Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
Page 11
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The arrival of print was represented as a great watershed. While the invention of writing was the most wonderful of all human discoveries, declared William Worthington, making us ‘Masters of other Men's labours and studies, as well as of our own’, printing itself, the progressive Anglican Edmund Law was sure, had ‘contributed infinitely to the perfection and progress of the sciences’.13 Literacy too was prized, with the Scots in particular proud of their parochial schools, springboards to college for the ‘lad o' pairts’.14 In England, between the cracks of the broad but decaying grammar school heritage, thousands of commercial ventures and Nonconformist academies sprang up, as did charity schools early in the century and Sunday schools later.15
Of course, sights might be set low: parish schools often taught reading but not writing, and assigned pupils only the Bible and other pious texts distributed by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. But the reading eye can never be blinkered – that is why many voices were raised, from that of the arch-cynic Bernard de Mandeville to the rabid Anti-Jacobin Review, against the folly of teaching the plebs to read at all and so giving them ideas above their station: ignorance, thought Soame Jenyns, was the best ‘opiate’ of the poor.16
Readers rejoiced: Edward Gibbon gloried in his ‘early and invincible love of reading, which I would not exchange for the treasures of India’,17 while ordinary working men wrote of lives revolutionized through the habit. Sent to market by his grazier father, the young John Cannon would slip away to a local gardener's to read the ‘large history of that learned and warlike Jew, Josephus Ben Gurion’, which was the ‘first foundation of my steady and unwearied adherence to English history’. Becoming a revenue officer and schoolteacher and serving as the local scribe, Cannon later loaned out books in the spirit of his horticultural mentor.18 Tramping to find work, the 14-year-old autodidact William Cobbett spied Swift's A Tale of a Tub in a bookseller's window. He forked out his entire capital – threepence – found a haystack and began to read. Eureka! – ‘the book’, he recalled, ‘was so different… it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect’. Cobbett rose to become the people's tribune, the self-styled ‘great enlightener of the people of England’.19 Something similar happened to the Lancashire weaver's son Samuel Bamford, another who would pay tribute to the ‘blessed habit of reading’. His earliest love was a perennial favourite: ‘The first book which attracted my particular notice was “The Pilgrim's Progress”, with rude woodcuts.’20 Bunyan led to Milton, to Pope, and on then to the rest of English literature, fortifying that sense of independence which turned Bamford into a radical. His contemporary John Clare, born into a near-illiterate peasant family in the Northamptonshire fens, learned his letters, stole time out from his work and, hiding behind hedges to read, grew familiar with that supreme self-help fable Robinson Crusoe, then turned into an angry poet, protesting against exploitation and enclosures.21 Crucial to plebeian self-respect was the empowerment offered by books.22
The reading habit changed cultural allegiances. ‘The poorer sort of farmers, and even the poor country people in general,’ commented James Lackington in the 1790s, ‘shorten the winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, romances, etc. and on entering their houses, you may see Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and other entertaining books, stuck up on their bacon-racks.’23 ‘Prodigious numbers in inferior or reduced situations of life’, he gloried, had thus been ‘benefited’, rescued as they now were from wasting their time on ‘less rational purposes’.24 Lackington's account of reading as enlightenment was patently self-serving, coming as it did from one who not only made his living as a bookseller but who prided himself upon selling knowledge cheap. A self-made man, he turned his ‘Temple of the Muses’ in Finsbury Square into one of London's landmarks, its sign boasting: ‘CHEAPEST BOOKSELLERS IN THE WORLD’. By 1792 he was claiming a staggering turnover of ‘more than one hundred thousand volumes annually’, boosted by his giant catalogues and his brainwave of cheap remaindering.25
Lackington was not alone in sensing the power of print. ‘General literature now pervades the nation through all its ranks,’ Samuel Johnson had earlier stated, every house now being ‘supplied with a closet of knowledge’.26 Referring back to the 1760s, when he had been lent Gulliver's Travels and the Spectator by a fellow apprentice, Thomas Holcroft similarly pointed to the difference: back in his childhood, an ale house might have a few old English ballads, but ‘books were not then, as they fortunately are now… to be found in almost every house’.27
These print-led shifts in consciousness hinged partly on high literacy rates – although, already impressive by European standards by 1700, British literacy levels did not rise very sharply in the next century.28 What mattered, rather, was not the sum total of readers but the fact that reading became second nature to a major swathe of the nation, and that the glass screen dividing those within the print club from the rest came to count for more: illiterates were mercilessly taunted, while reading proffered an admission ticket into the cultural magic circle, even for those of no great wealth or status. Indeed, the key polarity in Georgian England, it has been suggested, was not that between patrician and plebeian, or rich and poor, but that between those swimming in the metropolitan culture pool created by print and those excluded, those whose culture was still essentially oral – perhaps what Sir James Mackintosh had in mind when he said that the spread of ‘the art of Printing had… provided a channel by which the opinions of the learned’ passed ‘to the shop and the hamlet’.29
Autodidacts like Cobbett were particularly inspired by their early encounters with modern writings – with Defoe, Swift and Smollett, with newspapers and magazines. This reflected a shift from ‘intensive’ to ‘extensive’ reading.30 Traditionally, a ‘common reader’ would treasure a shelf of hallowed texts, perusing them time and again – precisely the picture Holcroft painted. ‘My master's whole library,’ Lackington remarked of his cobbler employer, ‘consisted of a school-size Bible, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, Foot's Tract on Baptism, Culpeper's Herbal, the History of the Gentle Craft, and an imperfect volume of Receipts in Physic, Surgery etc. and the Ready Reckoner.’ The Bible, some religious texts and a few ‘how-to’ books – such had been an artisan's treasury of wisdom.31
The new breed of ‘extensive’ readers, by contrast, had access to a far greater range of materials, largely up to date, which they might run through, before returning them to the circulating library, handing them on or turning them into bumf. The individual item became less sacred, and the reader more desultory, accustomed, commented the bluestocking Frances Boscawen, ‘not to read strictly, but feuiller’.32 It was a shift which was widely condemned: ‘Reading is now sunk at best into a Morning's Amusement,’ growled that arch-grumbler the Revd John Brown.33 That the new habits were not all trivialization, however, is shown by the diary of the mid-century Sussex grocer Thomas Turner. Rather impressively, that godly but gadabout fellow owned more than seventy books and periodicals, including works by such flagship enlighteners as Locke, Addison, Tillotson, Steele, Sterne and Edward Young, as well as Shakespeare and Milton; his diary mentions a further fifty books read in the decade after 1754, along with periodicals and newspapers. Of an evening, if he was not getting drunk, Turner might intone Tillotson's sermons to his chums,34 and, when trade was slack, he would sit in his shop poring over such weighty works as Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education. Since Turner doubled as village schoolteacher, he may well have spread enlightened outlooks to his pupils, perhaps even following Locke's educational hints.35
As Turner's diary confirms, prominent in the print explosion were newspapers, magazines and other ephemera. The newspaper itself was still news. The new century inherited the Post Boy, Post-Man and Flying-Post; the first successful daily, the Daily Courant, began under Queen Anne; more followed – the Evening Post, the St James's Evening Post, the Whitehall Evening-Post, the London Journal, th
e Daily Post, the London Evening-Post, the Daily Advertiser and so forth – while the London Gazette served as the nation's official organ. Up to 1700, all were printed in London – by 1712 the capital had about a score of single-sheet papers, selling some 25,000 copies a week – but a provincial press soon emerged, beginning with the Norwich Post in 1701. By 1760, 200,000 copies were being sold a week of the thirty-five provincial papers, and sales had doubled by 1800. Every big town had its own paper before the century was out.36
The annual total sale of newspapers in 1713 was around the 2.5 million mark. By the 1770s, when there were nine London dailies and fifty provincial weeklies, the figure was over 12 million; by 1801, when London alone was served by thirteen daily and ten tri-weekly newspapers, it had leapt to 16 million. ‘Their cheapness brings them into universal use,’ commented Johnson on the medium's take-off; ‘their variety adapts them to everyone's taste’.37 New worlds flashed before people's eyes – and novelty, as George Crabbe noted in 1785, was the big draw:
I sing of NEWS, and all those vapid sheets
The rattling hawker vends through gaping streets.38
‘There is no Humour in my Countrymen,’ declared Mr Spectator, ‘which I am more inclined to wonder at than their general Thirst after News.’39
Provincial papers served as beacons to the region in which they were distributed, teaching a widening public not just of kings and battles but of the fads, sensations and excitements of the moment – indeed they created that public in the first place. Founded in 1736, by the end of the century the Salisbury Journal was selling over 4,000 copies an issue (more than most Paris newspapers) and it made its self-made proprietor Benjamin Collins rich – he died worth a staggering £100,000. Alongside news local and national, it dished up a minestrone of events, announcements, books, features and odds and ends. In all, around 200 teachers in seventy-eight Wessex towns inserted ads in the Journal in its first thirty-four years, a good pro-portion of which were for brand new schools,40 showing that the press and education worked hand in hand to galvanize minds, and bearing out Johnson's dictum that ‘knowledge is diffused among our people by the news-papers’.41
Newspapers changed assumptions and made things happen. ‘A lady will offer five guineas reward for a little lost dog worth fivepence,’ wrote the Swiss de Saussure in 1725:
A husband will warn the public not to lend or sell his wife anything on credit… A quack will advertise that he will cure all ailments. A person who has been robbed promises a reward to whoever will help him to recover his stolen property. Entertainments and spectacles are advertised; also offers of houses, domains, furniture, carriages, horses for sale or on hire, books, pamphlets, etc., and by reading these papers you know of all the gossip and of everything that has been said and done in this big town.42
Small wonder the invention was hailed as a dynamo of change. ‘One of the improvements of life in which the present age has excelled all that have gone before’, it was noted in 1753, ‘is the quick circulation of intelligence, by the multitudes of newspapers'43 – while the nostalgic for their part knew what to blame. In 1768 the crusty Alexander Catcott – he was, among other things, a passionate anti-Newtonian – snarled that ‘every man in this Enlightened age (having been fully instructed by those genteel and easy conveyances of knowledge, newspapers and magazines)’ presumed to have ‘the liberty of making a philosophy (and I might add indeed a religion) for himself’.44 If extreme, the Bristol clergyman's diatribe contained a core of truth, as did Josiah Tucker's telling retort in 1774 that ‘this country is as much news-mad and news-ridden as ever it was popery-mad and priest-ridden’.45
A parallel agent of cultural change was the periodical, popularized by Daniel Defoe's Review (1704–13). Through the persona of Isaac Bickerstaff, Richard Steele then edited and largely wrote the Tatler, which appeared thrice-weekly from 1709. The first Spectator followed on 1 March 1711, with another of those tags from Horace beloved of the Georgians: ex fumo dare lucem (‘to turn the darkness light’).46 Posing as the musings of ‘Mr Spectator’, this collaboration between Steele and Joseph Addison appeared daily, Sundays excepted, until December 1712 (nos. 1–555), priced at just one penny. With other collaborators, Addison then put out a second series which ran three times a week from June to December 1714 – all told, a staggering 635 numbers.
As will be explored in chapter 7, the Tatler and the Spectator brought enlightened views and values to the public at large, polishing manners, popularizing the new philosophy and refining tastes.47 By splicing dramatized scenes with moral chats and readers' correspondence, genuine and fictitious, a collusive sense of shared superiority was forged through the medium of the daily essay, often read out at home or in that ‘place of general Resort’, the coffee house.48 The novelty of it all was not lost on Samuel Johnson. Before the Tatler and Spectator, he observed, ‘England had no masters of the common life. No writers had yet undertaken to reform either the savageness of neglect, or the impertinence of civility.’49
Fired by their success, scores more periodicals followed. Prominent were the Examiner (1710–14), partly written by Swift; Steele's own Guardian (1713); Ambrose Philips' bi-weekly Free-Thinker (1718–21), with its ‘sapere aude’ masthead – popular enough to warrant a three-volume reprint; and Aaron Hill's Plain Dealer (1724–5). The very titles tell all. Henry Fielding's Covent-Garden Journal mixed essays with news, as did his Grub-street Journal (1730–37). A signal innovation was the Female Spectator, which appeared in 1744.50 Edited by the dramatist and novelist Eliza Haywood (though ostensibly the work of an all-women ‘club’), it was the first magazine written by, for and about women, being filled with items on love, marriage and the family, female education, etiquette and health (including warnings against the hysteria induced by excessive tea-drinking).51
After the Tatler and Spectator, the prime periodical, however, was the evergreen and significantly titled Gentleman's Magazine: or, Monthly Intelligencer, a general interest offering, founded in 1731 by Edward Cave, a Midlander like Johnson, who astutely passed himself off as ‘Sylvanus Urban, Gent.’ The Gentleman's boasted it contained ‘more in Quantity, and greater Variety, than any Book of the Kind and Price’ (just sixpence). To prove its range, after a lengthy ‘View of the Weekly Disputes and Essays in this Month’, the first issue devoted four pages to poems and six to a ‘Monthly Intelligencer’, and included sections on marriages and deaths, promotions, accidents and ‘lost and stolen’, stock prices, bills of mortality, foreign news, books and bankrupts, together with an essay on credulity (witchcraft in Pennsylvania), gardening hints and abridgements of the news and comment papers. It built a circulation of over 10,000 copies and, of course, a far larger readership.52
More followed, including Johnson's Rambler (twice-weekly, 1750-52, running to over 200 issues). His ‘Idler’ column appeared in the weekly Universal Chronicle (1758–60) and Goldsmith's ‘Chinese Letters’ in the Public Ledger (1760–61). In time, specialized titles arrived, given over to topics like fashion. Book review magazines came in too. First there were the Monthly (1749) and the Critical (1756); then in 1783 John Murray started up the English Review, in 1788 Joseph Johnson launched the Analytical Review, in 1793 came Rivington's British Critic, and three years later the Monthly Magazine – between them, they founded the meta-genre of works about new books.53 By 1800, a staggering 250 periodicals had been launched in England, creating a spirited cultural sounding-board and exchange: ‘a periodical paper of instruction and entertainment’, reflected Boswell, himself a columnist, ‘may be reckoned one of the happiest inventions of modern times’.54
Real and fabricated alike, audience participation was a key attraction, persuading readers at large, as with phone-ins today, to regard themselves as on the inside of the sets that mattered. Reader input was the very raison d'être of the Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury, Resolving All the Most Nice and Curious Questions Proposed by the Ingenious (1691), whose format lay in answering readers' questions – on points of
fact, morals and conduct. Later renamed the Athenian Mercury, this ‘all your questions answered’ scrapbook was the brainchild of the eccentric John Dunton. Despite the Fall, he remarked in his garrulous autobiography, ‘the desire for Knowledge is undestroyed’; and it was to afford the curious ‘some glimmering apparition of Truth’ that he launched his weekly miscellany, printing in its 580 numbers the answers to close on 6,000 questions, their subjects ranging from female education to the immortality of the soul. You could, for instance, find out ‘How shall a man know when a Lady loves him?’ or ‘Whether 'tis Lawful for a Man to beat his Wife’.55 It was later put out in bound volumes, twenty in all, plus various supplements like the Young Students' Library, which provided among other scientific items an abstract of Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, another of Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667), and some ‘Observations on Mr Boyle's Specifick Remedies’, the chemist's foray into popular health.56 Dunton's Athenian Mercury provides a benchmark of cultural change, signalling the point when ‘Mr Public’57 was beginning to look to journalists for guidance in life, perhaps in the process sidelining parents, parsons and other venerable authorities.