45 pages • 1 hour read
Alexander PopeThe Dunciad
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1743A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2 Summary
Cibber, now crowned King of the Dunces, sits atop his throne. In his honor, Dulness calls forth all her Dunces and all those who profit from her Dunces for a series of games in the king’s honor.
The first competition is a race for booksellers. Dulness creates a phantom poet, and the first bookseller to reach him wins. Publishers Bernard Lintot and Edmund Curll (spelled “Curl” in the book) step forward as challengers. Curll dashes out in front, taking an early lead, but is obstructed by a large puddle of excrement dropped by poet Elizabeth Thomas. Curll slides and falls into the muck, and the crowd shout their support for Lintot. While lying there, however, Curll issues a prayer to Jove, king of the Roman gods, and Cloacina, goddess of Rome’s sewer system. As Curll is one of her favorites, Cloacina makes it so that the excrement gives him strength. He rises, renews his challenge, and races passed Lintot to victory. Curll reaches out to the phantom poet, who vanishes. Next Curll reaches out to the poet’s papers, but they fly back to their original authors. Dulness laughs at each of Curll’s attempts to grasp at something he can make money from, but ultimately takes pity on him and awards him a tapestry depicting the ignoble fates of famous Dunces.
For the second competition, a phantom “poetess” in the likeness of writer, actor, and publisher Eliza Haywood appears. Instead of a race, however, the competing booksellers are asked to urinate: “The Goddess then: ‘Who best can send on high / ‘The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky’” (2: 161-62). Curll again steps forward, as well as Thomas Osborne. Osborne’s first attempt barely makes an arc, and on his second attempt he splashes himself in the face. Curll, on the other hand, shoots a stream over his head that smokes and burns. He wins the poet and her writing, while Osborne is crowned with a chamber pot.
The next competition is for authors and involves “tickling,” or flattering a nobleman in the hopes of receiving patronage. Attempts are made to appeal to the lord’s pride, vanity, and sense of good taste, but the winner is an unknown youth who gives the lord his sister.
Dulness then announces a pair of games for critics to see who can produce the most noise. First is the competition for chattering senselessly like monkeys, but Dulness decides that the thousand competitors are all equally impressive in their abilities. Second is the competition for braying like an ass. The narrator mentions multiple brayers of quality, but none compare to Richard Blackmore:
[…] whose indefatigable Muse produced no less than six Epic poems: Prince and King Arthur, twenty books; Eliza, ten; Alfred, twelve; the Redeemer, six; besides Job, in folio; the whole Book of Psalms; the Creation, seven books; Nature of Man, three books; and many more (2: R47).
The whole company then proceeds to Fleet-ditch, the city’s main sewer outlet into the Thames, where political writers are asked to dive into the mud. John Oldmixon jumps in from the top of a lamppost. Jonathan Smedley dives in and disappears forever. Many others have their turn, but the winner for flinging muck is William Arnal, while the winner for deepest dive is the Archbishop of Canterbury, who becomes the Archbishop of Dulness.
The final contest is again for the critics. The one who can stay awake long enough to weigh the qualities of John Henley against those of Richard Blackmore shall be named Dulness’s chief judge. Unfortunately, everyone falls asleep, and there the book ends.
Book 2 Analysis
The second book comprises 428 lines of heroic couplets and contains most of what could be considered action in the poem. The games that Dulness holds serve multiple purposes. They parody games from Virgil’s Aeneid and other classical works (Book 2 contains 43 “imitations,” the most in The Dunciad), provide a vehicle for lambasting specific individuals in London’s literary circles, and offer an outlet for Pope’s broader themes and opinions on art and the role of the critic. The harsher social and political commentary is well disguised by the humor and satire.
In the first 16 lines of the first game, Pope identifies and critiques a wide range of problems with the London literary scene. He subverts the trope of the penniless writer by making the goddess’s phantom poet “All as a partridge plump, full-fed, and fair” (2: 39), thus pointing toward The Corruption of Mercenary Literature. Where the trope of the starving artist implies integrity and even martyrdom to the higher ideals of art, the comparison to a partridge (a game bird) marks the poet as a commodity to be acquired and sold by the business-minded publishers competing for the prize. After describing the phantom poet as having “pert, flat eyes, […] A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead” (2: 43-44), Pope notes that the goddess named him “More,” (2: 50) a reference to James Moore Smythe, an aristocratic playwright who had plagiarized Pope’s poetry in his play, The Rival Modes, for which he was paid handsomely despite the play’s commercial failure.
As with the other books, to understand Book 2, it helps to understand who the individual Dunces are and what crimes they committed against Pope and poetry. Thomas Osborne, for example, was a bookseller who had published pirated copies of Pope’s Iliad. He was given a prominent role in the urination competition but was unable to produce anything. His opponent is Edmund Curll, for whom Pope reserves some of his sharpest sarcasm, saying, “[W]e shall only say of this eminent man, that he carried the Trade many lengths beyond what it ever before had arrived at; and that he was the envy and admiration of all his profession” (2: R11). Given that the “Trade” in question is one prized by the goddess Dulness, and that its practitioners prove their worthiness by competing to see who can urinate most forcefully, it’s clear that this ironic praise amounts to mockery. Pope goes on to say (still in a tone of ironic admiration), that Curll “possessed himself of a command over all authors whatever; he caused them to write what he pleased; they could not call their very Names their own,” critiquing The Corruption of Mercenary Literature, as hack writers wrote whatever opinions they were told to write by their publishers and employers (2: R11). The real life Curll embodies this mercenary quality among booksellers and publishers, as he had made his fortune selling whatever books he believed would make money, without regard to their artistic value or veracity.
Book 2 contains most of the poem’s references to sewage and waste, a comic motif used to illustrate The Decline of Literary and Intellectual Standards. Dunces slip, slide, and are energized by sewage, urinate openly, dive into muck, and fling it about. The entire book wallows in waste and filth, symbolizing the degraded literature that is their stock-in-trade. Through it all, however, Pope maintains his veneer of innocence, relying on sarcasm, literary precedent, and the Dunces’ own words to defend his positions and undermine any accusations of defamation.
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