Mandeville, Pope, and Apocalypse
Abstract
Some years before the Scriblerians brought a comic realism to bear on
the themes of prophecy and apocalypse, Mandeville gave millenarians
a taste of their own medicine by showing – in the conclusion to The
Grumbling Hive – that a land free of the offences decried by the pious
would indeed prove to be ruinous. In so doing he inaugurated a tradition
of secularised apocalypse that finds one of its most famous expressions
in the Dunciad. Both Pope and Mandeville make use of the millenarian
motifs of Elkanah Settle’s pageants for Lord Mayor’s day, and though the
Williamite politics of The Fable of the Bees was deeply inimical to the
Tory wits (as appears in the satires of the Scriblerians), time has exposed
a paradoxical congruence between Pope and Mandeville that underlies
their official enmity.