Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Many domains underwent what, from a twentieth-century viewpoint, has been called the ‘taming of chance’, though it might less anachronistically be deemed the denial or distancing of the transcendental.17 That was exemplified in the rise of social scientific frames of thinking – the belief that social happenings should be explicable in terms of impersonal, universal law, expressed within the categories of such emergent disciplines as political economy, anthropology, sociology, psychology and demography.18 All this went with myriad slight, but cumulatively significant, day-to-day indications that polite and propertied society, afflicted by adversity or the unknown, was growing less disposed to look to the Hand of God, and certainly not to the wiles of Satan. Whilst the environment remained hazardous, unsafe and disease-ravaged, risk might now be managed through superior information – about epidemics, prices, crises, wars or weather trends – purveyed by the press, and also through practical agencies like banks, annuities, firepumps, smallpox inoculation and casualty admission in hospitals.19 Life and fire insurance expanded: John Byng noted in the 1790s that even waggons could be seen emblazoned with the Phoenix Insurance emblem, ‘which is a novel safeguard, many having taken fire’.20 Faced with a household rat problem, the Restoration astrologer Elias Ashmole had tried talismans to ward them off; by the next century professional ratcatchers were advertising their services in the papers. The staging of public lotteries – their philosophy of luck seemingly at odds with Providentialism – symbolizes this more secular bent.21 Meanwhile, much else that was time-hallowed was now being questioned as superstitious, irrational or primitive, as for instance duelling and the aristocratic honour code at large.22

  Enlightened thinking challenged attitudes to body and health, confronting custom with reason and the spiritual with the secular. Addressing childbirth, progressive doctors urged that the episcopally licensed ‘ignorant’ midwives be abandoned in favour of medically trained male obstetricians, who, expert in anatomy, would for the most part leave parturition to wise and gentle Nature or in emergencies use the newly invented forceps.23 Once safely delivered, babies should no longer be subjected to swaddling – another symbolical mode of confinement! – but be allowed to romp freely and, as Nature intended, be breast-not artificially fed, and suckled not by wetnurses but by their own mothers.24 Toddlers should not be mollycoddled but encouraged to exercise freely in fresh air, so as to harden and grow up strong. Reason, nature and health were thus said to go hand in hand, and superstition would wither under science's sunlight. This new ‘childbirth package’ gained credence because it chimed with polite and progressive opinion: the appeal to modern science, to reason, to the blandishments of the ‘natural’, to familial affection. The switch from ‘peasant’ midwife to graduate accoucheur, from ‘custom’ (wetnursing) to ‘Nature’ (the maternal breast), from ‘superstition’ (swaddling as a support for weak bones) to ‘science’ (activity promotes sturdiness) – all harmonized with the dream of escape from ignorance into information, from the prejudiced past into the brave new future. Indeed, the switch from the dim, closed birthing-room into birth by daylight aptly captures the essence of ‘enlightenment’.25

  Given due attention to bodily health, why, speculated Dr Erasmus Darwin and others, should lifespans not be prolonged? And if death must finally supervene, advanced thinkers wanted it shorn of the traditional horrors of hellfire. Christianity had traditionally portrayed death as the threshold to futurity. To the Catholic the final dispensing of grace was paramount: a good man who died without the sacraments (for example, by not confessing his sins) might be consigned to Hell, the sinner who received them, saved. The Protestant with his non-sacerdotal strategy was instructed to meet his Maker with conscious fortitude. Regarded primarily as a religious event, the Christian deathbed had thus staged high drama, and the ars moriendi (art of dying) scripted the conquest of Death, to prove it held no terrors. Of course, it did; and abundant records attest the intractable fears entertained by Christians such as Samuel Johnson and James Boswell of what the Beyond might hold, be it oblivion or the abyss (Johnson, for one, feared eternal damnation).

  Combating such morbidity, the enlightened sought to demystify death by promoting frankness towards physical annihilation.26 Central to this, for rational Christians, Deists, sceptics and atheists alike, was an onslaught upon the theology of eternal punishment, that perverted fiction of priestcraft designed to terrorize the credulous and so maximize ecclesiastical power and profit. The enlightened also commended dignity at the end, tempting Christians to haunt the deathbeds of pagans, in hopes of last-minute conversion or signs of chinks in their stoical composure. Imposing himself on the dying Hume, the anxious James Boswell was scandalized by the unbeliever's departing ‘easy’.27 There was, broadly speaking, a move away from the pious ‘good death’ scripted by the old ars moriendi, in which the dying person called upon God and denounced the Devil, towards the ideal of a peaceful passing, aided, if need be, by the opiates newly at the doctor's disposal.28

  Some accepted oblivion (‘After Death, nothing is,’ opined Rochester),29 and notions of the afterlife itself were also changing.30 In his Lockean The Light of Nature Pursued (1768), Abraham Tucker accepted that the melancholy appearance of a lifeless body was shocking; but ‘it is to the imagination only, not the understanding; for whoever consults this faculty will see at first glance, that there is nothing dismal in all these circumstances’. To learn how to die peacefully, it was necessary, he reasoned, to conquer the nightmarish phantasms associated with funerary rituals, and the attendant palaver of Hell, damnation and demons.31

  Secularization also infiltrated the social rituals surrounding death. Testamentary references to God were being pared down to formal preambles; the typical English will came to serve almost exclusively as an instrument for transmitting property within the family; and the elaborate funeral sermon was giving way to the obituary notice in the press.32

  And what about the lower orders? Was their living and dying to remain a matter of prayer, popular nostrums and Providence? Education in popular health became a crusade waged by progressive doctors. First published in 1769, and often reprinted, William Buchan's Domestic Medicine expounded to the common reader an enlightened philosophy of health to be pursued through reason, temperance, hygiene and heeding Nature's laws. The sick no longer needed to abandon themselves to their fate: knowledge and skill would save lives.33 Committed to ‘rendering medicine more extensively beneficial to mankind’, the Edinburgh-trained Buchan embraced a democratic, late Enlightenment medical populism. If the people were ignorant about illness, it was because ‘physic is still engrossed by the faculty’. For far too long physicians had made medicine a mystery, a closed shop using a dead tongue and serving the sordid greed of those who would ‘make a trade of it’. Popery had spawned priestcraft; seeking likewise to ‘disguise and conceal the art’, physicians had set up doctorcraft.34

  ‘While men are kept in the dark, and told that they are not to use their own understanding in matters that concern their health,’ explained Buchan, drawing on familiar, telltale metaphors, ‘they will be the dupes of designing knaves.’ Monopoly perpetuated ignorance. Quoting Benjamin Rush, the top American physician and one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence, Buchan later waxed indignant that doctors had for so long exercised a ‘monopoly over many artificial remedies’. But ‘a new order of things is rising in medicine too, as well as in government’. The modern age thus demanded the democratization of medicine, and that meant freedom of information. ‘It is no more necessary,’ he explained, ‘that a patient should be ignorant of the medicine he takes to be cured by it, than that the business of government should be conducted with secrecy in order to insure obedience to just laws.’35

  So what future did he envision? Most disorders and accidents, Buchan insisted, could be self-treated: from diarrhoea to dislocated necks, few bedside problems lay beyond a sensible layman or woman – one simply needed to avoid silly folk saws and professional mystificati
ons. Buchan thus scolded the

  horrid custom immediately to consign over to death every person who has the misfortune by a fall, or the like, to be deprived of the appearance of life. The unhappy person, instead of being carried into a warm house, and laid by the fire, or put in a warm bed, is generally hurried away to a church, or barn, or some other cold damp house, where, after a fruitless attempt has been made to bleed him… he is given over for dead, and no further notice taken of him.

  Such fatal folly was the result of ‘ignorance’, ‘supported by an ancient superstitious notion, which forbids the body of any person supposed to be killed by an accident to be laid in an house that is inhabited’ – views ‘contrary to all the principles of reason, humanity and common sense’.36

  Buchan's book fanfared the ideal of medicine for the people, by the people.37 Yet with health, as with everything else, enlightened thinking was not of a piece. Even doctors wedded to Buchan's impeccably liberal politics did not necessarily share his faith in a people's medicine; for, like a pilotless ship, self-medication could be perilous.

  One radical physician confronting this dilemma was Thomas Beddoes, already mentioned in chapter 6. A Midlands tanner's son, Beddoes was so ardent in his support for the French Revolution that in 1793 he was effectively drummed out of his position as reader in chemistry at Oxford University. Retiring to private practice in the Bristol suburb of Clifton, where he opened his Pneumatic Institution in 1799, Beddoes hoped to cure tuberculosis by means of the newly discovered oxygen and nitrous oxide (laughing gas). While also writing anti-Pitt diatribes and health care manuals for the well-to-do, Beddoes produced medical tracts targeted at the lower orders, whose vulgar errors irked him. Education was the answer – people had to ‘unlearn’ their mistakes, and not meddle. Lay physic was bad physic and therapeutics should be left to the trained.38

  In touting this medical variant of enlightened absolutism, Beddoes was departing from Buchan's dictum that medicine could be a plain art open to all. Popular ignorance must indeed end, but what the people must know was not medicine but healthy living, based on good diet, exercise and moderation. Above all, he wished to apply ‘physiological knowledge to domestic use’. In line with the sense-based pedagogics championed by Locke, Rousseau and Beddoes's own father-in-law, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a start should be made by ‘teaching children accurately to distinguish the parts of the body’.39

  Buchan, Beddoes and other progressive physicians criticized the status quo in society and medicine alike, bludgeoning vested interests for conniving in ignorance and holding that injustice and oppression undermined the people's health. Beddoes accused Pitt's high-tax, inflationary and warmongering policies of impoverishing labourers, and denounced medicine as a ‘sick trade’ perverted by fortunes and fashion. Medicine thus affords a clear-cut case, one among many, of the practical application of enlightened thinking, confirming that it was not mere vacuous coffee house chatter but an action philosophy.40

  Health management finds parallels in attempts to regulate other domains: irregularity was Jeremy Bentham's bête noire and the rationalization of the legal and administrative systems his raison d'être. The ‘lottery of the law’ made crime and punishment scandalously arbitrary, the pillory being a mere ‘game of chance’.41 Reformers particularly aimed to end that absurd confusion of ferocity and leniency displayed by the Bench which negated all hopes of deterrence.42 In a similar vein, Bentham also protested against the absurdities of the Poor Law, where ‘in a cluster of small pauper establishments, straggling over England, dispersed and unconnected… all is opacity and obscurity’. Likewise, addressing local administration, he groaned that ‘every thing is insulated, every thing is particular; every thing is out of reach, every thing is out of knowledge: and while every thing is growing worse and worse, every thing is out of the reach of cure’. Muddle must yield to method.43

  Other anomalies and abuses became targets for streamlining and rationalization. Calendar reform was introduced when England (finally) went over to the Gregorian system in 1753;44 English replaced Norman French as the language of the law;45 and cricket received its rules in 1744, while the next year saw the appearance of Edmund Hoyle's immortal The Polite Gamester, Containing Short Treatises on the Games of Whist, Quadrille, Backgammon and Chess.

  Language reform had its advocates. Amid xenophobic braying against the invasions of Gallic neologisms, proposals were published for academies to standardize and monitor English,46 the Gentleman's Magazine urging that ‘a proper person or committee be appointed, to ascertain all such words as are wanting in our language, to convey clearly and precisely such ideas as naturally arise in the mind of every man’.47 In the preface to his Dictionary (1754), Samuel Johnson urged that regularity should finally be brought to the English tongue – that language ‘copious without order, energetick without rules’ – although, like Ephraim Chambers, he rejected French-style academies as dictatorial.48 Often reprinted, Joseph Priestley's The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761) simplified grammar – and chastised David Hume for his Frenchified style; while John Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary of English (1774) provided ‘rules to be observed by the natives of Scotland, Ireland, and London, for avoiding their respective peculiarities’ – the corrective agenda being as ever politically loaded.49 Describing English as the third and superior ‘classical’ language, the Irish Thomas Sheridan argued in his British Education: or the Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (1756) for making Britain's literary heritage the basis for modern polite instruction:

  as models of style, Milton in the poetic, and Shakespeare in the dramatic, Swift, Addison, Dryden, and Sir William Temple… in prose, may be considered as truly classical, as the Virgil, Caesar, Tully, and Sallust of the Romans; nor is there any reason that they should not be handed down as such equally to the end of time.50

  Nor did the applied arts escape the systematizers. In 1728 Batty Langley published New Principles of Gardening (1728), followed in 1747 by his, at first blush, paradoxical Gothic Architecture, Improved by Rules and Proportions (Georgian gothic was regularly irregular). Even William Hogarth, that bulldog champion of English liberties against foreign tyranny, expected his The Analysis of Beauty (1753) to fix ‘the fluctuating ideas of Taste’.51 Such projects for ordering and regularizing typically, however, met with scant success, as Bentham's chequered career makes so clear. Quite apart from those intent upon leaving well alone, enlightened counterarguments championed English ‘freedom’ over Continental centralization – a prejudice which stalled proposals to conduct a national census and which was to run and run under the Podsnapian Victorians.52

  In certain domains the eighteenth century brought remarkable secularization in perceptions and practice alike. Take madness. Before the Restoration, insanity was commonly read as a spiritual condition, be it demonic possession or divine genius. In medical writings after 1660, however, the idea that lunacy could be an affliction of the soul, and thus genuinely endanger salvation, ceased to be admissible – that was too close to the demonologists' dogmas for comfort. Physicians instead assigned lunacy to some or other somatic ailment: ‘Every change of the Mind’, maintained Dr Nicholas Robinson (not coincidentally, an ardent Newtonian), ‘therefore, indicates a Change in the Bodily Organs’ – the presumption being that, if an organic pathology were diagnosed, the immortal soul automatically escaped aspersions of impairment, while the authenticity of the malady was also reassuringly confirmed. It was no mere matter of ‘imaginary Whims and Fancies’ – that too would have been stigmatizing – precisely because, as Robinson insisted, it arose from ‘the real, mechanical Affections of Matter and Motion’.53

  Partly because madness had been regarded as integral to man's lapsarian condition, hardly any specialist institutions for the insane had been endowed. In almost the only exception, London's Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam), inmates had often been chained and neglected, and hidebound therapeutics of blood-lettings and emetics long remained the staple treatments. Its doors open to gawp
ing sightseers, Bethlem was a satirist's delight.54

  All this changed. With enlightened physicians discarding demonological in favour of disease models, lunatics were declared sick, not possessed, and therefore amenable to treatment and cure. For this the right environment was needed – that is, asylums, preferably in rural surroundings, far from the madding crowd. Private and charitable madhouses sprang up, while Bethlem ended public visiting around 1770. From about then, recourse to sedation or mechanical restraint was, in its turn, challenged by new techniques of interpersonal management. Authentically psychological illnesses became conceivable for, with the secularization of psychology (see chapter 7), it became possible to speak of a ‘disordered understanding’ without the insinuation of diabolical possession of the immortal soul. By 1798, the specialist mad-doctor Alexander Crichton could evoke the heritage of ‘our British Psychologists’, that is, Locke, Hartley, Reid, Stewart, Priestley and Kames.55 Neo-Lockean theories professed to show how insanity could be read as the outcome of personal tragedy – for instance, loss, grief or unrequited love. Educated in Lockean Cambridge, Dr William Battie regarded all madness as ‘deluded imagination’,56 a notion which flowed, of course, from Locke's doctrine of the (mis) association of ideas. For Thomas Arnold, Lockean psychiatrist and Leicester madhouse-keeper, ‘the imagination is too active when it is for ever busily employed’.57