Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  All such publications, of course, entailed wider innovations within the print business. The relentless demands of newspapers and magazines for copy turned authorship into a trade. Only from around 1700 did the ‘author by profession’ make his mark on the literary landscape. Writing, remarked Daniel Defoe in 1725, ‘is becoming a very considerable Branch of the English Commerce… The Booksellers are the Master Manufacturers or Employers. The several Writers, Authors, Copyers, Sub-Writers and all other operators with Pen and Ink are the workmen.’58 The plight of such ‘hirelings with Pen and Ink’ was caught by Henry Fielding in The Author's Farce (1730), in the lament of the arch-hack Blotpage:

  How unhappy's the fate

  To live by one's pate

  And be forced to write hackney for bread!

  An author's a joke

  To all manner of folk

  Wherever he pops up his head, his head,

  Wherever he pops up his head.59

  Blotpage was new to the literary scene. In 1763, supping with Johnson and Goldsmith, Boswell noted how odd it was to be ‘sitting with London authors by profession’: Sawney McHackit had not yet appeared in Old Reekie.60

  The scribblers' headquarters was Grub Street, an actual location (by the Barbican) as well as an image.61 Defined by Johnson as ‘a street near Moorfields, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems’, it was a wryjoke to its own denizens, who self-mockingly referred to the ‘University of Grub-street’, that ‘fruitful Nursery of tow'ring Genius's!’62 Meanwhile, they were despised by princes of the pen like Alexander Pope, fearful of being dragged down into the gutter by the drudges scratching away for the ‘buzzing tribe’ of Paternoster Row booksellers, those ‘pimps of literature’.63

  Life was not easy for one of that new breed, the ‘author by trade’, who, as poignantly evoked in Johnson's Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), strained for bread and fame – how Johnson knew, being a poor bookseller's son himself!64 Their status was rising, however, if slowly – and only for some. This owed a little to a series of copyright acts, which extended the Lockean sanctity of an Englishman's estate to literary property. ‘Nothing [is] more a Man's own than his Thoughts and Inventions,’ avowed the critic John Dennis; ‘wit’, agreed Lord Chesterfield, ‘is a sort of property’.65

  Complex new copyright laws confirmed publishers' rights while also holding out some entitlements to authors. London's ‘booksellers’ (publishers) had traditionally enjoyed a national monopoly (aside from the university presses) under the protective canopy of the Stationers' Company. The lapse of the Licensing Act spurred the hundred or so metropolitan booksellers to combine to defend their corner, setting up congers, or associations, which monopolized shares in copyright.66 Subsequent to the 1710 Act, however, it was no longer clear that they controlled exclusive copyrights, and certainly not for any more than twenty-one years (from the date of the Act) over the works of the dead – Shakespeare, for instance. Books already in print would be protected for fourteen years, renewable for a further fourteen if the author or owner was still alive.

  In this unsettled situation, publishers found it paid to strike deals with favoured authors, who proved able to negotiate more handsome rewards. Oliver Goldsmith secured 800 guineas for his History of Animated Nature (1774), while the Scottish historian William Robertson received a huge £4,500 for his History of Charles V (1772).67 Successful authors and publishers thus thrived alike in what had become a booming industry. ‘I respect Millar, Sir,’ declared Johnson of a top bookseller, ‘for he has raised the price of literature.’68 No doubt there is truth in Hogarth's portrayal of the hapless ‘distrest poet’; Adam Smith was to deride ‘that unprosperous race of men commonly called men of letters’, and one protested that ‘there is no Difference between the Writer in his Garret, and the Slave in the Mines’.69 Yet professional authors were winning their place in the sun. Little of any value was written in either the garret or the palace, remarked Gibbon, perhaps correctly.70 Certainly a growing number of writers, himself included, escaped these stultifying extremes, gaining pecuniary success and public cachet alike. ‘My book was on every table, and almost on every toilette,’ the historian gloated, recalling the appearance of his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–81); 3,500 copies sold in just over a year.71 Before 1700 those authors who were not independent gentlemen had typically sought patronage, and some Gay and Prior, for instance continued to be so favoured.72 But patronage could feel like prostitution and it irked many, not just Johnson. In any case, by the 1730s the golden age of royal and noble literary sponsorship marked by Lords Somers, Montagu, Halifax, Harley and the Kit-Cat Club was waning. Writers, however, found that, instead of drowning, they were actually buoyed up by the market, which provided them with a measure of independence. Johnson, for one, never rued the new situation in which the author looked to the public, and the pen was independent of the pension. Visiting Glasgow, he was given the old rigmarole as to how trade and learning did not mix, but, as ever, he had no truck with cant:

  JOHNSON:… Now learning itself is a trade. A man goes to a bookseller, and gets what he can. We have done with patronage.

  Enter the biographer with his usual asinine interjection:

  BOSWELL: It is a shame that authors are not now better patronized.

  JOHNSON: No, Sir. If learning cannot support a man, if he must sit with his hands across till somebody feeds him, it is as to him a bad thing, and it is better as it is. With patronage, what flattery! What falsehood!

  BOSWELL: But is it not the case now, that instead of flattering one person, we flatter the age?

  JOHNSON: No, Sir! The World always lets a man tell what he thinks, his own way.73

  While Johnson cursed Lord Chesterfield for letting him down as protector to his Dictionary, his complaint was not about the noble lord's failure to bankroll it – finance to the tune of about £5,000, after all, came from the booksellers. What piqued the lexicographer was Chesterfield's failure to provide ‘one Act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour’. Hence the barbed put-down:

  The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help.74

  – and the significant substitution when Johnson revised The Vanity of Human Wishes in 1749:

  There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,

  Toil, envy, want, the Patron, and the jail.

  (The line had originally indicted not the patron but ‘the garret’.) 75

  While Tory wits mourned the demise of courtly patronage in Walpole's ‘degenerate’ age, Johnson was not alone in viewing it as a blessing in disguise for authors by profession – an escape from being patronized. The poets of England, opined Goldsmith, ‘no longer depend on the great for subsistence; they have now no other patrons but the public, and the public, collectively considered, is a good and generous master’.76

  Literature became a commodity circulating in all shapes and sizes. John Wesley turned out fourpenny pocket-sized abridgements of classics like Paradise Lost – Milton for the masses – as well as a dictionary and a nine-page English grammar.77 New packages were also pioneered, for instance publishing by parts. The first edition of Johnson's Dictionary (1755), of which 2,000 copies were printed, cost £4 10s.; hard on its heels came a second, brought out in 165 weekly sections at sixpence each. Smollett's Complete History of England (1757-8) sold 10,000 copies in sixpenny weekly numbers.78

  In addition, enterprising publishers began to market cheap sets of the standard English poets and playwrights at the knock-down price of a shilling or so – in effect, paperbacks. This was made possible by a 1774 copyright ruling which established that after the expiry of the protected period (a maximum of twenty-eight years), a text entered the public domain. The old cartels could now be smashed. John Bell launched his Poets o
f Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill series, which came out between 1776 and 1792 in 109 volumes, at IS. 6d. each – or just 6d. on tatty paper.79 Soon John Cooke was competing, with his editions of the British poets, prose writers and dramatists, in sixpenny weekly numbers.80 Young William Hazlitt gobbled up English literature through Cooke's books which regularly arrived by mail order at his parental home (‘a perpetual gala-day’). Another 1770s innovation was William Lane's Minerva Press and Library, notorious for its salacious and sentimental novels.81

  Thus, more made its way into print, more cheaply. Books also became easier of access, particularly as provincial publishing brought a bookshops boom. Under the Licensing Acts printing had been a London monopoly and provincials had had to make do without printed broadsides and handbills, advertisements, theatre programmes, tickets, receipts or other trade items. In 1700 Birmingham had no bookseller, while as late as the 1720s Lincoln had a towncrier but no newspaper or printer. All that changed fast. By 1740, there were about 400 printing outlets in nearly 200 towns, and, by the 1790s, this had risen to nearly 1,000 in more than 300 centres. In 1800, Newcastle-upon-Tyne could boast not only twenty printers but twelve booksellers and three engravers as well. ‘There are now as many Booksellers as there are Butchers,’ observed the Londoner William Blake.82

  Nor was it even necessary to buy, as hosts of book clubs and libraries – circulating, proprietary and subscription – came into being. By 1800 there were about a hundred in the metropolis and a thousand in the provinces.83 Some were huge: in 1793 Bell's London circulating library claimed to hold 150,000 volumes – including the kinds of belles lettres and Minerva Press fiction which drove Sir Anthony Absolute to apoplexy.84 Though most libraries kept large stocks of history, travel and the like, it was the novels, play texts and light reading which were seized off the shelves.

  The print boom bred new varieties of men of letters. ‘In opulent or commercial society,’ observed Adam Smith, theorist of the division of labour, ‘to think or reason comes to be, like every other employment, a particular business, which is carried on by a very few people.’85 Among the emergent breeds was the critic, that self-appointed judge, censor and reformer of the republic of letters – and object of vilification:

  So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea

  Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,

  And these have smaller yet to bite 'em,

  And so proceed ad infinitum…86

  Thus wrote Swift, while Cobbett for his part called ‘those who carry on the trade of critic… a base and hireling crew’.87 Even so, the critic was enlightened man incarnate, the caustic Restoration wit purified into the more civilized character required in the age of politeness, standing for freedom of speech and rational argument against dogmatism and absolutism.88

  Mr Critic overlapped somewhat with the satirist for, especially in the early Enlightenment, the burlesque, the spoof and the parody formed ideal vehicles for free-thinking, opposition and subversion. And his younger brother was Mr Reviewer. Johnson might slight the business as an ‘epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper’,89 but reviewing, like criticism, filled the sails of the ship of print. It told readers what to think and say, while nurturing a much-desired (if despised) cultural narcissism in circles eager to hear themselves talked about and liking the sound of their own voices.90

  The crony of them all was Mr Spectator, arbiter of standards and ubiquitous commentator. Hinting that there was no coffee house which he did not frequent, that Addisonian persona assumed a universal status, transcending the particular identities of the individual members of his club – the cleric, man of fashion, merchant, country gentleman and soldier – to become the cosmopolite, the very epitome of sweet reason, composure and tolerant pluralism.91

  These literary identities were part and parcel of the key Enlightenment reinvention of the persona of the thinker, signalled by Adam Smith's remark about the trade of thinking. Proposing to bring ‘Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses’, Joseph Addison, the first great media man, sought to turn the philosopher into a man of letters and thus a man of the world.92 Thinking was not for academics alone and must be rescued from the ‘monkish’ seminaries which bred arcane pomposity; what was needed was discussion not disputation, conversation not controversy, politeness not pedantry. ‘If Philosophy be, as we take it, the Study of Happiness,’ remarked the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘must not everyone, in some manner or other, either skilfully or unskilfully philosophize?’93 It was not thus a matter of metaphysics but of savoir vivre: ‘The Taste of Beauty, and the Relish of what is decent, just, and amiable, perfects the Character of the Gentleman and the Philosopher.’94

  David Hume concurred in urging a reincarnation for the philosopher: ‘The separation of the learned from the conversable world’, he maintained, had been ‘the great defect of the last age’; learning had ‘been as great a loser by being shut up in colleges and cells’, while philosophy had gone to ruin ‘by this moping recluse method of study, and became as chimerical in her conclusions, as she was unintelligible in her style and manner of delivery’. Where lay the fault? Thinking had been monopolized by self-absorbed academics ‘who never consulted experience in any of their reasonings, or who never searched for that experience, where alone it is to be found, in common life and conversation’. Things, however, were on the mend. ‘It is with great pleasure I observe’, he noted,

  that men of letters in this age have lost in a great measure that shyness and bashfulness of temper, which kept them at a distance from mankind; and, at the same time, that men of the world are proud of borrowing from books their most agreeable topics of conversation.95

  Hume's life itself played out the impasse of the thinker – and its Enlightenment resolution. In his twenties, the Scotsman slithered into a career crisis. He abandoned his legal studies and launched himself on to the troubled waters of philosophy. He wrestled with his daring experimental science of the self, abandoning the philosophy of first principles and a priori reason for the unremitting examination of every scratch of sensation upon the consciousness, under a ruthless and sceptical honesty – studies that were to lead to his Treatise of Human Nature (1739).

  For a while, he studied at fever pitch, but then succumbed to fatigue and ennui: ‘I could no longer raise my Mind to that pitch, which formerly gave me such excessive Pleasure.’ He tried to work, but by the spring of 1730 he was experiencing severe physical and mental pains. Not least, those doughty ‘Reflections against Death, & Poverty, & Shame & Pain’ which he had read in the works of the Stoics had the clean contrary effect on him, for they merely accentuated the fact that he was sick.

  Hume grew mentally disordered, but he was unwilling to believe his condition was purely in the head, for that would have implied a disturbing loss of self-control. His doctor was not deceived: ‘he laughed at me, & told me… I had fairly got the Disease of the Learned’. He was prescribed ‘a Course of Bitters, & Anti-hysteric Pills’, claret and riding. His nerves and spirits needed reinvigorating. During the next eighteen months, Hume's health went up and down. Still he wished to believe it was no mental or personality disorder, for that would have implied either madness or malingering. Yet he could not disguise that his condition had some psychic tinge. The best parallel to his condition, Hume noted, lay in the strange sicknesses of religious dévots. Painting a self-deprecating portrait of the philosopher as a young religious enthusiast, he can hardly have felt flattered by his fate.

  Arguably this acutely self-monitored mental breakdown was critical in shaping Hume's philosophical temper and credo. For it was living proof of the frailty of pure, isolated, abstract reason. Thinking could not divorce itself from sensation, and sensation was rooted in the body. Nervous collapse surely convinced Hume that his own special philosophical project – to delve into sensations to resolve the problem of identity – entailed the kind of morbid introspection that was ma
king him sick. Philosophy was autobiography.

  From his sickness Hume emerged a new breed of philosopher, in ways notably paralleled nearly a century later in the outcome of John Stuart Mill's nervous breakdown, which transformed a scientific utilitarian into a libertarian individualist. Those who wallowed in morbid introspection remained religious enthusiasts; understanding and overcoming the condition led to Humean philosophy. What pulled him out of his depression was not some religious illumination but ‘Nature herself’. By rejoining the world and regaining his sociability, he restored his mental equilibrium: ‘I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when… I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.’96 ‘Be a philosopher,’ he concluded; ‘but amidst all your philosophy be still a man.’97

  Once his Treatise had fallen ‘deadborn from the press’,98 Hume took to writing Spectatorial essays and history, not as an abandonment of philosophy but as its superior, modern expression. Reckoning that ‘Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten’,99 he set about burnishing his style and switched careers. After applying unsuccessfully in 1744 for the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, he settled in that city seven years later, where, with his new identity as a man of letters, he gained a reputation in literary circles for essays and for his History of Great Britain (1754–62). Appointed secretary to the British embassy in Paris in 1763, he turned into a prominent salon figure, befriending such philosophes as Diderot and d'Holbach, and he later served in London as an undersecretary of state before finally retiring to Edinburgh. The philosopher had successfully metamorphosed into a man of letters and man of affairs.100