ABSTRACT
This chapter is about an instance of literary and philosophical nostalgia. Alexander Pope, writing the Dunciad in the secular, commercial environment of eighteenthcentury London (the final Dunciad was published in 1743), looks back to the landscapes of Paradise Lost, the great theological epic of the seventeenth century. He chooses for the setting of his mock-epic one of the most interesting locations in Milton’s poem: Chaos, the landscape through which Satan struggles in his ascent to earth, and the matter from which Milton’s God makes the world. Milton’s Chaos is made of confused, disordered matter that will be ordered and bounded by the power of God. It is a material surfeit that can be turned into an abundance of life; waste that can be turned by God into miraculous plenitude. Chaos is characterized both by surplus and void; where proliferating matter feels hollow and empty. Chaos is one of the landscapes in Paradise Lost crucial to our understanding of Milton’s “material philosophy”: his unorthodox arguments about the nature of substance. In modeling the Dunciad on the Miltonic antecedent in Chaos, Pope turns firmly back toward a set of seventeenth-century questions about the origins of the material world and the status of originary matter. He does so to attack his rivals in the seemingly indomitable world of the commercial book trade; Pope’s reworking of Milton’s Chaos explores the secular phenomenon of the making of books through a theological account of the making of the universe. This chapter explains why Pope adopts the Miltonic model of substance in order to represent Grub Street; why Milton’s material philosophy was more valuable to Pope than post-Newtonian accounts of matter, motion and space that prevailed in early eighteenth-century London.
