Reddit reviews Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)

Jonathan Swift has the most lasting influence. Not just for the Gulliver's Travels novel but his satires and political activism in general. A dramatist named John Gay had the most theatrical notoriety of the time. Gay had wild success with a satire of Handel's Rinaldo titled The Beggar's Opera. It was a satire that equated highway robbers with the nobility and was hugely popular both in England and in pre-revolutionary America. George Washington called it his favorite play; it was performed over 50 times in America and over 80 times during Gay's lifetime in England. There is a BBC performance of it on youtube and the text is on Gutenberg.

From a literary standpoint William Blake and Alexander Pope were probably the most relevant of the age in terms of original poetical talent. Blake was certainly the more politically revolutionary of the two in his personal beliefs, but the criticism in his poetry is subtle. There's a book length criticism of him from the 1950s that is still the canonical examination of the times from his perspective, titled Blake: Prophet Against Empire.

In addition to being a novelist, Henry Fielding founded London's first police force and was a magistrate. Most of his letters were assumed lost but batches were found in the early 1900s and 1970s, A memoir based on the early letters is on Gutenberg

If there is one figure that a large number of these surviving literary figures of the day were against, it was the first prime minister, Robert Walpole. Walpole was seen as corrupt in the press of the time, mostly because of his interest in the South Sea Company (a joint venture with Spain involving slaves and colonial goods from the Americas). Walpole invested in the company early in his life and cashed out before the value of shares in the company crashed, which happened while he was in office. It was England's first big financial scandal involving laypeople as investors, afaik. Pope and Gay in particular lost money in the same investments. Gay was bankrupted by the loss, and satirized Walpole constantly thereafter.

A LOT of what we know about these people is from Swift's letters to and from them, which were largely preserved, and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets (available on Gutenberg). Swift was in constant correspondence with the others mentioned above over a period of decades, and we still have a lot of those letters today. Johnson is the first example of what we would call a literary critic today.

There's a relatively new collection, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 from 2013 that I have not read but seems to be well reviewed. Available here if you have university subscription access.

I don't think this era is as popular as others for many reasons. Most obviously in America, because it's overshadowed by our own revolution. In Europe it's overshadowed by the French revolution. Comparatively, England was relatively peaceful at the time. But peace and a monarch friendly to the arts and literature makes for an abundance of critics, too. It's fascinating to me that England went through the same issues as America and France without a large scale revolution, particularly considering how lax Charles II was in terms of censorship compared to his predecessors and how much social/political criticism was floating around in the presses.