The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

Wit The term first comes into critical
importance applied to literature in the
seventeenth century, though it was used in
the previous century in a general way to
denote liveliness and brilliance of conversation.
‘Witty Jack Donne’ is an
Elizabethan man-about-town, but when
he turns up in Carew’s ‘Elegie upon the
Death of the Deane of Pauls’ (1623) as
a King, that rul’d as hee thought fit
The universall Monarchy of wit
we are moving into a time when wit was a
powerful if disputed critical concept or
basis for value-judgement, though such
a time was more surely after the
Restoration. The clue to the reason for
this may lie in a meaning of wit which is
assigned to the Restoration years: ‘the
seat of consciousness or thought, the
mind’. Dryden, living in this critical
climate, defined wit as ‘sharpness of
conceit’. His emphasis is on selfconsciousness
on the part of both the poet
and the audience. It is no accident, then,
that at this time ‘the wits’ emerged – a
group conscious of their nimble minds
and cultural awareness. Apart from selfconsciousness
itself, there are several
other characteristics of Restoration and
eighteenth-century wit that come from
such an in-group attitude. Comparison is
stressed. The wit demands to be used in a
context of accepted ideas and reading,
though the opposite side of this is also
valued, namely unexpected justness.
Cleverness and quickness are parts of it,
too, and the idea of the marshalled
disposition of material. Lastly, ideas are
important: the most famous characterization
of wit, echoed by later critics and
W
poets, is that of the most influential
philosopher of the age, John Locke, who
defines it as ‘the Assemblage of Ideas,
and putting those together with quickness
and variety’.
Locke is here, however, acting as the
spokesperson for the new highly developed
and articulate consciousness of the
self in moral thinking, scientific observation
and poetry, which begins to assume
special importance in England in the
seventeenth century. The consciousness
of the self as initiator, user and arbiter of
ideas produced the problem of establishing
a communal, standard judgement, a point
of rest which became increasingly the
goal of the succeeding Augustan age. The
arrogance of wit was resisted. There was
a backlash of sensibility, from individuals
who followed their hearts; and there was a
conservative backlash from those who
distrusted unsupported human daring.
Addison devoted several Spectator papers
to discussing wit (see nos. 35, 61–3, 140
and 249). In No. 62, he elaborates his
famous distinctions between ‘true wit’
and ‘false wit’ allowing an escape hole of
‘mix’d wit’ to avoid condemning writers
whom he half admired. There is a see-saw
between admiration for quick cleverness
and admiration for the harmony of the
assemblage. ‘False wit’ appears to
Addison to be ‘Gothick’, that is without
proportion, fussy, entertaining but lacking
overall control. ‘True wit’ he sees as
majestic and ‘natural’.
It would be possible to give a historical
account of the use of ‘wit’ as a critical
term. Pope, for example, makes it one of
the primary topics of his ‘Essay on
Criticism’. Dr Johnson was himself