ABSTRACT
Satire has often had a schoolboy dimension, both in its horrors and in its fun, not least where murders, hangings and extermination are involved: think of Fielding's Jonathan Wild, who was once a schoolboy thug and retains his bully-boy oafishness in his later role of gangster and political boss. The Dunciad's sympathies take in more than the satirical intention suggests and are in some ways subversive of it. The schoolboy metaphor is one such fiction. It has been a means of preserving for satire some of its original vigour and also of domesticating it by building-in an accompanying note of grown-up superiority. The increasing attenuation of satire's primitive aggressions was attended for a time by a corresponding elaboration of formal structure. The design of the neo-Horatian epistle or the epic plots of Augustan satire are intricate pieces of rhetorical and narrative management.
