We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Military Scandal and National Debt in Manley's New Atalantis.
- Authors
SARGENT, CAROLE
- Abstract
In Delarivier Manley's 1709 bestselling political satire, The New Atalantis, volume 2 contains a long tale of the virgin Elonora, her brother Don Juan, her suitor Don Antonio, her gambling aunt, and various men who conspire against her virtue. Most of Manley's other Atalantis stories satirize immediate Whig-Tory conflict in Queen Anne's Court and are decipherable, at least to a certain extent, through separately published keys. Despite this tale's length and prominence of place, however, no complete key to the characters' possible real-life identities exists; scholars have declared it unidentifiable, and perhaps pure fiction for entertainment. In this article, I demonstrate how the Elonora story invokes the memory of Sir Robert Howard, the only identified character, in a financial allegory dramatizing the dangers of England being in debt to foreign creditors beyond her net worth. Manley also hints at the implications of a notorious 1708 military pay scandal involving prominent Whig officers. This tale and others like it may have emboldened her soon-to-be employer Jonathan Swift to make the same allegations more overtly in his bestselling The Conduct of the Allies (1711).
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; MANLEY, Delarivier; NEW Atlantis, The (Book); PUBLIC debts; ENGLISH political satire; TORY Party (Great Britain); MILITARY compensation; SWIFT, Jonathan, 1667-1745; CONDUCT of the Allies, The (Book)
- Publication
SEL: Studies in English Literature (Johns Hopkins), 2013, Vol 53, Issue 3, p523
- ISSN
0039-3657
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1353/sel.2013.0024