although Addison draws a distinction between "ordinary people" and "Men of Wit" as early as Spectator 10, 63 later along in the paper's run it becomes unavoidably obvious that its intended audience consists at least partially of the latter group. Whether genuine or (far more likely) concocted as objects of mockery, the epistolary characters of the Valetudinarian of Spectator 27, the witless social reformer of 175, and the "sheromp" of 217 all share the essential premise of being regular readers of Addison's essays-they are all acknowledgements on Addison's part that average people suffering from the innumerable "diseases" that manifested themselves as bad taste turned to Mr. Spectator for "remedies." Casting Mr. Spectator as the leading physician to a putatively ill public taste, Addison met these demands by personally selecting the correct doses of Locke, Blackmore, and even Hobbes, 64 pruning problematic passages to curate a body of public knowledge in a manner not dissimilar to Diderot's Encyclopédie.
In an ironic twist, Addison's recasting of the critic as a cultural dietician introduced a critical responsibility not merely to spectate upon society as it is, but to shape its future by a need for "large indexes, and little compendiums" of quotations, forever rendered useless by the abject nature of their subjects. 73 In Swift's metaphor, the consideration of these dregs, and their consumption, is left to the "true criticks"-the type of both the Tale's audience and its writerwho are compelled to "drag out the lurking errors" of texts, "multiplying them like Hydra's heads; and raking them together like Augeas's dung." 74 It is this final step-in which Swift, like a Grubean alchemist, "proceeds by reincrudation" to transform bad works into worse ones-that sets A Tale of a Tub's print waste apart from that of Areopagitica or the Spectator. As much as Milton's books threaten to "spring up armed men," or Addison's romances to lull their readers into "lethargy," only the Grub Street's printed "children of the brain" contain such life as to survive and reproduce after repeated cycles of birth and consumption. 75 Even more than Addison, Swift shares the Hugh Ormsby-Lennon has already written extensively on the ways in which A Tale of a Tub apes and mocks eighteenth-century quack-doctor and stage-itinerant cultures, but it is worth noting how many of its invocations of chicanery double as digs at The Spectator and its readers. Like

Mr. Spectator, Swift's Hack promises "a wonderful revolution in [the] notions and opinions" of
his readers, and emphasizes his treatise's suitability to the tastes of diverse individuals-by which Swift means that he expects his audience to be amused and outraged, not edified. 79 Also like Mr. Spectator, the Hack eagerly begs for the "assent" of his "judicious reader" at every turn, drawing them into dialogue-but he does so in the manner of a profiteering mountebank, knowingly peddling snake-oil under the pretenses of the public good. 80 And where Addison jokingly affects a surgical air in his "dissections of a Beau's Head," finding therein "laces" and "mirrors," the Hack discovers "faults" upon "seeing a woman flayed" or a "the carcass of a 77  beau" laid open-but Swift never acknowledges the nature of these "imperfections," because the target of his satire is plainly the voyeur-surgeon himself. 81 More so here than in the "Letter to a Young Poet," Swift reveals the quest to commercially "cure" the public taste by exposing the bad and prescribing the good as not simply pointless or deluded, but actively vulgar and transparently pecuniary in interest.
We need not read these parallels between the Hack and Mr. Spectator as personal animosity. Instead, I argue that they reflect a wider Swiftian anxiety surrounding the differentiation of different types of waste, as described in Sophie Gee's work. In her examination of Swift's writing in general and "Directions to Servants" in particular, Gee notes an inescapable tendency to conflate the sacred and profane: in the servants' hands, the chamber pot becomes "a vessel" containing communion wafers or, nauseatingly, "canapés." 82 The uncomfortable implication here, as Gee sees it, is that the magic of the page draws those categories together, and makes it easy to mistake one for the other even for those of an otherwise sensitive faculty of taste. 83 This, I believe, is why Swift so often configures literary waste as human waste, rotting carcasses, and other points from which "bad air" emanates-because while they might smell different to the nose capable of recognizing their scent, toxic vapors cannot be distinguished from uncontaminated air without partaking of their miasma. 84 In the same way, the persistence of mimesis as a mode of thought meant that the difference between a learned author's parody and a 81 Tub 84. 82 Sophie Gee, Making Waste 14-16. 83 Ibid. 14-16, 92-112 84 As Paul Hunter notes, "the many accounts of eighteenth-century sense experience… all bear a consistent record of personal invasion," particularly where the smells of disease and rot were Clearly, Swift sees little hope for redemption of the public taste-printed waste is too great in mass, too generative, and too difficult to identify, while its purported opponents hardly seem to take it seriously. With regards to the individual, however, Swift seems harder to read. On the one hand, Gigante notes occasional appeals to those of "good noses" which imply the existence of a tasteful class against which the debased tastes of the general public contrast 86but, as Claude Rawson points out, Swift tends to see the "potential for freewheeling mental excess and moral depravity" as a universal human trait, in which satirists themselves were complicit. 87 If Shaftesbury's purgation of rudeness remains at all possible in Swift's world, even on a personal level, it must involve a more total separation from printed and societal waste than that achievable through the mechanism of satire, the "writers" of which wear "very foul clothes" and "leave more filth and nastiness than they sweep away. the Struldbrugs vices arise not as an innate product of growing old, but as a consequence of accumulating so great a quantity of material dregs as to prevent entry into the Addisonian society of good taste. 92 Swift's irony, of course, lies in the fact that their unwilling method of evacuation-the forgetfulness of senility-prohibits the Struldbrugs who suffer from it from improving the taste of others through their own judgement, now purified. Swift thus renders Gulliver's initial fantasy of an undying man of taste absurd on two fronts, problematizing both the concept that individual evacuation of the traces of a degraded or debased society is possible, and the idea that a return to the state of nature is at all preferable. 93 Swift's descriptions of the Houyhnhnms both confirms the centrality of external causes to degrading both the public and individual taste, and suggests a solution. Like the people of Laputa, the Houyhnhnms are avowed rationalists-however, while the Laputans' professed wisdom conceals useless pedantry, 94 Gulliver views the Houyhnhnms as members of an "orderly… rational, acute and judicious" not unlike that sought after by Addison. 95 This social harmony is made possible by both the Houhynhms total physical and linguistic separation from the Yahoos, their isolation from the rest of the world, and their complete absence of a print 92 A similar idea is expressed by Rousseau, who in Sciences et Artes "imagines future generations crying out to their God, 'deliver us from the enlightenment, and the fatal arts of our fathers, and give us back ignorance, innocence, and poverty'" (as quoted and translated in Jennifer Tsien, The Bad Taste of Others 35). Older discourses of forgetting and idealizing primitive institutions were available as well-see Tony C. Brown, The Primitive, The Aesthetic, and the Savage 26-44 on contemporary sources. 93 Swift may have had in mind Steele's assertion that age improves "all the rational and worthy pleasures of our Being" in The Spectator i. 153. 94 See Gregory Lynall, Swift and Science (New York: Palgrave, 2012) pp. 89-119 on Laputa as a parody of the Royal Society of Physicians. As Lynall notes, Swift's satire tends to mock the Laputans' (and the "Laputans" of the Royal Society's) obsession with trivia, self-righteousness, and lack of common sense, rather than faith in evidence-based reasoning that they share with the Houyhnhnms. 95 Gulliver's Travels 191. Compare to Addison's description of the "constant and assiduous" culture of "well-regulated families" of readers in Spectator i. 10. culture 96 -as a result, there is no way for print waste to enter Houhynhmland, nor for Addison's "Follies" to artificially preserve themselves in the culture and reproduce. The Yahoos are particularly notable, as their presence asserts again the link between waste and the degradation of taste-the Yahoos represent "waste people" in every sense, being both obsessed with their own feces and, as underutilized and constantly procreating bodies, wasted labor. Because the Houyhnhnms have no verbal intercourse with the Yahoos, however, they never suffer from the putrification of taste or judgement that defines Addison's waste readers.
This logic of excision does not confine itself to the fantastical islands of Gulliver's Travels, however. As Claude Rawson notes in God, Gulliver, and Genocide, Swift frequently flirts with an ambiguous rhetoric of removing or exterminating those who threaten the "public good." 97 Swift's discussion of the Houyhnhnms' voluntary alterity from the Yahoos gleefully engages this suggestion: while we are surely meant to feel disgust at the mention of utilizing Yahoo hides as sails, it is "presented as a matter of what men do to beasts," 98 or indeed, as a "useful" (if disgusting and immoral) commodification of "raw materials" not dissimilar to Swift's proposal in an earlier pamphlet that the "unsupportable" segments of the Irish population be sold as slaves. 99 It is in this way fundamentally different from the horror engendered by A Modest Proposal, where, as Rawson astutely points out, the horror originates less from the abjection of the Irish poor than from the "assimilation" of the Anglo-Irish colonizing class into 96 See Terry Castle, "Why the Houyhnhnms Don't Write: Swift, Satire, andthe Fear of Text," Essays in Literature 7, no. 1 (1980): 31-44 andCharlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 61-63 on Swift's suggestion of (disastrous) cultural contact between Houhynhnmland and Europe. 97 See Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2001)  "their own most despised subgroup" 100 -in other words, the consumption of waste, and its implied contamination throughout that social stratum. The deficiency in the speaker of A Modest Proposal's character does not lie solely in his coldness or cruelty, but in his flawed assumption that the Irish can ever be "sound and useful members of the common-wealth," even as food.
Of course, as the immense quantity of literature pointing to the satirical connotations of Swift's characterizations of Houhynhmland points to, 101 Swift follows Thomas More in setting up a thoroughly imaginary Utopia, not to be attempted. 102 Even Gulliver, regarded as a lunatic by the end of his travels for his misanthropy and obsessive, quasi-sexual fascination with horses, fails to wholly separate himself from the "Yahoo" society, instead aiming to "reconcile" himself to "the Yahoos of [his] own Family, as [he] finds them docible Animals." 103 Nor does Swift ever, like the more vindictive philosophes, fantasize about public book-burnings. 104 Charitably, we may view Swift's recurrent image of excising bad taste from society in service to a tasteful elect as a deliberate satire of the improvement of the public taste, taken to its absurd and morally deficit conclusion-less generously, it is a pining and knowingly impossible dream of a society where those who grate on his nerves have been eradicated.
Regardless of its seriousness, Swift's dream of an England radically separate from the bad taste of its inhabitants lives on in the poetry of Alexander Pope, whose pastorals present a 100 Claude Rawson, Swift's Angers 16 101 See James Clifford, "Gulliver's Fourth Voyage: Hard and Soft Schools of Interpretation," in Quick Springs of Sense, ed. Larry Champion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011) pp. 33-51. 102 Although on the other hand, see Swift's Proposal for giving Badges to Beggars, where he advocates that "foreign beggars… must be driven or whipped out of town" without a shred of irony, essentially putting a similar system of quarantine into practice for a demographic widelyseen as tinged or tainted by waste. See Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide 183.

Pope's Paradise
Up until now, this essay has functioned largely as an attempt to contrast Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift as early theorists of print waste in conversation by virtue of shared premises, rather than any profound similarity in their conclusions. It is tempting to position Alexander Pope's nascent theory of waste as a compromise between the other two, but such a claim would be misleading, as his relationship to the public taste was more complicated than either Addison's or Swift's. As late as the 1744 revision to The Epistle of Burlington, Alexander Pope remained an ardent critic of "the abuse of the word Taste" by Walpole's social circle, writing ceaselessly to recover the philosophical, sensual, and poetic world of taste from the commercial and, by the 1730's, Whig-coded usage of the word. 106 I argue that this censorious critical posture which privileges the individual capable of distinguishing "false taste" and art from higher truth lies at the core of Pope's curiously Miltonic conception of printed waste as a testing ground for distinguishing good readers from bad. 107 In articulating a distinct theory of waste based around this concept, Pope draws on elements in both Addison and Swift's writings but rejects their conclusions, returning instead to a Miltonic conception of print waste as a useful tool to ascertain the worth of readers.
In his writing dealing explicitly with printed waste, Pope tends to strongly cohere with Swift in aligning the public taste with degraded Mandevillian appetites. Nowhere is this clearer 106 See James Noggle, The Temporality of Taste 40-63 107 This is, of course, exactly what Milton argues in Areopagitica: that bad books "promiscuously read" have the potential to "purify us" by testing "virtue… which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises her followers" (Complete Prose 728). Milton is, of course, much more concerned with books of negative moral value-to apply this logic to aesthetics is Pope's innovation. than in The Dunciad, in which the preponderance of printed trash littering London brings on a literal apocalypse of taste. 108 There, London's "Grubstreet Race" produce occasional genres, "New Years Odes" and the like, that, while lapped up by the public, lack the immortality that serves as an atemporal judge of literary quality and poetic accordance with nature. 109 In order to serve this "weekly muse" of public appetite and fill their own bellies, the uneducated and untalented hacks of the Dunciad collect and consume a disorganized smorgasbord of excessive texts ranging from Ogilby's translations ("printed," fawns Scriblerus, "on such large paper!") to the works of the Scriptural commentator Nicholas de Lyra-which they then, in true Swiftian fashion, literally piss away into the chamber pot of history. 110 Pope's charge recalls that of A Tale of a Tub's narrator, comparing contemporary literature to "Ollio's, Friccassés, and Ragousts"-that the overwhelming public desire to consume predigested occasional literature results in the devaluation and impossibility of higher forms. 111 Like Swift but unlike Addison, Pope identifies this failure of public taste and consequent fading of the light of English culture with the motives behind the production of print waste: as Scriblerus notes in a moment of uncharacteristic clarity, Pope "imputes all" that he satirizes "not so much to Malice or Servility, as to Dulness; and not so much to Dulness, as to Necessity." 112 Engaging in the same association between Addisonian market-taste and appetite that marks Swift's satire, 113 Pope insists on the futility of improving taste as long as poor poets write to eat.
As Abigail Williams notes, however, Pope contradicts this movement away from a market evaluation of taste when he implies that the writers of Grub Street "hunger… and thirst, for scribling sake," or in other words, that they remain poor on account of the poverty of their verse. 114 In this moment, at least, Pope sides with the judgement of the purchasing public, and seems to endorse the validity of their valuation. While it hardly seems surprising that Pope should valorize certain public judgements in light of the popularity and controversy of his Iliad, I argue that there is more than hypocrisy at work in Pope's incomplete accession to Swiftian tasteskepticism. 115 As David Morris observes, Pope embraced occasional poetry throughout his career, and his early writing is full of market metaphors and references to poets as merchants. 116 In particular, Morris cites the 1713 Windsor-Forest as an example of Pope's early enthusiasm for the "commercial spirit," noting its undifferentiating embrace of the language of prosperity contrasting with the poet's later "questioning" and satirizing of financial institutions in the wake of the South Sea Bubble. 117 I do not aim to dispute this view, but instead to suggest that Pope's revisions to both As with The Dunciad, Pope echoes Paradise Lost: Audra and Williams gloss the "weeping amber" and "balmy tree" as potential recollections of Eden's "Groves," 120 while the 1732 version's deliberate addition of "fruitful fields" in the "sable waste" invokes the Miltonic conception of wasteland as largely unproblematized verdancy ennobled by the labor of cultivation. So extensive is this natural bounty that its utilization takes on a moral dimension later in the poem, when Pope describes how the "kind Seasons swell the teeming Grain" of England's fields "in vain" under the wasteful Norman regime, and directly links this unaccounted-for excess to the starvation of the peasantry and overturning of the natural order. 121 If there is any taste theory at work in this passage, it is that of the unproblematized consumption of Areopagitica-the chief concern lies in the public access to bread, not what to do after that bread is digested. For Susan Staves, an answer to Pope's puzzlingly commercial turns lies in his and Addison's shared affinity for public improvement: in attempting to refine the taste of the polite ladies and gentlemen of his readership, Pope engaged in "a kind of bourgeois and nationalist scheme for improvement" closely aligned with that which Addison attempted in The affection, while reminiscent of the polite circle of The Spectator's readership, differs from it in function. Mr. Spectator treats his readers as participants in a project of tasteful improvement, validating their desire for education and suggesting that even those of unrefined understanding can hope for improvement through continued participation in his scheme. Pope, on the other hand, yearns for "a kingdom of the Just" free from both Earthly distempers and, more disconcertingly, the scurrilous "creatures of this world" whom Swift so loves to vex 137 -his vision of paradise, whether Earthly or heavenly, is defined by the evacuation, rather than integration or redemption, of bad taste and its associated print waste. Taste and pleasure, Pope suggests, can be had, and the Mandevillian appetites underlying them glorified-but only once the unworthy, the immoral, and the Duncical have been evacuated from the polite economy. 138 Pope never hides his distaste for his poetical and political enemies, but the justification for this scorn is attributable to more than mere personal distaste. While Addison makes it easy to imagine the kind of universal affection and sensibility that makes the Royal Exchange's paradise Pope saw the "air of Piety" as essential to the Elysian chronotope of Pastoral poetry. 140 Nevertheless, he reconfigures the rite that should, in theory, form the sacred core of Hellenistic religion into a modern economic exchange dependent on reciprocation-Lycidas offers his lambs only if their numbers increase, and his continued praise is contingent upon nature's continued beauty. Of course, because the pastorals occur in a "Golden Age" outside of real time or history, 141 these promises are devoid of real tension-the reader of pastorals assumes, by convention if not Pope's own discourses, that Lycidas's sheep will breed plentifully and the landscape rejuvenate readily in the Spring. The result is what Georges Bataille would refer to as a "restrictive economy," where the excessive fecundity of Lycidas's "teeming Ewes" is kept entirely in check by the waste-free disposal system of religious sacrifice. 142 Although remarkable in its conditionality, this system of sacrifice closely follows the chief ideological precept set down in the Discourse on Pastoral Poetry-the system regulates itself, and in this way, the "miseries" that make up rural labor in the real world are "concealed." 143 As Claude Rawson notes, however, this directive does not demand to the removal of poetic miseries, like those experienced by Winter's suicidal shepherd, but instead serves to "methodize" the modern pastoral, and bring it into continuity with Virgillian models of 139 Poems vol. 1 94-95. 140 Poems vol. 1 24. 141 Ibid. 142 Bataille defines the "restrictive economy" as one either lacking or lacking concern for surplus, as opposed to the "economy considered in general," in which excess material "must necessarily be lost without profit" (The Accursed Share vol. 1, 19-26) 143 Poems vol. 1 24. poetry and critique. 144 Likewise, Pope's portrayal of truly restrictive economies in which waste is either avoided entirely or evacuated completely serves to separate, rather than bring together in the positive Addisonian or negative Swiftian senses, the material world from the poetic. The transformative power here, far from the inert dregs of Swift's Tale of a Tub, suggests the possibility of a real and substantial classical inheritance of the same type represented in Pope's lifetime attempt to fashion himself as a modern-day Virgil. 145 The combination of radical fungibility between things of different qualities and the possibility of atemporal poetic evacuation lets Pope make exchanges between time periods, as when he apostrophizes in classical terms the "God-like Poets venerable made"-not Homer or Horace, as one might expect, but Denham and Cowley. 146 This remarkable levelling between the evacuations of ancients and moderns is not open to everyone, however. While Shaftesbury "believed that human beings were naturally tasteful," and that soliloquy was a way "to get back to that original condition of purity," 147  The facetiousness of Pope's parody is inescapable, but it contains within it two unique suggestions: that the build-up of worldly dregs simply happens, rather than being a product of consuming print waste, and that the "purulent Metre" of bad poets originates within their physiology.
While it is tempting to see this attribution of poor poetry to personal qualities as a simple farce on or even misreading of Addison, it largely coheres to the doctrine of the "Ruling This clue once found, unravels all the rest 149 Christopher Fox reads this idea of a singular, fixed, and impelling force as an "attempt to reconcile the two visions of the self" common in the early and mid-century, when debate between proponents of a traditional fixed identity and a shifting Lockean identity were at their 148 Alexander Pope, Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford University Press, 2006) pp. 201-202. 149 Poems vol. 3.2 168-176 peak. 150 In addition to this function, however, the doctrine of the Ruling Passion serves to prettify and soften the shocking cynicism of Peri Bathous's formulation of printed crudity as an immutable marker of a poor poet.
By defining his polite circle on terms of personal affection and inherent worthiness, Pope leaves room for the presence of individuals who, like the poor poets swarming the pages of the Epistle to Arbuthnot, "read [Pope] dead," remaining alienated and excluded from social education despite their consumption of good poetry. 151 Under these regimes of inherent aesthetic poverty, people like Leonora the book-hoarder and the obsessive Valetudinarian posed little threat to the project of improvement-for although they purchase subscriptions as well as a good reader, they lack the heavenly "light" of "True Taste." 152 In effect, Pope's poetic ideology promises the exact opposite of The Spectator project-not to improve the taste of the sick or find a place for the "butts" of polite society, but to separate (or evacuate) those of naturally poor qualities or debased ruling passions by pitting their verses against one another. Accepting as inevitable the Addisonian future of London as an appetite-driven consumer paradise, Pope instead seeks an Edenic enclave kept separate by careful critics, leaving the unworthy safely preserved "in the liquid Amber of… Wit" for the observation of the gawking masses. 153 The Evacuated Share As one proceeds further past Pope in the history of criticism, it becomes apparent that "theorizing in the taste mode was, alas, dying and being replaced" at the end of the eighteenthcentury, a victim of the burgeoning aesthetic theories of the nineteenth. 154 In an ironic moment of nearly cosmic proportions, the Augustan taste theories themselves became waste products, so alien and disagreeable to later palettes that any possibility of repatriation fell flat. Addison's wit, his polite societies, and his conception of the imagination have all found ready recipients in the modern day-the theory of sense and discernment which lay under those ideas, broadly speaking, has not. We are left instead with the traces of those theories-the kind of strange subterranean logic of metaphor separated from its referents that leads to "matters of taste" as various as the gourmand culture of the Victorian era, or the persistent identification of teadrinking with the English identity. 155 To those traces of taste I would propose to add another, equally persistent and dangerous in its vitality. Following the close of the eighteenth-century, the Augustan conceptions of printed waste continued to linger in popular writings, particularly where the burgeoning science of demography was concerned. Thomas Malthus was an avid reader of Alexander Pope, and cites the Essay on Man repeatedly throughout his Essay on Population. 156 Is it yet conceivable that Pope's apocalyptic visions of endlessly reproducing hordes of "waste people" sowing the seeds of London's destruction may have had an impact on Malthus, who in his essay envisions a mass of insufficiently productive poor who, in shirking the "great restrictive law" of restraint, spread "misery and vice" among themselves? 157 Or that Malthus's notes on the paradoxical fertility of regions "laid waste" by war, fire and plague may have owed some inspiration to the "sable wastes" of Windsor-Forest, and the Miltonic paradise-in-ash behind it? 158 The demographic implications of waste theory need not be confined to the nineteenthcentury. Claude Rawson has already noted the extent to which Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw's twentieth-century "vocabulary of punitive isolation," whereby innocuous statements on the benefits of social programs were phrased in stark terms of "looking forward to the extermination of the poor," stand in rhetorical continuity with Swift's descriptions of the Yahoos and "wild Irish." 159 There is a similar vocabulary at work in all Augustan writing on printed waste and its writers, who are inevitably configured as compulsive scribblers, public urinaters, and sweating syphilitics. They are, in other words, "waste people," and that designation carries with it an ideological imperative for evacuation by one means or another.
These traces of eighteenth-century taste have persisted in the form of waste discourse because they address questions relevant in our era-to what extent can individual discernment be trusted? And if some number of people are incapable of distinguishing waste from salvageable matter, what reactions does the presence of that waste justify? These are valid concerns, but the 157 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Donald Winch (Cambridge University Press, 1992) 14. Note also that in Malthus's vision the impoverished classes, like Pope's Dunces, reproduce "not so much from malice… as from Dulness, and not so much from Dulness, as necessity"-or even, as Malthus frames it, from an admirable and almost holy sense of love (Essay 64-65). 158 Essay 35. See also Book 3 of Paradise Lost 334-337: The World shall burn,and from her ashes spring New Heav'n and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell And after all thir tribulations long See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds, 159 See Claude Rawson,God,Gulliver, in light of later history, as the stakes of discussing the perpetually generative wasteland of popular culture in the Addisonian idiom of disease or in the cadence of Swiftian desperation for a solution have become apparent. More insidious still is the nostalgic, pre-lapsarian paradise between Windsor-Forest and The Dunciad, which slips almost imperceptibly from praising waste-free poetry to soliciting the elect to preserve it by relegating alien voices to the footnotes.
In each case, it is worth remembering that the books which I have been cavalierly referring to as "print waste" are not merely "dead things," but the "season'd lives" of those who have written them.