Abstract/Summary

This book a long line of commentaries on ‘how-to’ knowledge and mechanical expertise in British poems, essays and novels of the eighteenth century. Its modes were not, however, directly instrumental, or straightforwardly didactic, as the modern historiography of industrial revolution expects. Invariably its framing was satirical, critical, and oblique. The ‘mock arts’ studied in this book dwelt half in the realm of encyclopaedic explication, and half in the tacit dimension of manual finesse. Eighteenth-century satirists submitted to a general paradox: that the nature of human skilfulness obliged them to write in an indirect and unpractical way about the practical world. Their explorations of mechanical expertise produced little in the way of straightforward description of the mechanical trades. They wrote instead a long and peculiar line of books that took apart the very idea of an instructional literature: the Enlightenment Mock Arts.