In the early eighteenth century, British readers and writers had to come to terms with a characteristic feeling of their new modernity: the sense of an increasing estrangement from the reality of the tangible world. In order keep in contact with that reality, I argue, they produced literary texts that dwell on the sense of touch. Modern philosophers like Descartes and Locke had located certain knowledge not among the world’s objects but among the mind’s ideas, a skeptical turn that infamously resulted in the alienated individualism of modern Western subjectivity. But literary discourse, unconstrained by philosophy’s compulsory skepticism, could still work to help its readers and writers understand and resist the harmful alienations of philosophical modernity. I describe two separate but related ways in which early eighteenth-century literary texts keep people in touch with the unmodern reality of the object-world. One of these is the familiar “formal realism” of the novel: Defoe, I argue, both records and reproduces his modern protagonists’ surprisingly unmodern desire to touch and to be touched. The other is a forgotten mode of resistance to the alienating pressures of modern life: the tactile aesthetics and ethics of that group of writers frequently called “Augustan.” By conceiving of their language as an immaterial “curtain of words,” Augustan writers evolve a distinctive style of poetry that acts as a formal metonym for physical interaction, a poetics in which “smooth or rough” is “right or wrong.” This Augustan tactile ethics gives form to prose as well. The final movement of my argument suggests that Swift, infamous for the lacerating negativity of his satire, argues constantly, literally, and explicitly for the positive ethical value of gentle physical touch. These readings seek to recover the sense of touch as it functions in Augustan letters: as the guarantor of objective reality, the primordial source of the self, and the stable ground of ethics.