Evan Lloyd

“ This condition of the world can be expressed satirically by a personal, informal satire which recognizes and dramatizes just how universal the corruption is and how commonplace its manifestations have become.
The informal, disorderly syntax, the colloquial diction, the chatty tone, the run-on lines, the conscious roughness of meter and rhyme, may have derived from Churchill, but they become here more relevant than in any of Churchill’s satires. ”

“ Churchill argues that it was “a sin ’gainst Pleasure, to design / A plan, to methodize each thought, each line / Highly to finish.” He claims to write “When the mad fit comes on” and praises poetry written “Wild without art, and yet with pleasure wild” (Gotham [1764] , II, 167-169, 172, 212) . His satire—with its deliberate, irreverant, “Byronic” run-on lines, fanciful digressions, playful indifference to formal structure, impulsively involuted syntax, long, wandering sentences—seems to move, as does Robert Lloyd’s satire (at a somewhat slower pace) , toward a genuinely new style. ”

“ They combine with the intemperate tone and the satirist’s concluding confession, his self-identification with the object of satire, to create a sense of an unheroic satirist, one who does not represent a highly commendable satiric alternative. Satire must now turn its vision from the heroic, the apocalyptic, the broadly philosophical, even from the depraved, and become exceedingly ordinary. It must recognize that there is little hope in going back to lofty Augustan ideals. ”

“ Lloyd treats the confusion between sexual desire and religious fervor as another aspect of general human depravity, extending the satire beyond the crude accusation of hypocrisy or cynicism. He argues that the confusion is a part of the human condition, allowed to go out of control by a religion that puts passion before reason. ”

“ To a satirist, such complexity makes art difficult. Satire usually deals with every-day realities, to which it applies simple moral ideals. The Augustan satiric alternative—returning to older beliefs in religion, government, philosophy, art—and the stylistic expression of such beliefs—formal verse satire and epistle, mock-poem, heroic or Hudibrastic couplet, diction of polite conversation, ironic metaphysical conceits, fantastic fictional situations—become irrelevant to the satirist writing when the past seems lost. In his later works, Pope took Augustan satire about as far as it could go. ”

“ In being chatty, fluid, iconoclastic, spontaneous-sounding, self-revealing, his satire might eventually prove capable of dealing with the problems that the Augustan satirists had predicted but did not have to deal with so directly. But both Churchill and Robert Lloyd died before they could develop their styles to the point that they had a new, timely statement to make. Anstey failed to develop beyond the New Bath Guide, and his influence proved to be more important on the novel than on verse satire. ”

“ Methodism lent itself to such satire. Methodists could be described as unfortunate aberrants from an essentially good world, typical of those bothersome fanatics and deviants at the fringe of society who keep this world from being perfect. They were also logical heirs to the satire once visited upon Dissenters but which diminished when Dissenters became more restrained in their style of worship. (The Preface to one anti-Methodist satire even takes pains to exclude “rational Dissenters” from its target.) ”

“ The satirist of the seventeen-sixties who repeats the ideas and styles of Butler, Dryden, Swift, Gay, and Pope seems not only imitative but out-of-touch with the world around him.
But such difficulties can provide the impetus for new forms and for original styles. And in the seventeen-sixties the writers of formal satire show signs of responding to the challenge. Christopher Anstey, Charles Churchill, Robert Lloyd, and Evan Lloyd seem, during this decade, to be developing their considerable facilities with satiric technique toward the creation of new styles. ”

“ Lloyd presents an essentially disorderly world in which chaos spreads almost inevitably, in which riots, corrupt ministers, arrogant fools, disrespectful lower classes, giddy middle classes, and lascivious upper classes are barely kept in check by a system of social class, government, and church. ”

“ The most serious problem with The Curate, however, is the same as the problem with all of Lloyd’s satires except The Methodist, and the same as the problem with almost all satires between Pope and Burns or Blake. The satirist seems unwilling to probe, to find out what are the political, ethical, psychological, or aesthetic forces that cause the problems which the satirist condemns, and to recommend what can be done to change these forces. If the satirist notes any pattern at all, it is one of ineffective, unmoving abstraction and generality. ”

“ The struggle between Crown and Parliament, the new industrial and agricultural methods, the workers’ demands for higher pay, the new rural and urban poor, the growth of the Empire, the deteriorating relations with the American colonies, the increasing influence of the ideas of the Enlightenment, the popularity of democratic ideas, the Wilkes controversy, the growth of Methodism, the growth of the novel, the interest in the gothic and the picturesque and in chinoiserie, sentimentality, enthusiasm—all these activities made England a highly volatile country. ”

“ It is notable that Swift, Pope, and Gay tended to satirize Dissenters within the context of larger problems. The assault on Methodists, then, is actually not a continuation of anti-Dissenter satire but something new. Hence the whole movement of anti-Methodist satire in the sixties and seventies has an untypically violent tone which cannot be explained solely in terms of satiric trends or religious attitudes. ”

“ Evan Lloyd’s first satire, The Powers of the Pen, is a clever but ordinary satire on good and bad writing. It has some historical interest as an example of the early influence of Rousseau in England, of part of the attack on Samuel Johnson for his adverse criticism of Shakespeare, of the influence of Churchill (Lloyd declared himself a disciple) , and of the expression of the fashionable interest in artlessness which was influenced as much by Joseph Warton as by Rousseau. In a “quill shop” the narrator discovers magic pens which write like various authors. ”

“ Evan Lloyd is the one anti-Methodist satirist who explores the larger implications.
Lloyd constructs his satire around the theme of general corruption, that nothing is so virtuous that it cannot be spoiled either by man’s weakness or by time. The theme is common in the period and could have become banal, except that Lloyd applies it to the corruption of the Church and its manifestations in daily life, giving it an immediate, lively reference. ”

“ The mass emotionalism of the evangelical meetings were reminders that man was not so rational as certain popular ideas tried to make him. Wesley’s insistence (with irritatingly good evidence) that he did no more than adhere to the true doctrine of the Church of England strongly suggested that the Church of England had strayed somewhere. (It is rather interestingly paralleled by Wilkes’s insistence that he only wanted to return to the Declaration of Rights, a reminder that the government had also strayed.) ”

“ And there were those people who believed that Methodism, in spite of Wesley’s arguments to the contrary, led good members of the Church of England astray and threatened religious stability.
Yet all these causes do not explain the harshness of anti-Methodist satire. No other subject during this period received such severe condemnation. Wesley and Whitefield were accused of seducing their female converts, of fleecing all their converts of money, of making trouble solely out of envy or pride. Evan Lloyd is not so harsh nor so implacably bigoted about any other subject as he is about Methodism. ”

“ The satirist, as Robert C. Elliott points out, has always, in art, satirized himself. [6] But there is here as throughout this satire, some attempt to develop a style which will express the belief that the world will always be disorderly and that the disorder stems from man’s “Zeal within.” ”

“ Anstey’s New Bath Guide has a combination of epistolary fiction, realism, use of naive observers, changing points of view, sweeping view of the social scene, great range of subjects, rolicking verse forms, and tone of detached amusement which suggests a satirist who, while still largely derivative, had the talent to create new techniques. Churchill and Robert Lloyd are explicit in their wish to break from Augustan style. ”

“ For such subjects, it uses the impulsive tone of an over-emotional satirist who is as flawed as the subject he satirizes and still represents the best of a disordered world.
Lloyd had attempted an autobiographical satire in The Curate. He failed to create an important satire for a number of reasons, one of which was that he tried to present himself as a high ideal, a belief that he apparently held so weakly that the satire became merely petulant. Lloyd corrected this error in The Methodist and now seems, however briefly, to have opened the way to a truly prophetic style of satire. ”

“ The Methodist open-air services were needed because new industrial areas had sprung up where there were no churches, and lay preachers were necessary because of population shifts but also because of the increase in population made possible by new agricultural and manufacturing methods. The practice of taking lay preachers from many social classes had obvious democratic implications. Wesley, in spite of his political conservatism, challenged a number of widely-held, complacent aphorisms, such as the belief that people are “poor only because they are idle.” ”

“ He uses mostly end-stop couplets, parallel constructions, Augustan diction and similes. Apparently, he began his rejection of his new ideas and style immediately after The Methodist and before his 1766-1767 outburst of satire-writing was over.
Lloyd, in writing The Methodist, seems to have come as close as any satirist before Blake and the writers of The Anti-Jacobin to seeing the problems England and the world were headed toward, to recognizing how genuinely volatile English society was in the middle of the century, and to creating a style which could deal with those problems satirically. ”

“ The anonymous author of The Saints fears “Their frantic pray’r [is] a mere Decoy for Mob” (p. 4) and the author [4] of The Methodist and Mimic claims that Whitefield’s preaching sends “the Brainless Mob a gadding” (p. 15) . ”

“ With busy search thro’ ev’ry Class,
Thro’ ev’ry Rank of Men they pass,
In ev’ry Class of Men they find
Some Hearts corrupted to their Mind,
Ev’ry Profession they explore,
Ev’ry Profession gives them more ”

“ Evan Lloyd’s works consist chiefly of four satires written in 1766 and 1767, [1] all of which are now little-known. What little notice he receives today results from his friendship with John Wilkes and David Garrick and from one satire, The Methodist, which is usually included in surveys of anti-Methodist literature. [2] For the most part, his obscurity is deserved. In The Methodist, however, he participates in a short-lived revolt against the tyranny of Augustan satire and shows considerable evidence of a talent that might have created a new style for formal verse satire. ”