Things That Didn't Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743 by John McTague (review)

• Published in: Eighteenth - Century Studies Vol. 56; no. 3; pp. 481 - 483
• Main Author: Seager, Nicholas
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.03.2023
• Subjects: Conspiracy; Historiography; History; Interpersonal relations; Medieval period; Politics; United Kingdom > UK; Scotland
• ISSN: 0013-2586; 1086-315X; 1086-315X
• DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2023.0048

"1 Through such counterfactual representations, Defoe presented the Union as the kind of "historical event" that "transform[ed] social relations" at the structural level, as opposed to a mere "happening," an occurrence subordinate to broader, underlying causes (to use William Sewell's terms, with which McTague works throughout his book).2 The point, for McTague, would not be whether or not the Anglo-Scottish Union was momentous in these terms but the ways in which Defoe presents "this great Transaction" as such, his motives for doing so, and the extent to which he does so by writing "counterhistory" (183). The Rye House Plot was a "travesty" which nonetheless proved useful to its intended victims, Charles II and the Duke of York, who used it to consolidate power. McTague thus provides a new take on an established theme, Pope's "reactionary politics" (256), and does justice to how great art emerges from or alongside more occasional and instrumental writings, because "one of the things that sets the Dunciads apart from the other works encountered in this study is their sheer extent, and the skill and knowingness with which Pope combines eventfulness and teleology" (250).