Chapter 4 “WHEN TIME SHALL END”

I

The Lisbon earthquake occurred in the morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints Day. Its three major shocks together lasted over ten minutes’ time and were followed by many aftershocks. Projections of its intensity according to the modern magnitude scale (the Richter scale) vary from 8.5 to 9.5; the latter, if accurate, would make this the largest earthquake in human history.⁴ The earthquake destroyed most of the city of Lisbon, ignited a weeklong fire, and was followed within two hours by three tsunamis of—at their highest—perhaps sixty feet, across the affected coastal areas. In Lisbon, these tsunamis overwhelmed the waterfront, sinking all but the largest vessels and carrying away coastal structures as well as the hundreds of people who had fled from the wreckage and fires in the city toward the Tagus River and the port. Beyond Lisbon, the earthquake caused major structural damage throughout southern Portugal, the Iberian Peninsula, Algiers, and elsewhere in northwestern Africa, and it was felt as well in Normandy, Brittainy, Switzerland, and northern Italy. Across its whole extent, this event is thought to have killed up to one hundred thousand people. In Lisbon ten thousand people were killed and forty to fifty thousand injured—these casualties probably affecting 40 percent of the city’s population.⁵

The Lisbon earthquake generated a discursive response that stands out in the history of the human engagement with the experiences of other earthquakes. Theodore E. D. Braun and John B. Radner note in their introductory overview of their collection on responses to this event that “it had a profound effect on European thinking for well over 100 years; and because the event made such an impact on the consciousness of people living at the time, it still remains potent in the European imagination.”⁶ And Jean-Paul Poirier in his review of the scientific, literary, and philosophical reactions to the earthquake concludes that “in the present age, no natural catastrophe could elicit the same amount of literary, theological and philosophical productions, as the Lisbon earthquake.”⁷ This distinctiveness is shaped in part by the historical coincidence of the earthquake with a set of transformations or tensions that mark this moment in eighteenth-century European history. Struggles and debates around the Reformation intersect with earthquake observers’ consistent engagement with religion. The visibility of the city and harbor of Lisbon as a center of European maritime expansion make the destruction there singularly significant, as an intrusion upon the ideologies of colonial and imperial expansion. And, as we shall see, the scope of human suffering in this geologic event intersects with key issues for Enlightenment humanism and optimism.

The immediate popular consensus expressed in England and very broadly across Europe was that the earthquake was an act of divine retribution—a view that is explicit throughout the literary representations of the earthquake as well as in the many topical sermons and religious publications of the moment. Charles Wesley’s “Hymn 2” in his Hymns occasioned by the Earthquake makes this impact most explicit, though this assumption is relevant throughout the English earthquake poetry:

JESUS, LORD, to whom we cry,

The true Repentance give,

Give us at thy Feet to lie,

And tremble, and believe;

On the Rock of Ages place

Our Souls, ’till all the Wrath is o’er,

Ground, and ’stablish us in Grace,

And Bid us sin no more. (3)

The designations of the rationale for God’s wrath, however, varied diametrically—from punishment for the bloody crimes of the Inquisition, which was still a powerful force in eighteenth-century Portugal, on the one hand, to retribution for the excessive tolerance shown to the heretics in Lisbon, on the other. For example, in “Poem on the Late Earthquake at Lisbon” (1755), it is the “Savage Hearts” of the Inquisitors that attract the earthly “Thunders” of “Heaven’s Justice”:

A murderous Crew within his Kingdoms dwell,

Ally’d to Satan and the Fiends in Hell;

To mild Religion, Honour, Mercy Foes,

All Laws divine as human overthrows:

.….….….….….….… …

The Rack, the Torture, is to them a Joy,

Their Aim to plunder, threaten and destroy;

Jews, Turks, or Christians serve their impious Turn,

Each, like a Faggot, undistinguished Burn;

.….….….….….….… …

But Heaven’s high Will who looks on Man’s Offence,

And with due Weight his Justice can dispense;

Who views Mankind with an Omniscient Ray,

And see’s Tomorrow as he see’s To-day;

Oft bids his loud impending Thunders Roll,

To strike a Terror in the guilty Soul.⁸

In London, the Lisbon earthquake was preceded in February 1750 by an earthquake of a magnitude of about 2.6, centered directly under the city; this quake killed two people and resulted in minor damage, but it created extensive anxiety in and beyond the city and was understood as a divine warning—today’s seismologists also understand this event as a warning since it indicated the presence of an active fault under central London. This quake generated a lively response of sermons and religious tracts and seemed, retrospectively, to presage the Lisbon earthquake. Wesley’s collection Hymns occasioned by the Earthquake, March 8, 1750, was published—following the Lisbon earthquake—in a second edition in 1756 along with the “Hymn upon the Pouring out of the Seventh Vial … Occasioned by the Destruction of Lisbon.”⁹ And upon news of the Lisbon earthquake, a royal decree was made for a Fast Day across England to promote general repentance and, through that penitence and prayer, to prevent further cataclysm.¹⁰

Earthquake writing—including eyewitness accounts, sermons, and poetry—reflects what Christopher Weber has termed “disaster discourse,” which is “comprised of overlapping rhetorical and narrative devices [including a] foregrounded speechlessness [that] triggers an array of highly stylized descriptions that have been recycled over and over for centuries.” These conventions highlight “the screams of dying people, the trampling of the dead, distressed mothers cradling their children, and the scandalous sight of improperly dressed people.”¹¹ In Biddulph’s Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon, for example,

Husbands are here seen pressing thro’ the Throng,

Nor know they drag their clinging Wives along.

Coy Virgins of their Lovers once afraid,

Now hang on Strangers Necks and court their Aid.

And there a ghastly Group of women see!

A Picture of the Ghosts they soon must be,

Wringing their Hands, sad solemn Silence keep,

While Infants wonder why their Mothers weep. (ll. 53–60)

And similarly in Henry Kett’s “An Episode Taken from a Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon” (1793),

Th’ impatient sailors waiting for Augustus

Repulse the gathering multitudes escap’d

From recent havock; tottering age and youth,

The rich, the indigent, distracted mothers

And weeping children, urg’d by common fear,

To the same spot repair’d; with arms extended

To Heaven, they beg for swift deliverance

From coming fate; or frantic and forlorn

With streaming eyes gaz’d on the gloomy ocean,

Imploring every ship that rode the waves,

To snatch them from the perils of the land.¹²

And in “A Poem on the Late Earthquake at Lisbon,”

The People shriek with Terror and Dismay,

Earth opes her Mouth and shuts them from the Day;

Young lisping Babes around their Mothers cling,

As tender Broods beneath the fostering Wing;

Where is my Father? with a Look most mild,

Or where my Mother? cries the duteous Child;

Oh! spare them both, if one of us must dye

T’appease the Anger of the Deity;

Thy prostrate Servant graciously receive,

Content to dye, but let my Parents live. (5)

Weber tracks the genealogy of these conventional images to the chronicles of the Roman historians and links them then to the repeated disaster scenes of sensationalist sixteenth-century broadsheets: “A comparative look at disaster narratives from the eighteenth century and the early modern period reveals that the descriptive details of the terror tableaux are interchangeable and not tied to a specific spatiotemporal context.”¹³

The classical rhetorical device of ponere ante oculos (placing before the eyes) is the core resource for these accounts, and Helena Carvalhão Buescu explores these interchangeable “terror tableaux” through their use of visual imagery. The impulse to visualize that is inherent in “disaster discourse”—as Buescu explains—“inevitably results in an evident pathos quite easily identifiable through the melodramatic forms that are used to appeal to the reader (transformed as we have seen into an imaginary spectator).… This quality of putting on a terrible show, presented as such to the spectator, suddenly turns the city of Lisbon into an enormous stage where all spectators become actors too.”¹⁴

In regard to the formal interchangeability across these instances of “disaster discourse,” then, the poetry of the Lisbon earthquake lacks specificity; the other-than-human event—even at 9.6 on the Richter scale—seems to escape the human imagination. The formal conventions of “disaster discourse” entail, in Buescu’s words, “the capacity to construct the earthquake as the staging of a spectacle whose excessive dimension also becomes a guarantee of its persuasive and redemptive effect.”¹⁵ That is, the human cultural imaginary offers a symbolic scenario whose overdetermination obscures the other-than-human realm, presenting earthquake through a formal system that renders its meaning accessible, indisputable, and even practical for the human audience, as a warning or prevision of the Apocalypse.

II

Unlike the advances in the modern science of meteorology that were generated by the responses to the great storm of 1703, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake did not give rise to significant changes in the long-standing notion—from classical times—that explained both earthquakes and volcanoes as arising from the impact of subterranean winds or gases that were ignited through exposure to flammable substances. Jean-Paul Poirier describes Aristotle’s theory in the Meteorologics of “windy exhalations,” noting that “at the end of the eighteenth century, the prevailing scientific explanation of earthquakes still did not essentially differ from the Aristotelian pneumatic theory—only the subterranean winds were now thought to be gases produced by the ‘fermentation,’ followed by combustion and explosion, of flammable substances such as bitumen, sulphur, or nitre, found in the underground. This theory, promoted by Buffon among others, accounted nicely for the association of volcanoes with earthquakes.”¹⁶

The same conclusion is drawn by Immanuel Kant in his 1756 History and description of the most remarkable events relative to the earthquake that shook a great part of the earth at the end of the year 1755, based on the notion of the flammable matter contained in the caverns of the earth. Poirier concludes that “the scientific impact of the Lisbon earthquake was insignificant; the venerable pneumatic theories were trotted out and there were no geologists that could make field observations.” But he notes that the prediction of a future earthquake in Lisbon, based on extrapolation from the historical interval, led to a surprisingly accurate result:

Pedegache [Miguel Tibério Pedegache Brandão Ivo, a Portuguese eyewitness and correspondent of the Journal Etranger], in a book on the earthquake published in 1756, listed all earthquakes having struck Lisbon in historical times and noticed that the three greatest happened in 1309, 1531 and 1755, separated by intervals of 222 and 224 years. He then ventured a hypothesis, which, he says, “may seem extravagant to many people, but is nevertheless not without any foundation. It is that there will be a great earthquake in Portugal between 1977 and 1985.” There, indeed, was one of magnitude 7.9 in 1969. Not bad for an extravagant hypothesis!¹⁷

On the other hand, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake had a very visible and even momentous impact on Enlightenment thought, including Voltaire’s responses, his exchange with Rousseau, and the aftermath of that conversation but extending to the broader debates around optimism and providential benevolence across the continent and in England. Voltaire’s 1755 “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster: an Inquiry into the Maxim, ‘Whatever is, is Right’” uses the events of the earthquake to refute the bold assertion of the benevolence of providence in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1732–34). Here is Pope’s famously direct claim:

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;

All Discord, Harmony not understood;

All partial Evil, universal Good:

And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, “Whatever IS, is RIGHT.”¹⁸

Voltaire uses the enumeration of scenes of human suffering in the Lisbon earthquake as an obvious case in point and direct refutation of Pope’s optimism, notably citing among other “terror tableaux” those deaths of infants that we have seen to be one of the key tropes of “disaster discourse”:

Women and children heaped up mountain high,

Limbs crushed which under ponderous marble lie;

Wretches unnumbered in the pangs of death,

Who mangled, torn, and panting for their breath,

Buried beneath their sinking roofs expire,

And end their wretched lives in torments dire.

Say, when you hear their piteous, half-formed cries,

Or from their ashes see the smoke arise,

Say, will you then eternal laws maintain,

Which God to cruelties like these constrain?

Whilst you these facts replete with horror view,

Will you maintain death to their crimes was due?

And can you then impute a sinful deed

To babes who on their mothers’ bosoms bleed?¹⁹

Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” was followed in 1759 by Candide; or, Optimism, which can be understood broadly as the next stage in Voltaire’s satire on the philosophy of benevolence. The proliferative misfortunes endlessly besetting Candide and his fellows throughout the narrative are encyclopedic with regard to their motivating frames of reference—including political, religious, social, colonial, romantic, and simply accidental contexts. Significantly, however, the Lisbon earthquake and the storm that immediately precedes it are the only representation of Candide’s engagement with environmental and geologic forces. At the outset of the narrative, within two chapters of his opening expulsion from the “earthly paradise” of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh’s country seat, Candide and his companions find themselves in the Lisbon harbor: “After escaping the storm … [they] felt the earth tremble beneath them. The sea boiled up in the harbour and broke the ships which lay at anchor. Whirlwinds of flame and ashes covered the streets and squares. Houses came crashing down. Roofs toppled onto their foundations, and the foundations crumbled. Thirty thousand men, women and children were crushed to death under the ruins.”²⁰ This trembling, boiling, crashing, crumbling, and crushing gives Pangloss—Candide’s optimistic philosopher-companion who is shortly to be hanged by the Inquisition—the opportunity to repeat the narrative’s absurd, satiric refrain:

Pangloss consoled them with the assurance that things could not be otherwise:

“For all this,” said he, “is a manifestation of the rightness of things, since if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could not be anywhere else. For it is impossible for things not to be where they are, because everything is for the best.”²¹

In Candide, the enumeration of scenes of suffering or “terror tableaux” that we have seen to be a central device of the earthquake poetry is extrapolated to the ironic or even ridiculous enumeration of unfortunate events that entirely constitute Voltaire’s narrative. But all of these multiplying misfortunes are initiated by the geologic event of the Lisbon earthquake.

The earthquake has multiplier effects beyond Candide. Rousseau’s response to Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” in his Lettre à M. de Voltaire (August 18, 1756), and the debate that attached to the exchange between the two thinkers, fundamentally shaped ongoing discussions of providence, necessity, suffering, and inequality for a century to come.²² Though Rousseau’s modulations of Voltaire’s critique were partial and even tentative—for instance, the suggestion that some of the victims of the earthquake may have been spared worse sufferings—according to José O. A. Marques, Rousseau’s approach to the earthquake also offers a distinctive new perspective that prefigures modern notions of social vulnerability:

Even if his attempted defense of Providence was in the end doomed to fail, Rousseau called attention to something that was not properly recognized until much later: the fact that social and behavioral patterns have a large influence in the occurrence of catastrophes that affect large human groups and which were until then blamed only on nature’s whims. As it happened in so many other fields of investigation to which Rousseau made pioneer contributions, we see here the first tentative steps towards a sociological theory of disasters and the modern concept of vulnerability, with the associated notion of the State’s responsibility in the prevention of such occurrences.²³

The impacts of the representation of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake on human thinking, human modes of representation, and even human approaches to politics and society are profound. And significantly these impacts are framed as we have seen by the inherent interchangeability of “disaster discourse,” which shapes earthquake according to human convention.

III

But while the conventional format of “disaster discourse” seems to place the other-than-human beyond human representation, it also provides for a counterhuman itinerary, corollary to the facets of the counterhuman imaginary that this study identifies elsewhere in the eighteenth-century imaginative engagement with the other-than-human. In the earthquake poetry, the conventional enumeration of suffering human beings—or those humans who are about to suffer—itself provides a starting point for a counterhuman explication, aligned with the autonomous multiplicities of Crusoe’s proliferating objects and with the assemblages of “hundreds” and “millions” of beings, books, things, insects, and yawns of The Dunciad’s sustained experiment with relationality: “Behold an hundred sons, and each a Dunce.”²⁴ Biddulph’s Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon here provides a corollary to The Dunciad’s assemblage of “hundreds” of beings:

Down from on high the shatter’d Tacklings rush,

And big with rattl’ing Ruin Thousands crush.

There gapes the vast Abyss with hideous Roar,

And in its Entrails swallows Thousands more. (ll. 85–88)

These “thousands” or “hundreds” evoke an indiscriminate assemblage that is notably repeated across the poems on the Lisbon earthquake. A Poem on the Late Earthquake at Lisbon also describes the fate of the “hundreds” who had sought safety:

Regardless of the kind hymnenial Tye,

Distracted Husbands from their Conforts fly;

Wives careless leave their tender Charge behind,

And vainly seek a safe Retreat to find;

.….….….….….….… …

Hundreds the gaping Chasms now destroys,

Quells every Hope, and every Bliss annoys. (p. 5)

And Richard Clarke’s “On an Earthquake” (1773) describes “ten thousand, thousand” of the dying:

The lofty domes, man’s fort and pride,

And gorgeous tow’rs on every side,

In dust all humbled fall;

Ten thousand, thousand, horrid cries

Of dying mortals rend the skies

Who late for mercy call.²⁵

These innumerable “thousands” are visible both in the scenes of the dying and also often in the accounts describing the diverse numerousness of the population of the city of Lisbon before the earthquake strikes. In Biddulph’s Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon, numerousness has an ongoing persistence from outset to apocalypse, as the poem opens with the same evocation of innumerable human beings who are later seen to perish in the “gaping Chasms”—in this case the crowds enjoying the city in the moments before the earthquake:

Within the Town gay Crowds were seen to stray,

While full Processions grac’d the festive Day.

Mechanicks by their honest Labour fed,

With cheerful Visage earn’d their daily Bread;

Misers were counting o’er their ill-got Store,

But not contented meditating more.

Spendthrifts were just awak’d from Golden Dreams;

Projectors were inventing Lottery Schemes;

Merchants were storing Goods from India brought;

Clients were selling Lands which Lawyers bought.

Behold a Youth, and sitting by his Side,

A Damsel new-betroth’d, his destin’d Bride;

Around them throngs a Train of Virgins gay,

Preparing Garments for the Marriage-day. (ll. 15–28)

The discourse of enumeration displayed here bears a notable resemblance to the ongoing counterhuman experiment with assemblage that we have seen to characterize The Dunciad’s encounter with other-than-human chaos, from the many manifestations of multiplicity in book 1 of that poem—“Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes, / And ductile dullness new meanders takes” (1.63–64)—to the “crowds” that convene for Dullness’ conferring of degrees in book 4:

The gath’ring number as it moves along,

Involves a vast involuntary throng,

Who gently drawn, and struggling less and less,

Roll in her vortex, and her pow’r confess.

.….….….….….….….…. .

Now crowds on crowds around the Goddess press,

Each eager to present the first Address.

.….….….….….….….…

Prompt at the call, around the Goddess roll

Broad hats, and hoods, and caps, a sable shoal:

Thick and more thick the black blockade extends,

A hundred head of Aristotle’s friends (4.81–84, 135–36, 189–92)

Like The Dunciad, the earthquake poetry steps outside of human coherence and hierarchy through multiplication.

Meanwhile, however, in a kind of counterhuman oxymoron, this multiplication is often juxtaposed with an insistent projection of singularity or immediacy. In Biddulph’s poem, for instance, the “Thousands” suddenly become “one”:

Horror and Desolation cou’d no more!

And now that once fair Town with all her Store,

And ev’ry Soul that hail’d the rising Day,

Heaving in Death like one vast Body lay. (ll. 105–8)

Wesley’s “Psalm XLVI” in his Hymns occasioned by the Earthquake names this singularity as “Earth’s inmost Center” (8). And “On the Late Earthquake” offers a similar account of the Earth itself—at the moment of the earthquake, which suddenly becomes a single, integral, consuming being:

When lo! a dreadful Sound affrights the Ear,

As if portending Desolation near;

The fatal noise th’ astonish’d Sense surprise,

And seems to rend the Concave of the Skies;

A fierce Convulsion shakes the Womb of Earth,

As if her Bowels sought a second Birth;

.….….….….….….….…

The People shriek with Terror and Dismay,

Earth opes her Mouth and shuts them from the Day. (5)

This sudden singularity is a persistent effect of the earthquake poetry, often signaled by a “fatal noise” or “roar” and characterized in terms of parts of the female human anatomy. In Biddulph’s poem, again, “Earth’s Womb was heard to groan with hollow Roar” (l. 47), or “Winds, Flames and Sulphur in her Bowels lurk” (l. 177).

To some extent, the counterhuman oxymoron that contrasts numerousness with singularity is representing a turn to the ultimate unity of the deity, to whose wrath the event of the earthquake is conventionally attributed. But even Wesley’s Hymns project a powerful image of a singularity that is distinct from the biblical conventions of the trinity. “Hymn 1” begins and ends with the unity of the “Great God … the God of Love” but reflects the earthquake itself distinctively as a singular “Mouth”: “The staggering Earth had yawn’d, and clos’d / Its Mouth on its devoted prey” (2). “Hymn 3” juxtaposes the numerousness of “The Crowd, the poor unthinking Crowd” with, “If Earth its Mouth must open wide, / To swallow up its Prey” (5). And in “Hymn 5,” this powerful “Center” is linked directly with a sudden, emphatic evocation of immediacy—“now”:

The Pillars of the Earth are thine,

And Thou hast set the World thereon;

They at thy threatning Look incline,

The Center trembles at thy Frown,

The everlasting Mountains bow,

And GOD is in the Earthquake now! (7)

Immediacy is a facet of singularity, as is evident in this description, in Richard Clarke’s poem, of the “sudden” “moment” of the earthquake, arising from the ruin of the “whole”:

Sudden the change, the change how great!

A moment sinks that pride and state,

The whole in ruin falls:

Hark! what a dreadful hollow sound

From Earth’s torn bowels shake the ground

And bursts the strongest walls. (47)

And this immediacy is also expressed in the present-tense evocation of earthquake-apocalypse and ensuing “new Creation” in Charles Wesley’s hymn “Rev. xvi, xvii, &c.”:

So be it: Let this System end,

This ruinous Earth and Skies,

The new Jerusalem descend,

The new Creation rise:

Thy Power omnipotent assume,

Thy brightest Majesty,

And when Thou dost in Glory come,

My LORD, remember me! (12)

Even as this poetry cites divine omnipotence, the disorienting collision of multiplicity and singular immediacy disorients human explanation, order, and even temporality.

IV

As we have seen, the human cultural imaginary constructs the Lisbon earthquake as a spectacle of suffering through iterative forms of “disaster discourse” that guide the reader to the lesson of repentance. But earthquake—the other-than-human geologic event that transformed the Earth in 1755—finds different, contrapuntal modes of representation in this poetry. A counterhuman excess or immeasurability or immediacy of earthquake is registered in this poetry’s persistent engagement with a kind of autonomous multiplicity, which confounds orderly human hierarchy or systematic human coherence. Multiplicity is a feature of the counterhuman imaginary that this study has identified in a range of eighteenth-century texts. In The Dunciad, as we have seen in chapter 3, the many forms of multiplicity that proliferate across the universe of the poem create an ongoing engagement with interrelationality, an “impossible” radical aliveness that empowers the ultimate “creation” of a nonhierarchic, antianthropocentric expression of “chaos.” Chapter 2 argues that in Robinson Crusoe the proliferation of objects is a signal of the “inexpressible” energy of matter on its own as it populates the “desert” island. And in chapter 1, in the comparison of the circulation narrative and the lapdog lyric, we found multiplicity to be equated with unexpected and unmeasurable cross-species and transbeing affect or “love”—that is, with distinctive modes of affinity that stand outside conventional human-based ontology. Here in the earthquake poetry also, multiplicity highlights proliferation in a way that points beyond human understanding or that surrenders human comprehension to an indescribable realm beyond the human.

And meanwhile, the oxymoron that we have observed in this poetry, in which the multiplicity of unnumbered human sufferers is juxtaposed with a powerful and sudden singularity and immediacy—either attributed to the deity or embedded in the earth itself—offers another moment of incongruity that eludes human conventions of coherence. The suddenness and immediacy of the collision between “ten thousand, thousand” and “the Earthquake now” is a counterhuman effect that points toward a transformative power inaccessible through “disaster discourse.”

Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” explicitly reproduces a version of this oxymoron in a reflective couplet that juxtaposes multiple “woes” with a singular, coherent, “general” “bliss”:

Yet in this direful chaos you’d compose

A general bliss from individuals’ woes. (189)

But in this case, the incongruity of the juxtaposition serves as a critique of the conventional earthquake poetry’s defense of providential benevolence, a project that we have seen to be the core intention of Voltaire’s poem. Here the attack on “philosophy” for seeking, oxymoronically, to generate “bliss” from individual “woes” is directly expressed:

Horrors on horrors, griefs on griefs must show,

That man’s the victim of unceasing woe,

And lamentations which inspire my strain,

Prove that philosophy is false and vain. (186)

In fact, Voltaire’s earthquake absorbs the counterhuman effects of the other earthquake poetry into its critique of optimism. Voltaire’s “Lisbon Disaster” begins, as we have seen, with an extended rendering of the established conventions of “disaster discourse,” just like the other earthquake poetry: “Women and children heaped up mountain high, / … Wretches unnumbered in the pangs of death, / … babes who on their mothers’ bosoms bleed.” (186). But the poem then explicitly targets that multiplicity, which we have seen as an indication of the impact of the counterhuman imaginary in the other earthquake poetry, as a “proof” that “philosophy is false and vain” (186).

Significantly, in this couplet attacking the problematic juxtaposition of a singular “bliss” with multiple “individuals’ woes,” Voltaire’s poem names the event in question: “this … chaos.” “Chaos” serves here as the term for that immediate indescribable moment that arises both through the counterhuman oxymoron of the other earthquake poetry and also from Voltaire’s poem’s revisionist attempt to absorb that counterhuman effect into the human imagination in despite of “philosophy”: “chaos” expresses the incongruous, sudden impact of a singular power from accounts of multiplicity and despite the dissonant citation of “philosophy.” We have seen this impact and this power in the ultimate counterhuman effect of The Dunciad. Here The Dunciad’s “chaos” helps to explicate Voltaire’s “chaos” and its absorption of the counterhuman imaginary of the other earthquake poetry:

—the all-composing Hour

Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow’r.

She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold

Of Night Primæval, and of Chaos old!

.….….….….….….… …

Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,

Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

.….….….….….….….….…

Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;

Light dies before thy uncreating word. (4.627–30, 643–44, 653–54)

Reading the other-than-human earthquake across the earthquake poetry connects Voltaire’s “chaos” and Pope’s. For both texts, multiplicity repudiates conventions of order, consolation, and philosophy. In both poems, that repudiation reveals a new realm—in Voltaire’s poem, a realm of “dire contention” that “overthrows” “all systems” (189, 191);²⁶ in Pope’s poem, an entropy of “discontinuity, multiplicity and contingency.”²⁷

The “new world” of Pope’s Dunciad is the earthquake of Voltaire’s “Lisbon Disaster.”

1. 1. Charles Wesley, Hymns occasioned by the Earthquake, March 8, 1750. To which are added an hymn upon the pouring out of the seventh vial, … Occasioned by the destruction of Lisbon, part 1, 2nd ed. (London: E. Farley, 1756), 10. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

2. 2. John Biddulph, A Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon (London: W. Owen, 1755), ll. 241–50. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

3. 3. David K. Chester, “The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake,” Progress in Physical Geography 25 (2001): 383; citing J. Mezcua, J. Ruida, and J. M. Martínez Solares, “Seismicity of the Ibero-Maghrebian Region,” in Seismicity, Seismotectonics and Seismic Risk of the Ibero-Maghrebian Region, ed. Mezcua and A. Udías (Madrid: Instituto Geografico Nacional, 1991), 17–28. See also, for recent detailed accounts of the Lisbon earthquake including contemporary reports as well as recent geological assessments, Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders, Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); T. D. Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake (London: Methuen, 1956); Nicholas Shrady, The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (New York: Penguin, 2008); and Edward Paice, Wrath of God: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (London: Quercus, 2008).

4. 4. Chester, “1755 Lisbon Earthquake,” table 3, 370.

5. 5. See especially Chester; Kendrick, Lisbon Earthquake; Shrady, Last Day; and Paice, Wrath of God.

6. 6. Theodore E. D. Braun and John B. Radner, introduction to The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions, ed. Braun and Radner (Oxford, UK: Voltaire Foundation, 2005), 3.

7. 7. Jean-Paul Poirier, “The 1755 Lisbon Disaster: The Earthquake That Shook Europe,” European Review 14 (2006): 180.

8. 8. “A Poem on the Late Earthquake at Lisbon. To which is added, Thoughts in a Church-Yard” (London: R. and J. Dodsley, [1755]), 4. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

9. 9. For a perspective on Charles Wesley’s hymns and on both Charles Wesley’s and John Wesley’s responses to the earthquakes in London and Lisbon, see Robert Webster, “The Lisbon Earthquake: John and Charles Wesley Reconsidered,” in Braun and Radner, Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, 116–26.

10. 10. See Poirier, “1755 Lisbon Disaster,” 176; and Robert G. Ingram, “ ‘The trembling Earth is God’s Herald’: Earthquakes, Religion and Public Life in Britain during the 1750s,” in Braun and Radner, Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, 113.

11. 11. Christopher Weber, “Tableaux of Terror: The Staging of the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 as Cathartic Spectacle,” in Catastrophe and Catharsis: Perspectives on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond, ed. Katharina Gerstenberger and Tanja Nusser (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015), 19, 26.

12. 12. Henry Kett, “An Episode Taken from a Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon,” in Juvenile Poems (Oxford, 1793), 47.

13. 13. Weber, “Tableaux of Terror,” 26.

14. 14. Helena Carvalhão Buescu, “Seeing Too Much: The 1755 Earthquake in Literature,” European Review 14 (2006): 333.

15. 15. Buescu, 334–35.

16. 16. Poirier, “1755 Lisbon Disaster,” 174.

17. 17. Poirier, 174–75.

18. 18. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), ep. 1, 289–94.

19. 19. Voltaire and William F. Fleming, “The Lisbon Earthquake,” New England Review 26 (2005): 186. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

20. 20. Voltaire, Candide; or, Optimism, trans. John Butt (London: Penguin, 1947), 23, 33.

21. 21. Voltaire, 35.

22. 22. See José O. A. Marques, “The Paths of Providence: Voltaire and Rousseau on the Lisbon Earthquake,” Cadernos de História e Filosofia da Ciência (CLE-Unicamp) 15 (2005): 33–57; and Russell R. Dynes, “The Dialogue between Voltaire and Rousseau on the Lisbon Earthquake: The Emergence of a Social Science View,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 18 (2000): 97–115.

23. 23. Marques, “Paths of Providence,” 18.

24. 24. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, 3.138. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

25. 25. Richard Clarke, “On an Earthquake, from a serious musical entertainment,” in The Nabob: Or, Asiatic Plunderers … to Which Are Annexed, A Few Fugitive Pieces of Poetry (London: J. Townsend, 1773), 48. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

26. 26. Here Voltaire is citing Pierre Bayle:

    What do I learn from Bayle, to doubt alone?

    Bayle, great and wise, all systems overthrows,

    Then his own tenets labors to oppose. (191)

27. 27. David Webb and William Ross, introduction to The Birth of Physics, by Michel Serres, trans. Webb and Ross (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 2 (originally published 1977).