| The eighteenth century witnesses a revolution in the British understanding of the afterlife, in both the literary sense of endurance through texts and the metaphysical sense of personal survival after death. When Dryden died in 1700, poets wrote elegies. When Samuel Johnson died in 1784, biographers wrote lives. Dryden's mourners follow Pindar, Horace, and Shakespeare in imagining poetry as the means of preserving human beauty and excellence. Johnson's mourners, by contrast, provide their subject with immortality through prose, particularly through accumulated biographical anecdote. This shift to prose immortality is a literary expression of eighteenth-century reinterpretations of the Christian afterlife, which moralists and theologians came to describe as a continuation of habits and practices developed on earth, rather than a timeless other world. Prose immortality is also a response to the threat posed to Christian authors by a certain strain of empiricist philosophy, particularly Hume; life writing becomes a way of documenting the existence of a stable (and therefore putatively immortal) self in the face of skeptical challenges. Interest in immortality, personal and literary, is an engine of generic innovation in the periodical paper (Addison and Steele's Spectator), the long poem (Edward Young's Night Thoughts), the novel (Richardson's Clarissa), the autobiography (Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs ), moral and religious writing (the essays and tales of Samuel Johnson), and literary biography (Boswell's Life of Johnson). |
