Mammon

The satirist combines the virtues of the faithful friend and the country gentleman. In his concern for others, his integrity, his modest way of life, and his hospitality, he is a standing rebuke to the Court, whose vices are concentrated in Sporus. Pope could be more straightforward and unwavering in his attitude to the Court than many country gentlemen of his time because he was financially more secure. Some of those who boasted of their political independence were perhaps rationalizing their inability to afford the costly attendance at Court which might ultimately win them a ‘place’. For the average country gentleman was far from being well-to-do. I have referred above to the financial pressures which curtailed country hospitality ; ¹ unpaid local government work might also involve large expenses. Moreover, landowners were the most heavily taxed members of the community. When, in 1714, the legal rate of interest was reduced from six to five per cent, this measure was offered as a slight relief to the gentry: ‘the heavy Burden of the late long and expensive War hath been chiefly born by the Owners of the Land of this Kingdom by reason whereof they have been necessitated to contract very large Debts and thereby and by the Abatement in the Value of their Lands are become greatly impoverished.’ ² In some cases this impoverishment was the delayed result of taxes and fines imposed on Royalist estates after the Civil War; ³ in others the debts could be laid squarely at the door of the gentleman’s (or his heir’s) irresponsibility. 123Defoe, with the practical education of a Dissenting Academy behind him, and with a well-developed sense of the value of bookkeeping, castigates those landowners who are too proud to audit their own accounts or to take the letting of their farms and properties into their own hands. ¹ A thoughtless young man, newly come into a modest inheritance, might squander it in high living. Thomas Smith of Shaw House, Wiltshire, records in his Diary the dramatic conclusion of a business visit to London: ‘At two this Morning was call’d up, where at my coming down Staires I found Mr Webb, Nephew to him of Farley of the same Name, in an extream necessitous Condition, having spent his whole Substance and is in want of all Necessarys of Life perfectly, not being now above 6 or 7 and twenty, a great Example of a profligate base Temper, he now coming in a begging Manner: but could have but little time with him ye Coach being ready.’ On his return to Wiltshire, however, Thomas Smith duly reported the young man’s plight to his uncle. ² Quite apart from the perils of London the need to maintain a ‘figure’ in local society, and to keep abreast of one’s neighbours with a fine house and equipage, could involve ruinous expenditure. Defoe commented that ‘every gentleman seems to be willing to liv[e] as gay as he can.’ ³