by Roy Porter
NORMAN HAMPSON, The Enlightenment (1968)
‘Distrust is a necessary qualification of a student in history.’
SAMUEL JOHNSON, ‘Review of the Account of the Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough’ (1742)
‘Many of the books which now croud the world, may be justly suspected to be written for the sake of some invisible order of beings, for surely they are of no use to any of the corporeal inhabitants of the world.’
SAMUEL JOHNSON, ‘A Review of Soame Jenyns’ (1757)
‘I'm sick of Portraits and wish very much to take up my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.’
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, letter to William Jackson (c. 1760)
‘The Husbandman puts his seed in the Ground & the Goodness, Power, & Wisdom of God have pledged themselves, that he shall have Bread, and Health, & Quietness in return for Industry, & Simplicity of Wants, & Innocence. The AUTHOR scatters his seed – with aching head, and wasted Health, & all the heart-leapings of Anxiety – & the Folly, the Vices, the Fickleness of Man promise him Printers' Bills & the Debtors Side of Newgate, as full & sufficient Payment.’
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, letter to Thomas Poole
(Tuesday, 13 December 1796)
‘I am now trying an Experiment very frequent among Modern Authors; which is, to write upon Nothing.’
JONATHAN SWIFT, A Tale of a Tub, and Other Satires (1704)
‘I wonder, however, that so many people have written, who might well have left it alone.’
SAMUEL JOHNSON, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775)
‘No expectation is more fallacious than that which authors form of the reception which their labours will find among mankind. Scarcely any man publishes a book, whatever it be, without believing that he has caught the moment when the publick attention is vacant to his call, and the world is disposed in a particular manner to learn the art which he undertakes to teach.’
SAMUEL JOHNSON, Preface to Richard Rolt,
Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756)
‘A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.’
SAMUEL JOHNSON in James Boswell,
The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
INTRODUCTION
[T]he historiography of enlightenment in England remains that of a black hole.
J. G. A. POCOCK1
A few preliminaries will make this book more approachable. For starters, terms of art, which are as inescapable as they are unsatisfactory. In John Pocock's opinion, the phrase ‘ “the” (or “an”) “English Enlightenment” does not ring quite true’.2 Maybe; but, following his own example, I shall be using it all the same. It is admittedly an anachronistic term, but it captures, I believe, the thinking and temper of a movement, one of whose leading lights could declare, ‘our first concern, as lovers of our country, must be to enlighten it’.3 I have, however, avoided the term ‘pre-Enlightenment’, since that confuses rather than clarifies (is it supposed to denote a status quo ante or something more akin to a prelude?).4 I shall, however, refer to the ‘early’ or the ‘first’ Enlightenment, alluding roughly to pre-1750 developments or, approximately, to what is mainly covered in the first eleven chapters of my book. I also write of the ‘late’ or ‘second’ Enlightenment, indicating in broad terms what happened after the middle of the century, or what may be found in the latter part of the book, that is, the enlightened critique of Enlightenment. ‘The long eighteenth century’ sometimes serves as a shorthand for the entire span from Restoration to Regency, and other chronological markers, like ‘Georgian’ and ‘Hanoverian’, are used equally elastically.
Over the years Pocock and others have been urging that, to avoid making progressive voices sound too much like a caucus or a conspiracy, we should drop the definite article and maybe also the capital letter, and speak not of ‘The Enlightenment’ but rather of ‘enlightenment’, or better still ‘enlightenments’. I fully endorse this typically shrewd suggestion, which is particularly germane to Britain where there never emerged, as some think there did in France, un petit troupeau des philosophes – a little flock, a party of humanity. The British avant-garde was not a network of persecuted rebels or underground samizdat authors, destined to hand down the torch of liberal democracy to Kennedy's America or Blair's Britain. They are better likened to the mixed clientele talking, talking, talking in a hot, smoky and crowded coffee house; men sharing broad convictions and sympathies but differing, and agreeing to differ, on matters dear to their hearts.
Mention of ‘men’ leads to the vexed issue of gendered language. Like those coffee house politicians, the great majority of the thinkers discussed below are male. The idiom they used –‘man of letters’, ‘man of mode’, ‘the common man’, etc. – was gendered through and through, as were their assumptions: when thinkers like John Locke spoke of ‘man’, there doubtless lurked a generic if tacit notion of ‘mankind’ in general, but the people they actually envisaged as doing the teaching and preaching, writing and enlightening, were male. They did not think much of women in such public contexts, and when they did, they singled them out specifically. This silently gendered language reflected a man's world as defined by dominant male élites; and, to catch the tones of the times, I largely follow their practice here.5
One further note on terms. The Act of Union (1707) united the parliaments of England and Scotland, creating Great Britain. Scotland thereby accepted the Act of Settlement, enacted by Westminster in 1701, which designated the Hanoverians as Queen Anne's successors. A second Act of Union of 1801 incorporated Ireland into the ‘United Kingdom’. My usage of national terms in the following pages will be less technically constitutionalist. I often employ ‘English’ as a shorthand for ‘English language’, and the terms ‘English’ and ‘British’ somewhat interchangeably when referring to ideas and developments broadly shared by élites living in the British Isles, since practically all enlightened thinking was then actually coming out of English heads, especially during the first third of the eighteenth century. By contrast to this ‘lumping’ habit, ‘English’ and ‘Scottish’ will be distinguished when I am specifically addressing regional traditions and themes, and I shall devote much of chapter 10 to developments characteristic of the Scottish Enlightenment.6 Numerous thinkers of Irish and Welsh extraction – John Toland and Richard Price, for example – also achieved eminence, but, except fleetingly in chapters 10 and 20, I do not focus on controversies taking place within and about Ireland and Wales. Usage will be clarified by context; if this laxity sometimes seems confusing or is galling to modern nationalist sensibilities, it reflects the realities of a time when ‘English’ was commonly applied to people born anywhere in ‘our Isles’.7
In this book far too many themes receive short measure. I do not give much space to political debate, literature and the arts, to tides of taste, the commercialization of culture or the forging of nationalism. Apart from space constraints, the reasons are plain: splendid books have appeared recently in all these areas and, rather than redigging sound foundations, I have instead tried to build on the spade work of my fellow historians.8 Likewise, few extended exegeses of major philosophies are offered here. Once again, in many instances, fine studies already exist,9 and in any case my chief concern lies less with the intricacies of, say, Hobbes, Hume, Hutton or Hazlitt than with the interplay of activists, ideas and society.
Historians of the Scottish Enlightenment may feel particularly aggrieved: does not the north British contribution deserve greater attention? Don't the literati of Aberdeen, St Andrews and Glasgow, not to mention the ‘Athens of the North’ itself, New Town and all, warrant chapters all to themselves? I would not scant the brilliance of the Caledonian contribution but, once again, notable studies already exist upon which I shall draw; and since my interest is more with meanings and impacts than with origins, I have, perhaps cavalierly, chosen to splice Scottish thinkers into the Br
itish story as a whole.10
I greatly regret that more is not said here about Continental influences upon Britain, and the reciprocal uptake of British thinking overseas. Insular history has no virtues, and any claims staked below about the Englishness of the English Enlightenment, or about ‘English exceptionalism’,11 must rest on firmer foundations than ‘fog over the Channel’ obliviousness to developments elsewhere. I can only plead that adequate discussion of such issues would have made a long book lengthier still, and that it would require research into the literati of Milan, Mainz and Madrid far beyond my competence.12
Numerous other issues cry out for greater attention – the controversies which raged over mind and body, Heaven and Hell, the afterlife, the soul and the je ne sais quoi of the self, to name just a few. I have an excuse for some of these omissions: I plan to address such topics in my next book, which will examine the triangle of the moral, the material and the medical in the anglophone Enlightenment.
Next, a word on where I stand. Enlightenment historiography has been distorted by hindsight, and remains unashamedly parti pris. Progressives have long praised the philosophes for being the begetters of the Rights of Man, or have traced a lineage from them to the American Republic – indeed, the distinguished American historian Henry Commager once claimed that Europe dreamed the Enlightenment and America made that dream come true.13 For their part, right-wing scholars, echoing Burke and the Abbé Barruel, have blamed the Enlightenment for handing the Terror its ideological ammunition, while Rousseau's doctrine of the general will supposedly begat ‘totalitarian democracy’, lethally sanctioning fascism, Nazism and Stalinism.14 In some quarters it has become almost de rigueur to paint the Enlightenment black. After the Second World War, ‘totalitarian’ became the epithet for an Enlightenment whose managerial rationality was alleged to have imposed an ‘administered life’ which inexorably reduced society to ‘a universal concentration camp’.15 Echoing such readings, Michel Foucaúlt held that, despite its rhetoric, the true logic of the Enlightenment was to control and dominate rather than to emancipate.16 Certain modern literary critical circles take a no less jaundiced view. ‘The “new” eighteenth century to be found in postmodernist scholarship,’ Terry Castle drily observes, ‘is not so much an age of reason, but one of paranoia, repression, and incipient madness.’17 ‘These days,’ remarked Eric Hobsbawm in 1997, in a similar vein, ‘the Enlightenment can be dismissed as anything from superficial and intellectually naive to a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism’.18 Voltaire likened history to a box of tricks we play on the dead, and none would gainsay that objectivity is a mirage; yet I believe these Foucauldian and postmodernist readings are wilfully lopsided, and I shall show how and why below.
I find enlightened minds congenial: I savour their pithy prose, and feel more in tune with those warm, witty, clubbable men than with, say, the aggrieved Puritans who enthral yet appal Christopher Hill or with Peter Gay's earnestly erotic Victorians. I trust, however, that this book will be read as a work of analysis rather than one of advocacy or apology. The Enlightenment is not a good thing or a bad thing, to be cheered or jeered. Apart from anything else, heroes-and-villains judgementalism would be absurd, because, as I shall insist ad nauseam, there never was a monolithic ‘Enlightenment project’. Enlightened thinkers were broad-minded, they espoused pluralism, their register was ironic rather than dogmatic. ‘The Enlightenment was not a crusade,’ observes Mark Goldie, ‘but a tone of voice, a sensibility.’19 Tolerance was central, and protagonists could shake hands on some matters while shaking fists on others. For much of his career, Joseph Priestley, that unflagging religio-political liberal, looked upon Edmund Burke as a sympathizer, though their amity ended abruptly with the French Revolution. Then again, while Priestley took issue with the infidel Edward Gibbon's account of its rise, they shared, in large measure, criticisms of the corruptions of Christianity. Priestley even made a point of publishing his polemical exchanges with his co-Nonconformist Dr Richard Price, in the candid if quaint conviction that dissent should be seen as the spur to truth.20 Little was fixed, debate came before doctrine, and culture wars went on among the enlightened as well as against their foes.
In short, we must be sensitive to chiaroscuro so as to descry the Enlightenment's contours, attending to its limits no less than its liberations, in recognition (as ever) that what permitted some truths to be interrogated was that others remained self-evident. We must resist being seduced by its slogans, and neither hypostatize the Enlightenment as the manifest destiny of humanity nor, conversely, diabolize it as a plot of dead white males: rather it should be seen as a cluster of overlapping and interacting élites who shared a mission to modernize. Our social vantage on enlightened ideologues must be nuanced, taking in the view ‘from below’ as well as ‘from above’, from the provinces as well as the metropolis, embracing female no less than male responses.21 It must be capacious enough to disclose how particular preferences led some (Jeremy Bentham, for instance) to proceed in the name of cost-efficient rationality, while others, like John Wilkes, played the liberty trump. To some (David Hume, for example) enlightenment was primarily a matter of emancipation from religious bigotry within the political status quo; for others, like Dr Richard Price, it meant a pathway to political liberty picked out by Providence.22
Avoiding taking sides, this book strives to make sense of what moved progressive intellectuals by laying bare their thinking, in the light of Locke's dictum that we must understand a thinker's terms, ‘in the sense he uses them, and not as they are appropriated, by each man's particular philosophy, to conceptions that never entered the mind’ of that author.23 This is a particularly important undertaking because the world they were making is the one we have inherited, that secular value system to which most of us subscribe today which upholds the unity of mankind and basic personal freedoms, and the worth of tolerance, knowledge, education and opportunity. As the Enlightenment's children, we should try to fathom our parents.
As ever, that is not straightforward. While in the eighteenth century progressive intellectuals backed many causes now typically approved, they also espoused others which today we find abhorrent. John Locke championed the natural freedom of mankind, yet ‘The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina’, framed by him in 1669, granted free men in the new colony absolute jurisdiction over their slaves.24 Bentham deplored the criminalization of homosexuality, yet proposed castrating rapists and tattooing convicts – all on the basis of the greatest happiness principle.25 Mary Wollstonecraft vindicated the rights of women, but out-misogynized most women-haters. ‘The age of enlightenment,’ Ronald Knox once noted, ‘was also an age of fanaticisms.’26 Complexities, convolutions and contradictions leap out from my pages.
‘Reason, with most people, means their own opinion’: thus wrote the saturnine William Hazlitt.27 Without succumbing wholly to that Hazlittian mulishness born of defeat, we must beware presentism and recognize that every age, especially perhaps the age of reason, rationalizes in its own way and has its own meaning codes, spoken and implicit. To utilitarians, rationality did not only spell personal freedom; it was also disciplinary, a tool in the forging of that efficient regime in which the rational would regulate the rest. The fact that Benthamism thus spelt social control is, however, no argument for abandoning ‘Enlightenment’ as a historical category: it is merely a caveat against simplistic ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible enlightenments’ readings.28 Nothing could be sillier than to tightlace the dead into today's conceptual corsets. The most we can hope to do is to understand them – all the hectoring in the world will not change them! Far from judging saints and sinners, this book problematizes the progressives in the battle for the mind.
While cheerfully acknowledging my massive debts to fellow historians, I also draw gratefully upon the work of literary scholars. Even the best historians have rarely done justice to the remarkable insights afforded by literary investigat
ions into Grub Street and the republic of letters, into authorship and readership, into genres, canons and registers, and into fictionalizations of self and society. In what follows I highlight the part played by poets, critics and novelists in debates over identity, individuality and subjectivity, and the role of the imagination in the politics of the gendered self, in the belief that the eighteenth century was truly, as Johnson thought, an ‘age of authors’.29
Enlightened avant-gardes condemned the fossilized, prized novelty (while also mistrusting it) and thrived upon controversy, self-criticism and self-celebration. Through the medium of print, public opinion was materializing in a manner uncannily prefiguring the late twentieth-century data revolution and those contemporary expressions of the electric information explosion, the Internet and the World Wide Web. The progress of print was a development upon which those two mighty adversaries Samuel Johnson and David Hume for once found themselves of a mind. ‘The mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing and consequently knowledge is not generally diffused,’ ruled Johnson;30 there had been, sensed Hume, ‘a sudden and sensible change in the opinions of men within these last fifty years, by the progress of learning and liberty’.31 The print revolution and the rise of the reading public brought new cadres of knowledge-mongers into being, serving as society's eyes, ears, brains and mouthpieces.32 How curious that this budding British intelligentsia has been ignored. This book aims to make a modest contribution to changing that, rethinking Albion's Enlightenment and shedding light on the ‘black hole’.
(Note: I have tried to give full citations to the quotations I have used. I have not, however, been scrupulously consistent in following original punctuation and capitalization.)