Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  A prime promoter of the enlightened alliance of science, utility and philanthropy under the banner of improvement was the Quaker John Coakley Lettsom.68 Born in 1744 in the West Indies, where his father was a plantation owner, Lettsom was sent to England for his education, studying medicine in London and Edinburgh. On his father's death in 1767, he returned to the Caribbean as heir to the family estates. There he performed a deed both pious and enlightened: ‘The moment I came of age,’ he later recalled, ‘I found my chief property was in slaves, and without considering of future support, I gave them freedom, and began the world without fortune, without a friend.’69

  Setting up in medical practice in London, Lettsom proved highly successful. In 1782, he noted that ‘sometimes for the space of a week, I cannot command twenty minutes' leisure in my own house’.70 Acquiring many prominent patients, including Lord Shelburne, patron of Priestley and Bentham, his busy practice made him wealthy – by 1800, his earnings amounted to a princely £2,000 annually. Prosperity underwrote philanthropy – ‘who will thank us for dying rich!’71 Indefatigably charitable, Lettsom was a founder of several forward-looking institutions. In 1770, he launched the General Dispensary in Aldersgate Street, the first of its kind, and became one of its physicians. This provided free outpatient treatment to the poor through a resident apothecary, and inaugurated domiciliary visiting. In 1774 he assisted in founding the (Royal) Humane Society, to pioneer techniques and publicize the practice of resuscitating the drowned; he was the driving force behind the Royal Sea Bathing Infirmary at Margate (1791), a convalescent home for the tubercular; and he also helped found the Medical Society of London (1773), whose very Addisonian aim was to unite improvement and conviviality.

  Building a house in suburban Camberwell, Lettsom there laid out a fortune on a museum, library and botanical garden. Like other enlightened Quakers, he valued sociability and the exchange of knowledge, keeping up a correspondence with (among others) George Washington, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin and Albrecht von Haller. Despite his Quaker pacifism, Lettsom became physician to the Camberwell Volunteer Infantry in 1803, declaring, ‘May I fall by the sword rather than live to see this free country the domain of a Corsican murderer and usurper!’72

  Lettsom enthused over useful knowledge, scientific experimentation, medical advance and moral improvement; a tireless writer, he produced pamphlets against drunkenness, while his The Natural History of the Tea Tree with Observations on its Medical Qualities, and Effects of Tea-Drinking (1772) exposed the evils of that pernicious habit. Among a plethora of projects, he was an advocate of soup kitchens for the poor, and his passion for education led him to write on the management of boarding schools, giving advice as to games, diet, attire and cleanliness. This busy bee also fittingly directed attention to beehives, ‘as appendages both of ornament and utility to the gardens about the metropolis’: within twenty miles of London, up to 50,000 hives might be maintained, enriching the nation by a guinea per hive per annum.

  In 1801 Lettsom collected his improving ideas into the 3-volume Hints Designed to Promote Beneficence, Temperance, and Medical Science, which gave instruction on such varied subjects as poverty, discharged prisoners, prostitution, infectious fevers, a Samaritan society, crimes and punishments, wills and testaments, lying-in charities, the deaf and dumb, village societies, the blind, a society for promoting useful literature, religious persecution, Sunday schools, the Philanthropic Society, dispensaries, hydrophobia, sea-bathing infirmaries, and ‘A Substitute for Wheat Bread’ – Indian corn made a thrifty porridge. It all amounted to a veritable enlightenment omnium gatherum.

  If piqued at his exclusion, as a Quaker, from the fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians, Lettsom was a passionate champion of science and his own profession. He waged newspaper wars against quacks, became an early advocate of smallpox vaccination and also championed John Howard, the hospital and prison reformer.

  As well as botany, fossils, medicine and natural history, Lettsom was an enthusiast for scientific agriculture, playing a part in the introduction into Britain of the mangelwurzel. All such scientific and philanthropic activities were the more remarkable, because, like his physician contemporary Erasmus Darwin, his works tended to be written in his carriage while scurrying about to see his patients. Like others featured in later chapters – Darwin himself, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Joseph Priestley, for instance – Lettsom exemplifies the ardent promotion of practical, science-based improvement by enlightened Englishmen.

  A contemporary of Lettsom who, in a crammed career, united science, improvement and utility on a more elevated plane within the Establishment was Sir Joseph Banks.73 Born to wealth, young Banks drifted from Eton to Oxford without apparent intellectual passions, but there he became fascinated by botany and, finding that the professor did not lecture, he imported a substitute from Cambridge, out of his own pocket.

  Inheriting broad Lincolnshire acres, Banks built himself a mansion in Soho Square which he turned into a salon, club, library and natural history museum – his curator, Dr Daniel Solander, one of Linnaeus's protégés, presided over a great and growing collection of botanical specimens. A mutual interest in agriculture won Banks the friendship of George III, who made him Keeper of the Royal Gardens at Kew. Every inch an Englishman – stout country squire, farmer, fisherman, sheriff of Lincolnshire and gout-sufferer – Banks was no less an enlightened cosmopolite. During the forty-two years he presided, ever more autocratically, over the Royal Society, disbursing hospitality and patronage, he combined internationalism with an ardent patriotism. Anticipating Jenner's dictum that ‘the sciences are never at war’, he conferred upon Benjamin Franklin the Royal Society's gold medal for his zeal in protecting Captain Cook during the American War of Independence; and in the French wars he intervened to save beleaguered savants, rescuing the geologist Dolomieu from a Naples dungeon.

  Banks's long career throbbed with activity on behalf of science, which he valued as progressive knowledge and a national asset. While still a young man he explored Newfoundland and Labrador and botanized in Iceland; he visited Fingal's Cave in the Hebrides, reciting Ossian before recording its dimensions; and he sailed with Cook in 1769 to the South Seas, on one of the first great international scientific enterprises, to observe the transit of Venus, and brought home 17,000 new plants to stock his bulging Soho Square cabinet.

  Banks promoted Botany Bay – named after his own passion – as an ideal site for a convict colony, and thereafter proved a booster and benefactor to New South Wales. He experimented with Spanish merino sheep to improve the breeds sent to Australia, got Captain Bligh to export the breadfruit tree from Polynesia to the Caribbean and imported mangoes from Bengal. As patron of the African Society, he helped send John Ledyard up the Nile, and Mungo Park up the Niger. High-minded if self-important, adventurous yet autocratic, a man with a deep sense of social responsibility but scarcely a trace of Christian piety, for half a century Banks devoted his wealth to advancing science, learning and wealth creation – an awfully English philosophe.

  Science's growing prestige broadened horizons and bred hope: all was open to inquiry, measurement and analysis. Apparatus would do its bit: telescopes, microscopes, barometers, thermometers, hydrometers, theodolites, pumps and prisms – such technical devices were the auxiliaries of a new science which was not about vain and vaporous lucubrations but the busy, hands-on probing of Nature. Every month the Gentleman's Magazine reported daily barometric pressure, temperature and the bills of mortality for the City of London, all neatly tabulated, just like stocks and shares. Science had ‘too long made only a work of the Brain and the Fancy’, Robert Hooke had conceded in his Micrographia (1665); ‘it is now high time that it should return to the plainness and soundness of Observations on material and obvious things’.74 True scientific method was to ‘begin with the Hands and Eyes, and to proceed on through the Memory, to be continued by the Reason; nor is it to stop there, but to come about to the Hands and Eyes again, an
d so, by a continual passage round from one Faculty to another’.75 Adopt this method, and what indeed could bind Prometheus?

  Probabilistic thinking to some extent replaced Providence,76 while the conviction grew that social no less than natural events were fundamentally governed by natural law – and hence were in principle amenable to scientific enumeration, explanation and control. ‘No Laws can set Prices in Trade,’ declared Sir Dudley North in his Discourses Upon Trade (1691), ‘the rates of which, must and will make themselves’: commerce was subject to underlying regularities, and prices, like water, would find their own level.77

  The psychological and aesthetic dynamics of fathoming Nature were pondered by Adam Smith in a long meditation on the history of astronomy. Addressing Plato's point that philosophy begins in wonder, he proposed that it was the mind's uneasiness with the strange which provided the driving force for attempts to eliminate perplexity through theories, models and formulae. He accentuated the psychological side of science – it began with unease at the unexpected, and would, it was hoped, be followed by relief upon assimilating irregularities into the familiar. A scientific theory gave satisfaction when it overcame disquiet at anomalies.

  That was not, however, the only reason for the intellectual dissatisfaction which propelled scientific theorizing: a good explanation must be clear, coherent and easy to grasp. When, in a valiant attempt to accommodate all the observed phenomena, a theory (Smith instanced Ptolemaic astronomy) grew over-intricate and unwieldy, disaffection would set in, and a new and simpler model would be needed (in this case, Copernican heliocentrism). ‘Philosophy is the science of the connecting principles of nature,’ he summarized, in a formulation reminiscent of Hume.

  Nature, after the largest experience that common observation can acquire, seems to abound with events which appear solitary and incoherent with all that go before them, which therefore disturb the easy movement of the imagination; which makes its ideas succeed each other, if one may say so, by irregular starts and sallies; and which thus tend, in some measure to introduce… confusions and distractions… Philosophy, by representing the invisible chains which bind together all those disjointed objects, endeavours to introduce order into this chaos of jarring and discordant appearances.78

  The savage mind thus encountered disorder everywhere, and the progress of science was the quest for regularity. Uniformity and order were the desiderata of the striving, restless progressive mind, at least as much as they were present in Nature. Smith thus wove the rise of science into that wider evolutionary history of the human mind advanced in the conjectural histories of civilization discussed below in chapter 10. A confidant of Hume and, like him, no Christian, Smith acclaimed science as ‘the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition’.79

  As well as thus discrediting ‘superstition’, Newtonianism served enlightened goals by demarcating ‘true’ sciences from the ‘pseudo’ – those which were ‘occult’, ‘magical’ and ‘vulgar’. This happened conspicuously in the discrediting of astrology.80 Throughout the Renaissance, that ancient art had remained integral to a shared, indeed dominant culture, acceptable to courtiers, clergy and country folk alike, which peaked in England around 1650 with the work of the adepts William Lilly and his great rival, the royalist John Gadbury, both of whom enjoyed national followings.81 After the Restoration, however, educated sympathies cooled decisively. The triumph of the new science contributed much to this rejection. Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology had posited correspondences between macrocosm and the microcosm, the celestial spheres and mankind. But if, as the new astronomy revealed, the heavens were neither perfect nor unchanging, the Earth was but a paltry planet in an infinite universe and the cosmos was governed by mechanical second causes, then astrology had many questions to answer.

  The disavowal of astrology was also, however, a socio-cultural reaction. The art had been indelibly tainted during the Civil War by plebeian radicalism and wild republican prophesyings, leaving it vulnerable to attack as treacherous and vulgar. By 1700 such fellows of the Royal Society who had been sympathetic to astrology – John Aubrey, for instance – were all dead, and no top-flight metropolitans stepped into their shoes.

  Though its appeal waned amongst the enlightened, however, the art retained a popular following. Provincial adepts continued to practise, albeit on the margins. Like other manifestations of the occult – palmistry or physiognomy, for instance – astrology was not killed off by science; rather, it found new niches in a modulating cultural environment.82 Almanac sales held up, but their profile changed. Many became more ‘rational’, some early eighteenth-century productions shedding prophecies altogether; other compilers repudiated judicial astrology, one, Richard Saunders, feeding the reader with ‘A Discourse on the Invalidity of Astrology’. Openly hostile, his almanac derided astrology's want of scientific foundations, mocking Lilly, Gadbury and the ‘frightful stuff’ put out by the self-promoting Whig zealot John Partridge.83

  As Shaftesbury would have been pleased to find, ridicule worked. Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire (1697) mocked astrology as puerile – he did not even trouble readers with formal disproofs! Such dismissiveness was infectious. In his ‘Predictions for the Year 1708’, Jonathan Swift, writing under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, lampooned the political predictions of the old astrologers, his chief target being again John Partridge. ‘Bickerstaff’ foretold that Partridge would die of a fever at 11 p.m. on 29 March 1708 – followed by Louis XIV on 29 July, and the Pope six weeks later. A solemn account duly appeared of Partridge's predestined demise. The hapless astrologer tried to prove his continued existence, but his posthumous protestations proved futile. Among the élite, astrology had been reduced to a joke.84

  Earnest popular educators, for their part, were of the view that it was not ridicule but the march of the mind which would finally see off the footling art. Over a century after Swift's lampoon, The British Almanac for 1828, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, while providing a wealth of terrestrial and celestial data, was quite astrology-free. ‘From that hour,’ it was piously declared, ‘the empire of astrology was at an end.’ Like Partridge's, this obituary also proved wildly premature.85

  Other practices underwent similar revamping. From the late seventeenth century, fortune-telling, dowsing, palmistry, metoposcopy, physiognomy and similar arcana lost credence among the élite, while continuing to be practised up and down the country by amateurs. Top people likewise distanced themselves from old magical medicine, including the botanical lore of emblems and correspondences; after Queen Anne, British monarchs stopped touching for the King's Evil (in France the Bourbons touched on until 1830).86 Ancient wisdom lost its legitimacy as a scientific posture muscled in. ‘I could write a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written,’ boasted Samuel Johnson; ‘it should be a book upon philosophical principles.’87

  Science's key contribution to enlightened thinking lay in its underwriting belief in intellectual advance and its staking a claim to be the gold standard of positive knowledge. There were innumerable progress stories along these lines. Thus Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1738) traced the birth of the healing arts with Hippocrates and their corruption by the medievals:

  At length, however, they [Galen's errors] were purged out and exploded by two different means; principally indeed by the restoration of the pure discipline of Hippocrates in France; and then also by the experiments and discoveries of alchymists and anatomists; till at length the immortal Harvey overturning, by his demonstrations, the whole theory of the antients, laid a new and certain basis of the science. Since his time, Medicine is become free from the tyranny of any sect, and is improved by sure discoveries in anatomy, chymistry, physics, botany, mechanics &c.88

  Sketch after sketch of medicine's progress elaborated such conclusions. Looking back over the previous two thousand years in his Strictures on the Gout (1775), the medical writer Samuel Wood chided the ‘unenlightened state of the ancient Practitioners’, w
ith whom ‘all was mere conjecture’. ‘There could be no Physiology at all,’ he insisted, ‘before our immortal Hervey's Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood’; but ‘since these lights have shone in upon us, all the ancient conjectures, reasonings, and systems, must vanish like morning clouds before the sun’.89 All told, Wood insisted, it is ‘evident we have greatly the advantage of our ancestors’, and theoretical advances had borne practical fruit: ‘we now see many diseases cured with facility, with which the afflicted of those days bore, and closed a wretched existence’. In a recital of enlightened platitudes, he looked forward with confidence to the conquest of diseases long held incurable, including his personal speciality, gout.

  Expectations of brilliant breakthroughs also coloured the more grandiose medical dreams of Thomas Beddoes, chemist, physician, researcher, educator, poet, pamphleteer – indeed, ‘Mr Late Enlightenment’ incarnate. An ardent experimentalist, Beddoes saluted the French revolution in chemistry no less than in politics.90 Looking to science to produce transformations in health, he read history as a tale of progress: while equivocal about the Ancients – he criticized Plato's ‘mystic passages’ – and dismissive of the Dark Ages as a fog of priestly superstition, he hailed the achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as beyond praise.91

  Touting the applicability of the new gas chemistry to respiratory disorders, Beddoes predicted in 1793 that ‘from chemistry, which is daily unfolding the profoundest secrets of nature’, hopes could be entertained for ‘a safe and efficacious remedy for one of the most frequent painful and hopeless of diseases’, that is, consumption (tuberculosis). Inspired by late Enlightenment perfectibilism, he foresaw that ‘however remote medicine may at present be from such perfection’, there was no reason to doubt that ‘the same power will be acquired over living, as is at present exercised over some inanimate bodies, and that not only the cure and prevention of diseases, but the art of protracting the fairest season of life and rendering health more vigorous will one day half realize half the dream of Alchemy’.92 Chemistry thus portended a medical millennium. ‘In a future letter,’ he informed his Lunar Society friend Erasmus Darwin,