Going by its definitions in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), ‘nonsense’ in the mid-eighteenth century was licensed to negate only a very limited kind of ‘sense’. In particular, it could make no inroads on the ‘sense’ that is synonymous with ‘reason’. Johnson confines nonsense to ‘Unmeaning or ungrammatical language’ and ‘Trifles; things of no importance’. Yet the examples he cites in support of those definitions (from Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and James Thomson) suggest a more unruly and invasive beast, with the potential both to create and to destroy. Nonsense is further associated, in the first group of his citations, with questionable literature—with tales that are neither true nor false (Butler); with works that do not sell (Dryden); and with editions that misrepresent their authors (Pope).
In the age of the scholarly variorum, ‘How easy it is’, as Pope observed in a letter of 1711, ‘to any one to give … a new nonsense, to what the author intended’. The laborious pedantry and combative self-regard of editors and learned commentators triggered a counter-blast of mock-scholarship from the Scriblerians. For all his attacks on Grub Street and on professional editors, Pope delighted in their waste products; he more than once described ‘nonsense’ as ‘new’ because it unleashed his creative energies. Eighteenth-century cock-and-bull stories, tales of tubs, farragoes and hodge-podges have a generic association with nonsense, a quality associated in this period not so much with the absence of rationality as with an affront to subordination and decorum—an affront which may, admittedly, make an author go mad in the end. Nonsense attacks the internal coherence of a work’s stylistic economy; it may annihilate a writer in the process.
