Page 27 - Gullivers

The question then returns: why should Swist - who had written celebrated urban pastorals for English periodical readers; who showed himself, in the Journal to Stella, to be fascinated with the details of modern urban life; who, as Dean of St. Patrick’s, contemplated adding a brick spire to the cathedral – have found it so hard to write about Dublin. The answer is a complex one but just as in England, there was scant tradition of imaginative writing about cities other than London, so there was little sense that Dublin might be the legitimate subject of ambitious pœtry. Like the literature of classical Rome, eighteenth- century literature in English was, above all, metropolitan in its bias. It was by the standards of the metropolis – understood as the locus and epitome of the age’s cultural values – that the remainder of the world must be judged. Even in an age when landownership was the key to political and social power, those who could afford it wintered in London, at least while parliament was in session.
John Brooking
I. Swist and Dublin 21