Despite “the Counterhistorical” in the subtitle of John McTague's Things that Didn't Happen, the words counterhistory and counterhistorical do not actually appear in the online OED that my university library offers. These lexicographical absences seem oddly apt given the events that never occurred analyzed by McTague, who describes his focus as the “historiographical”—the narrative form given to events—rather than the “historical,” actions that really took place. As McTague puts it, “what matters is not what happened but how things are made to matter” (2, 23). This work offers detailed analyses of selected non-events in the period between the Popish Plot in 1678 and the publication of Alexander Pope's fourth and final Dunciad in 1743.
Things that Didn't Happen is carefully structured, with enough flexibility to highlight various resonances within and across chapters. After an introduction covering theoretical and methodological backgrounds, three sections of two chapters each analyze the central counterhistorical categories McTague delineates: fabrications (events widely discussed that never actually took place), failures (events that could have occurred but ultimately did not), and speculation (descriptions of potential futures that never materialized). Each section presents a variety of printed materials on the political, cultural, and historiographical practices that shaped the representations of the chosen non-events, ranging from the warming pan scandal and the Rye House Plot to the attempted Jacobite invasion in 1708 and the apportionment of blame for the South Sea Bubble. A final three-chapter section examines Pope's four versions of the Dunciad in order to develop different perspectives on the counterhistorical elements and strategies highlighted in the first three sections.
Although rich in information about and insights into historical writing, the major contributions of Things that Didn't Happen are to literary criticism, through its reliance on close textual analysis. McTague is an excellent, often brilliant, close reader of texts and groups of texts, whether major works like John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, or ephemeral pieces such as pamphlets, ballads, satirical prints, and even a three of spades from a deck of South Sea Bubble playing cards. Critics are accustomed to dealing with the classical echoes and influences in early modern texts, but McTague points out what he describes as another sort of “cultural literacy,” a set of cross-textual allusions with which most scholars are not as familiar: “Educated eighteenth-century readers . . . also recognised references to political debates and even specific pamphlets, sometimes recalling details from apparently ‘ephemeral’ texts decades old” (19). This study lays important groundwork in providing access to this other system of reference with its focus on recurring tropes and ideas in the political literature of the period.
The analyses depend heavily on analogous relationships between textual elements, whether or not these were intended by their authors. Although McTague admits the risks of this method, like some practitioners of the older New Historicism, he does not entirely avoid some of its potential problems, particularly in the later part of the book. For example, the chapter on the philosophy of the freethinkers and their opponents is far too short to accomplish all that McTague sets out to do and fails to adequately cover the historiographical ramifications of the work of either Bernard Mandeville or George Berkeley, its major figures.
More troubling is the relationship of the three concluding chapters on the Dunciads to the rest of the study. McTague is a very fine critic of Pope, and his treatments of mock prophecy, agency, and providence in the poetry are full and satisfying. But only the last of the Pope chapters, which includes theories of history, ties in well with the preceding material. The other two are inadequately connected with the earlier chapters, mainly because of an overdependence on analogy without sufficient accompanying explication and analysis. At moments, it reads almost as if McTague were hurrying to conclude; with his plethora of materials, perhaps what he has here could have become two separate but related books.
None of the above should detract from the solid and valuable accomplishments of this study. The scholarship is thorough, and McTague is generous to others, careful to acknowledge his academic debts with full documentation of related work. He indicates that he chose to center this study in the later Stuart and early Hanoverian periods because the binary partisan structures that coalesced and the faster communications that developed made political discourse such a driving force in historical and polemical activity during the period. But McTague's insights also have ramifications for other times and places. In the United States today, Things that Didn't Happen makes for sobering reading amid heightened binary political polarization, so-called fake news, deepfakes, and lies intentionally propagated by media both real and counterfeit. The incorrigibility, contingency, and conspiracy that McTague analyzes in the political writing of the later seventeenth and early to mid-eighteenth centuries are staples of current polemical discourse. It is our misfortune that the story he tells is not relevant only to later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholarship.
