Places: The Dunciad

*London. Dunciad, TheCapital and largest city of Great Britain. With a population of nearly seven hundred thousand people in the eighteenth century, London is the setting of the final campaign of “The War of the Dunces,” which culminates in the obliteration of high cultural standards. At the core of its East End is the old walled section, known as “the City,” center for the lower and middle classes, business, the trades, markets, counting houses, the Royal (stock) Exchange, jails, shanties, butcheries, shipping, coal wharves, and tanning factories. The East End was noted for its mobs, crime, jails, poverty, ugliness, dirt, sooty air, open sewers, and foul odors. London’s West End is associated with the royal court and aristocratic elegance, leisure, gardens, lovely parks, large squares, and beautiful houses. The mock-heroic journey of the dunces from the East End to the West End and back symbolizes the conquest of high culture by low standards.

*Smithfield. Lower-class section of East London, site of a bazaar and the occasional dramatic entertainment “agreeable only to the Taste of the Rabble.” The mock-heroic invocation to the muse in the poem’s opening lines announces the theme of cultural degeneration: the bringing of “The Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings.”

*Rag-Fair. Located near the Tower of London, a place where old clothes were sold to the poor. It is the site of the cave of Poverty and Poetry, mythical source of low standards and poor taste. References to Grub Street, a lane of unsuccessful authors who pandered to popular tastes, continue the linkage among poverty, crime, and low culture. From her sacred dome of Dulnes near the Tower, Goddess Dulnes and the dunces begin their evening movement through the City.

*Guildhall. Historic city hall of the City of London. Goddess Dulnes’s home is her “Guild Hall,” literally the seat of the lord mayor, popular government, and trade. It symbolizes the triple alliance of democratic politics, commerce, and vulgar standards that threatens to overwhelm the landed aristocracy and its high culture.

*Ludsgate. Western entrance to the City of London. Tracing the route of the lord mayor’s parade, the dunces leave the City by this western gate, built by King Lud and carved with images of kings whose heads have been scored off by vandals, symbolizing the antiaristocratic and philistine temperament of the dunces. Their move west to found the empire of dullness parodies Aeneas’s voyage west to found the Roman Empire.

*Fleet Street. London street that was the traditional home of many printing houses that published newspapers and popular reading. Traveling on this street, the dunces pass two jails, Bridewell, for vagrants, prostitutes, and the disorderly, and the Fleet, for debtors. These prisons suggest the criminality of lowering standards.

*Strand. Continuing Fleet Street and running parallel with the River Thames to its south, this street is the direct route of the dunces from the City to the West End and back. Places along it symbolize the encroachments of low life. They pass Drury Lane, noted for fighting and prostitution. At Fleet Ditch, a channel of sewage running into the Thames, the dunces hold their mock-heroic games, among them, contests of urinating, cat-calling, racing through slop, and diving in filth, symbolic of bad poetry, criticism, journalism, or unethical publishing.

*Elysian Shade. The descent of Goddess Dulnes and the king of the Dunces parodies Aeneas’s descent to the underworld. While Aeneas learned of the greatness of the Roman Empire that he was to found, the king hears a prophecy that his dynasty of dullness will rule the world. By the poem’s apocalyptic end, this has come to pass, as the arts, learning, virtue, and religion have become imprisoned, have hidden, or have died, and “Universal Darkness Buries All.”