Even to eighteenth-century scholars, Mark Akenside (1721-1770) is likely to be only a name with a wispy vapor trail, memories of having flown over The Pleasures of Imagination. What scholars may recall better is Johnson's brief and, by and large, magisterially dismissive account, within a decade after Akenside's early death, in The Lives of the Poets. Here Johnson is at his apparently most credible, because most skillful at treating opinion as distilled fact: "To examine such compositions singly cannot be required; they have doubtless brighter and darker parts: but when they are once found to be generally dull all further labor may be spared, for to what use can the work be criticised that will not be read?" This rhetorical question elicits a simple response: what is, once found dull may later look better, when better read. Mr. Dix's Literary Career of Mark Akenside provides the critical wherewithal for better readings.
This new book by Mr. Dix complements his editions of Akenside's poetry (1996) and of essays reassessing Akenside (2000). It spares no labor to pace through Akenside's literary output. Admittedly, only already willing readers are likely to profit from Mr. Dix's rather gray plod, so at odds with Akenside's own poetic luxuriance, but profit there undoubtably and frequently is. As a bonus, this volume also includes an edition of Akenside's nonmedical prose, in appendices. These comprise just over twenty letters, a theological essay (staunch in style, flimsy in thought) written by Akenside at twenty-one, and four essays of 1746 from The Museum, a periodical that Akenside edited capably during its eighteen-month life (1746-1747). Why so few? Because shortly after The Museum stopped appearing, Akenside, in his late twenties, markedly retrenched his short, precocious career as a man of letters - he had begun to publish when he was sixteen - to attend more to his medical life.
Mr. Dix's fullest discussion, seventy pages, of course falls to The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), an extraordinary blending of poetry, philosophy, and learning for someone not yet twenty-three. This discussion, plus another twenty pages about the drastic revision of the poem as The Pleasures of Imagination (a posthumous, unfinished publication in 1772) is the best account of this critical achievement I know. The rest of the book works its way thoughtfully through Akenside's smallish body of poetry, mainly lyric - odes and their ilk - but also his satire An Epistle to Curio, between Pope and Churchill in date and quality, which carries forward Pope's late motif of the satirist as victim, but here with a pathos that reminds one of the kinship between satire and sentiment.
The last sentence of The Literary Career of Mark Akenside tells us that "Careers are, in one way at least, like arias: we find them easier to admire if they end on a high note." The career of Akenside, who died in his very late forties, failed at this criterion; but with this book I think the career of Mr. Dix, who died in 2007 at fifty-one, met it.
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