by Roy Porter
In his vastly influential Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Hugh Blair approached the question of the thinker and his public from a further angle. What did readers of serious books want? Doubtless they hoped ‘for instruction, not for entertainment’, but readability must be a plus: ‘The same truths, and reasonings, delivered in a dry and cold manner, or with a proper measure of elegance and beauty, will make very different impressions on the minds of men.’ Indeed, Blair extolled ‘good Writing’. Particularly valuable were illustrations from history and the affairs of great men, ‘for they take Philosophy out of the abstract, and give weight to Speculation, by shewing its connection with real life, and the actions of mankind’.101
Moreover, it was now insisted, unlike its monkish ancestor, enlightened philosophy should and would be useful. Assuredly it was the ‘trade’ of the philosopher, noted Adam Smith, ‘not to do any thing, but to observe every thing’. However, even this art of observation must be use-oriented;102 the true philosopher was no armchair daydreamer – James Watt of steam-engine fame, for example, amply deserved the accolade.103 In the notion broached by Smith and others that Mr Spectator, alias the universal observer, was the model thinker, philosophy itself was redirected and revitalized: no metaphysical mystery exclusive to cloistered bookworms, it was to be that rational understanding of the real world which would drive the Enlightenment.104
Bearing out the Baconian dictum that knowledge is power, print proved the great engine for the spread of enlightened views and values (see chapter 15).105 Alongside chapbooks, prayer books, jest books and what have you, the presses spewed forth improving teach-yourself guides, educational treatises and advice manuals by the score, from gardening to gymnastics, carpentry to cookery – Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) even tailored recipes to servants, to save ‘the Ladies a great deal of Trouble’.106 The children's book was also born,107 and prints and picture books blossomed.108
Monumental reference works appeared, including Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755). John Harris's Lexicon Technicum (1704) was the first modern English encyclopaedia, weighted on the scientific and technical side.109 Inspired by Harris, Ephraim Chambers compiled a more comprehensive work, entitled Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, published in 1728 in two folio volumes, with plates, at four guineas. Chambers was to be honoured by election to the Royal Society of London and burial in Westminster Abbey.110 In 1778 the Dissenting minister Abraham Rees re-edited Chambers in four volumes – it appeared in 418 weekly numbers – and he later cranked out a further edition, before planning his Cyclopaedia, Or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences… Biography, Geography and History, a vast undertaking completed in 1819 in thirty-nine quarto volumes.111
Meanwhile, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had appeared, also in parts (the first appearing in 1768), at a cost of 6d. each on plain paper, with over a hundred parts in all. Its 2,670 quarto pages with 160 copperplate engravings cost just £12.112 Ten thousand copies were printed of the third edition (1787–97) – France, with three times the population of Britain, had a mere 4,500 subscribers for its Encyclopédie. All human knowledge was thus made readily available, for the first time, in English and within reach of middle-class pockets.113
Though far from every title flew under the ‘enlightened’ ensign – mountains of devotional literature were published – print became indelibly linked in the public mind with progress. And, through the printed word, a specifically national culture was crystallizing, aided by works that taught what every educated Briton should know, particularly about home-bred achievements. Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England, published from 1762, was the first history of English art; Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1774–81) complemented Dr Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779–81); Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, on matters of taste, came out between 1769 and 1791, while in music Sir John Hawkins's A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776) was counterpointed in the same year by Charles Burney's polished A General History of Music.114
Early in the century, Shaftesbury had protested that ‘the British Muses’ were ‘yet in their mere infant-state’.115 But critical and popular editions of British writers and biographical dictionaries of native worthies, like the Biographia Britannica (1747–66), allayed cultural anxieties and boosted national pride. Bardolatry boomed, especially after David Garrick's Shakespeare jubilee staged in 1769 at Stratford-upon-Avon. Anthologized in works of the ‘beauties of Shakespeare’ genre, the Bard became the national saint – chips of his chair were on sale as relics: ‘Shakespear,’ mused the playwright-scholar Arthur Murphy, ‘is a kind of established Religion in Poetry.’116 Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey became a tourist must; the trade cards of London booksellers fêted heroes like Shakespeare, Addison and Pope, alongside such philosophers and divines as Locke, Newton, Boyle, Clarke and Archbishop Tillotson; while a temple of British worthies, designed by the Viscount Cobham on his country estate at Stowe, sported busts of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Newton, Locke and Inigo Jones, amid the regulation generals and royals. Voltaire was impressed: ‘The English have so great a Veneration for exalted Talents, that a Man of Merit in their Country is always sure of making his Fortune. Mr Addison was rais'd to the Post of Secretary of State in England. Sir Isaac Newton was made Warden of the Royal Mint. Mr Congreve had a considerable Employment.’117 Writers and thinkers had become national assets.
‘Meantime, the pamphlets and half-sheets grow so upon our hands,’ groaned Swift in 1710, ‘it will very well employ a man every day from morning till night to read them.’ His solution? Never to open any!118 The doctor Thomas Beddoes was another who grumbled about the welter of print – all those endless pamphlets and periodicals befuddling the brain. ‘Did you see the papers today? Have you read the new play – the new poem – the new pamphlet – the last novel?’ – that was all you heard. ‘You cannot creditably frequent intelligent company, without being prepared to answer these questions, and the progeny that springs from them.’ The consequence? ‘You must needs hang your heavy head, and roll your bloodshot eyes over thousands of pages weekly. Of their contents at the week's end, you will know about as much as of a district, through which you have been whirled night and day in the mail-coach.’119 Yet that didn't sap his ardour for enlightenment, or still his quill.
Be they reactionaries like Swift or radicals like Beddoes, many feared truth was being buried in the avalanche of textual production. ‘It comes to pass, that Weekly Essays, amatory Plays and Novels, political Pamphlets, and books that revile Religion; together with a general Hash of these, served up in some Monthly Mess of Dulness,’ bewailed the Revd John Brown, ‘are the Meagre literary Diet of Town and Country.’120 Old fogeys feared what Johnson memorably and and approvingly called ‘a nation of readers’ – for his part, however, the lexicographer never doubted the benefits of literacy, even if he also muttered that ‘this teeming of the press in modern times… obliges us to read so much of what is of inferior value, in order to be in the fashion’.121
What made critical reactions to the diffusion of knowledge, and the culture industry sustaining it, so caustic was that this cornucopia of secular information, instant opinion and urbane values, purveyed by the Monthly Mess, was new and unprecedented. People seemed to be picking up beliefs from their reading like apples from a barrel. Moreover, amid the welter of essays, belles lettres and novels, life and letters seemingly mirrored each other in a looking-glass world – no accident, surely, that the prime Scottish periodical was actually titled the Mirror.122
It was a turning point. The print boom was bringing into being an intelligentsia, separate from (though overlapping with) the clergy, a ‘commonwealth of polite letters’ linked to the public at large via the publishing industry.123 Print technologies and surplus wealth were supporting cultural performers who became established as self-appointed tribunes of the people, sustained by infrastructures created by imp
resarios, critics and capitalists. The writer's status became irrevocably bound up with his relations to the public – indeed, his public relations – as he projected himself as the nation's eyes, ears and voice, a figure commanding public presence, notoriety even. The business of writing and the reading public were two sides of the coin of print capitalism.
Writers were, of course, confronted by the problem of how to train these raw cultural audiences, how to forge taste while affecting to follow it. Some did not hide their contempt: ‘the Vulgar’, alias ‘bipedal reptiles’, spat one, now expected respectful treatment as ‘the Public’.124 But if satirists disdained its supposed boorish ignorance, later authors tended to be more accepting of the public, recognizing that their fame depended on its applause. ‘The public is seldom wrong declared Gibbon;125 ‘I rejoice to concur with the common reader,’ Johnson tellingly commented, à propos Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard (1751).126 If such tributes involved a dollop of flattery, they also reflected the familiar, if fragile, relations in the Enlightenment between thinkers and the public.
5
RATIONALIZING RELIGION
The universal Disposition of this Age is bent upon a rational religion.
THOMAS SPRAT1
… before Christianity was entirely reasoned out of these kingdoms…
EDWARD MOORE2
What did God require of mankind, who could know His will, and by what means? These questions lay at the very heart of enlightened thinking.3 This must be kept in mind, if two errors are to be avoided. One is the assumption that it was an age of downright religious apathy, when ‘cassock'd huntsmen and fiddling priests' kept fine cellars and mistresses, congregations slumbered, the wits blasphemed, the Quality flouted the Commandments, and even grave Quakers turned gay. Hogarth's engravings, the diary of Parson Woodforde – a man devoted more to beef than to the Bible – Gibbon's damnation of the ‘fat slumbers of the Church’ and other familiar vignettes lend some credence to this caricature.4 An early Spectator paper insinuated that the value of Sunday church-going was essentially temporal, it being ‘the best method that could have been thought of for the polishing and civilizing of mankind’5 – and even this may not have worked, since congregations were dwindling.6 ‘The Church in Danger’ was the cry not only of iure divino High-flyers, and many bewailed the tide of ‘unbelief’: ‘no age, since the founding and forming the Christian Church,’ lamented Daniel Defoe in 1722, ‘was ever like, in open avowed atheism, blasphemies, and heresies, to the age we now live in’.7 No one in England believed any longer, quipped Montesquieu around the same time.8
Indifference and unbelief, however, if present, were far from the norm. Many, notably Nonconformists, staunchly upheld the austerities of their grandfathers. Weekly in church or chapel, the Protestant nation heard Bible religion preached from the pulpit, and indeed sang it, in what proved to be the golden age of English hymnody.9 Rigorism survived – high-profile divines still damned even the theatre: ‘a Player cannot be a living member of Christ,’ thundered William Law.10 Amongst prominent laymen, Samuel Johnson upheld eternal hellfire and believed the ‘quiver of Omnipotence’ was ‘stored with arrows’,11 while Jonas Hanway, rescuer of unfortunates and popularizer of the umbrella, insisted that ‘to learn how to die… is the great business of living’.12 If we imagine mass indifference, the polemics of Deists and the raillery of sceptics make no sense.13 Religion was still a burning issue, if now only in a metaphorical sense.
And what of the other canard, the view – the converse of the former – that the scoffers' attacks were but the paper darts of crankish nobodies? ‘Who, born within the last forty years,’ demanded Edmund Burke in 1790, ‘has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Free Thinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?’14 The Deist challenge associated with such figures, Burke blustered, had not just been seen off; it had been impotent in the first place. The English, in other words, did not even come near to producing that écrasez l'infâme warcry which typified their Continental cousins, and Christianity remained snug until the Victorian honest doubters and the Origin of Species.15
But that is also a simplistic view. Mary Wollstonecraft certainly did not share Burke's confidence. ‘It is the fashion now for young men to be deists,’ his feminist foe tut-tutted, ‘and many a one [have] improper books sent adrift in a sea of doubts.’16 In this, the pious Anglican, wary of ‘wandering reason’, was echoing churchmen's fears regarding the inroads made by free-thinking. ‘It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons,’ agonized Joseph Butler, later bishop of Durham, ‘that Christianity is… now at length discovered to be fictitious.’17
For all Burke's put-downs, the English Deists were novel, incisive and influential – Voltaire and other philosophes were deeply in their debt.18 And it was for quite other reasons that Bolingbroke and co. were less widely perused in Burke's day: by then their writings had done their work. Samuel Johnson once remarked of the Renaissance courtesy books that ‘if they are now less read’, it was ‘only because they have effected that reformation which their authors intended’;19 the same holds for Augustan Deism. Threats to a gentleman's privilege of being religious on his own terms – threats from High Churchmen, Non-jurors, Puritans and later from Methodists and other enthusiasts – had been resisted, had withered away or were becoming marginalized to a ‘lunatic fringe’.20 Legislation won toleration for Protestants; prorogued in 1717, Convocation did not thereafter meet for over a century, depriving the Church of its ‘parliament’; and the Church courts lost their bite. By 1800 courtly prelates of the lustre of a Laud were extinct, and no longer were there menacing clerical conspirators like Bishop Atterbury, dazzling demagogues like Henry Sacheverell or pulpit polemicists like Dean Swift.21 In important respects England had grown ‘laicized’,22 and the world the Deists and Mr Spectator had wanted, one secure against Popish and Puritan theocracy, had largely been realized.23
Indeed, ecclesiastics had been busily secularizing themselves, pursuing lives barely different from those of their neighbours: ‘A foreigner is surprised,’ observed the Swiss traveller de Saussure, ‘to find the clergy in public places, in taverns, and eating-houses, where they smoke and drink just like laymen; but, as they scandalize no one, you quickly get accustomed to this sight.’24 What made the name of many a leading Anglican divine was not divinity or devoutness but achievements in other spheres: William Derham and Gilbert White in science and natural history, Richard Bentley, William Warburton and Richard Hurd in scholarship, George Berkeley in philosophy, Thomas Percy and Lawrence Sterne in literature, Edward Young and George Crabbe in poetry, William Gilpin in aesthetics, Horne Tooke in philology and Thomas Robert Malthus in political economy, to say nothing of the hundreds of country parsons who dabbled in verse and antiquities or prosecuted poachers.25 Masquerading as a travelling Spaniard, Robert Southey contrasted religion Iberian and Anglican-style:
With us, every thing is calculated to remind us of religion. We cannot go abroad without seeing some representation of Purgatory, some cross which marks a station, an image of Mary the most pure, or a crucifix… There is nothing of all this in England. The clergy here are as little distinguished from the laity in their dress as in their lives. Here are no vespers to unite a whole kingdom at one time in one feeling of devotion; if the bells are heard, it is because bell-ringing is the popular music.26
Enlightened minds ceased to equate religion with a body of commandments, graven in stone, dispensed through Scripture, accepted on faith and policed by the Church. Belief was becoming a matter of private judgement, for individual reason to adjudicate within the multi-religionism sanctioned by statutory toleration. The Anglican Church, meanwhile, lost its monopolies over education and the enforcement of morals. As religion became subjected to reason, Christianity ceased to be a ‘given’ and became a matter of analysis and choice. And, for some, that meant scepticism or reject
ion.
As the seventeenth century drew to its close, one call was heard ever louder: religion and reason were one and must pull together. ‘There is nothing so intrinsically rational as religion is,’ Benjamin Whichcote had urged – and Locke concurred with that respected Cambridge Platonist.27 History showed why that alliance mattered, as it looked back in anger upon the wars of religion, be it Papists or Puritans who had commanded the ‘infallible artillery’.28 What the political nation sought was a rational religion, involving the destruction of idolatry and priestly power. Enlightenment in Britain took place within, rather than against, Protestantism.
Religion, held the enlightened, must be rational, as befitted the mind of God and the nature of man. Rejecting the bogeyman of a vengeful Jehovah blasting wicked sinners,29 enlightened divines instated a more optimistic (pelagian) theology, proclaiming the benevolence of the Supreme Being and man's capacity to fulfil his duties through his God-given faculties, the chief of these being reason, that candle of the Lord. The Creator should be seen less as Jahweh, the Lord of Hosts, than as a constitutional head of state. ‘God is a monarch,’ opined Viscount Bolingbroke, ‘yet not an arbitrary but a limited monarch’: His power was limited by His reason.30
As we have seen, Locke's epistemology had a place for revealed truth, which commanded ‘assent’ or faith.31 Reason for its part could validate the existence of the Father of Light, verify the Bible as revelation and back the basics: Christ was the Messiah, the sole tenet upon which the disciples had insisted – not for them any Thirty-nine Articles, Westminster Confession or even Athanasian Creed. Beyond that, how could man fathom omniscience?32
Here lay the prospect of a creed, adapted to ‘labouring and illiterate men’, and free of those sophistries with which ‘wranglers in religion have filled it’, as though the stairway to heaven wound through the ‘academy’. Scripture, Locke held, was simple, ‘to be understood in the plain, direct meaning of the words and phrases’.33 Revealed in Scripture and Nature, God's will must be divined through use of the understanding, for