The Restoration and the Eighteenth century has been classified with many names: the Augustan Age, the Neoclassical period, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Reason; all of which apply to some characteristics of this period in time, but not all. The 1660s to 1800s is compelled of numerous historical, cultural, and literary events that makes the time period very significant.
Many authors, that are still looked up to and read today, began their writings during this time of transformation. Included is Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the principal prose writer of the eighteenth century and England's greatest satirist. At the age of three he was left to be raised by his uncle who paid for his education. Swift's goal in writing was not to gain fame, money, or to entertain, but to improve human conduct. His first book of importance was A Tale of a Tub (1704). Swift describes this book as an exposure of "gross corruption in religion and learning." Another important book of Swift's is Gulliver's Travels (1726), written to attack many different varieties of human misbehavior, vice, and folly. Swift also wrote pamphlets to defend the Irish against the oppressive policies of their English rulers. The most famous of these pamphlets is A Modest Proposal (1729). Swift died of an inner ear disease, though no longer in the world, he left behind his views of reformation.
The most important poet of the eighteenth century was Alexander Pope (1688-1744), a catholic child prodigy who was of delicate health conditions. Pope's early writings induced envy in other writers, therefore he was lampooned and ridiculed and in an attempt for defense, he turned to satire. In 1728 Pope wrote The Dunciad, which attacks dull, uninteresting writers of all kinds and shows the forces of stupidity, ignorance and folly taking over the world. Another of Pope's writings is the Moral Essays (1731-1735), which passes judgement on immoral men and women as well as very rich people who lack common sense and good taste.
