Editing Satire (section)

===Age of Enlightenment===
[[File:A Welch wedding. Satire c.1780.jpg|thumb|upright=1.35|'A Welch wedding' satirical cartoon {{Circa|1780}}]]

The [[Age of Enlightenment]], an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th centuries advocating rationality, produced a great revival of satire in Britain. This was fuelled by the rise of partisan politics, with the formalisation of the [[Tories (British political party)|Tory]] and [[British Whig Party|Whig]] parties—and also, in 1714, by the formation of the [[Scriblerus Club]], which included [[Alexander Pope]], [[Jonathan Swift]], [[John Gay]], [[John Arbuthnot]], [[Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer|Robert Harley]], [[Thomas Parnell]], and [[Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke]]. This club included several of the notable satirists of early-18th-century Britain. They focused their attention on Martinus Scriblerus, "an invented learned fool... whose work they attributed all that was tedious, narrow-minded, and pedantic in contemporary scholarship".<ref>{{Citation | title = The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century | volume = 3 | page = 435}}</ref> In their hands astute and biting satire of institutions and individuals became a popular weapon. The turn to the 18th century was characterized by a switch from Horatian, soft, pseudo-satire, to biting "juvenal" satire.<ref name="Weinbrot2007p136">Weinbrot, Howard D. (2007) ''Eighteenth-Century Satire: Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter...'' [https://books.google.com/books?id=vHADZOHbJ2QC&pg=PA136 p.136]</ref>

[[Jonathan Swift]] was one of the greatest of Anglo-Irish satirists, and one of the first to practise modern journalistic satire. For instance, In his ''[[A Modest Proposal]]'' Swift suggests that Irish peasants be encouraged to sell their own children as food for the rich, as a solution to the "problem" of poverty. His purpose is of course to attack indifference to the plight of the desperately poor. In his book ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]'' he writes about the flaws in human society in general and English society in particular. [[John Dryden]] wrote an influential essay entitled "A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire"<ref>{{Citation | url = http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/drydendiscourse2.html | editor-first = Jack | editor-last = Lynch | publisher = Rutgers | last = Dryden | first = John | title = Discourse | number = 2}}</ref> that helped fix the definition of satire in the literary world. His satirical ''[[Mac Flecknoe]]'' was written in response to a rivalry with [[Thomas Shadwell]] and eventually inspired [[Alexander Pope]] to write his satirical ''[[Dunciad]]''.
 
[[Alexander Pope]] (b. May 21, 1688) was a satirist known for his Horatian satirist style and translation of the ''[[Iliad]]''. Famous throughout and after the [[Long eighteenth century|long 18th century]], Pope died in 1744.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.biography.com/people/alexander-pope-9444371#synopsis|title=Biography of Alexander Pope § Synopsis|work=Biography.com|access-date=December 10, 2015|archive-date=December 18, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151218092153/http://www.biography.com/people/alexander-pope-9444371#synopsis|url-status=dead}}</ref> Pope, in his ''The Rape of the Lock'', is delicately chiding society in a sly but polished voice by holding up a mirror to the follies and vanities of the upper class. Pope does not actively attack the self-important pomp of the British aristocracy, but rather presents it in such a way that gives the reader a new perspective from which to easily view the actions in the story as foolish and ridiculous. A mockery of the upper class, more delicate and lyrical than brutal, Pope nonetheless is able to effectively illuminate the moral degradation of society to the public. ''The Rape of the Lock'' assimilates the masterful qualities of a heroic epic, such as the ''Iliad'', which Pope was translating at the time of writing ''The Rape of the Lock''. However, Pope applied these qualities satirically to a seemingly petty egotistical elitist quarrel to prove his point wryly.<ref>{{cite journal|url=http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/545/satire-in-18th-century-british-society-alexander-popes-the-rape-of-the-lock-and-jonathan-swifts-a-modest-proposal|title=Satire in 18th Century British Society: Alexander Pope's ''The Rape of the Lock'' and Jonathan Swift's ''A Modest Proposal''|year=2011|journal=Student Pulse |volume=3|issue=6|author=Jonathan J. Szwec}}</ref>
Other satirical works by Pope include the ''[[Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot]]''.

[[Daniel Defoe]] pursued a more journalistic type of satire, being famous for his ''[[The True-Born Englishman]]'' which mocks [[Xenophobia|xenophobic]] patriotism, and ''[[The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters]]''—advocating [[religious toleration]] by means of an ironical exaggeration of the highly intolerant attitudes of his time.

The pictorial satire of [[William Hogarth]] is a precursor to the development of [[political cartoons]] in 18th-century England.<ref name="Press">{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fwzWAAAAMAAJ|title=The Political Cartoon|author=Charles Press|year=1981|publisher=Fairleigh Dickinson University Press|page=34|isbn=9780838619018}}</ref> The medium developed under the direction of its greatest exponent, [[James Gillray]] from London.<ref name="Guardian"/> With his satirical works calling the king (George III), prime ministers and generals (especially Napoleon) to account, Gillray's wit and keen sense of the ridiculous made him the pre-eminent [[cartoonist]] of the era.<ref name="Guardian">{{cite news|title=Satire, sewers and statesmen: why James Gillray was king of the cartoon|url=https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/21/satire-sewers-and-statesmen-james-gillray-king-of-cartoon|agency=The Guardian|date=June 18, 2015}}</ref>

[[Ebenezer Cooke (poet)|Ebenezer Cooke]] (1665–1732), author of "The Sot-Weed Factor" (1708), was among the first writers of literary satire in [[Colonial America]]. [[Benjamin Franklin]] (1706–1790) and others followed, using satire to shape an emerging nation's culture through its sense of the ridiculous.