Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
Page 27
And once madness was no longer attributed to supernatural powers, unbelievers like Dr Erasmus Darwin could switch the blame for mass hysteria and religious melancholy to fanatics and Methodists, and cast enthusiasm as itself a symptom of mental derangement. No longer did the Devil drive you insane: now believing in the Devil or in hellfire was, for physicians like him, a mark of madness.58
In these circumstances, ‘moral therapy’ became the magic word: the mad, like everyone else, were to be treated with reason, calmness and good example. Visiting the prestigious York Retreat, opened in 1796, Louis Simond found it ‘admirably’ managed, ‘almost entirely by reason and kindness: it was instituted by Quakers. Most of the patients move about at liberty, without noise and disorder.’59 In the case of insanity, enlightened thinkers thus plumed themselves that benighted religious explanations, and the neglect and cruelty supposedly accompanying them, were being supplanted by reason and humanity. It is noteworthy that the York Retreat, though run by Quakers for Quakers, employed exclusively secular therapies.
Changing responses to suicide afford marked parallels.60 In Christendom ‘self-murder’ had been both a sin and a crime, an offence against God and King, the business of courts ecclesiastical and civil. Since Tudor times juries had routinely returned verdicts of felo de se (wilful self-murder), imposing severe posthumous punishments: the suicide was denied Christian burial, the corpse being interred at a crossroads, a stake through the heart; and the felon's property was forfeited to the Crown. This cruel treatment expressed Protestant theological rigorism – suicide as a wilful mutiny against God – while also marking the tenacious assertion of royal rights under the new monarchy. Puritanism redoubled the punitiveness.
As in so many other walks of life, the Restoration brought a transformation. It soon become standard for coroners' courts to reach a non compos mentis verdict, whether or not there was any real history or independent sign of mental instability in the victim: was not suicide itself sufficient proof of derangement? This ‘medicalization’ or ‘psychologization’ of self-destruction sanctioned a church-yard burial and put a stop to the escheat of the victim's possessions – a notable assertion of community will against the Crown at the very moment when Locke was affirming against Filmer the natural right to property.
Shifting philosophies of the self, in any case, led the élite to commend ‘Antique Roman’ apologies for suicide as noble-minded. On 4 May 1737, having filled his pockets with rocks, Eustace Budgell, a one-time contributor to the Spectator, drowned himself in the Thames. Found on his desk was a suicide note: ‘What Cato did, and Addison approved, cannot be wrong.’61 David Hume and others offered enlightened defences of suicide.62 While fashionable society condoned the deed, holding that death was preferable to dishonour, enlightened opinion, eager to outflank bigotry, abandoned punitiveness for pity. The poet Thomas Chatterton, who poisoned himself in 1770 at the age of seventeen, provided the role model for the Romantic suicide cult.63
These changes – which made Britain notorious as the suicide capital of the world – in many ways bear out historian Keith Thomas's account first of the intensification of Christian Providentialism in the Reformation century, and then its later withering under a Weberian Entzauberung, prompted by the laser beams of science and rationalism.64 But they offer no support to another popular reading of early Modern cultural history, the one which posits a growing post-Restoration chasm between élite and popular culture. High and low alike, the various post-1660 suicide scenarios followed parallel courses. Public responses to patrician rakes who blew their brains out were not dissimilar to those towards big-bellied milkmaids who disappeared in duckponds (the two events might not be unrelated): formerly vilified, the suicide now often attracted sympathy. The Anglican Parson Woodforde had nothing but sympathy for the suicides he knew.65 ‘Is it?’ asked Pope –
Is it, in heav'n a crime to love too well?
To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,
To act a Lover's or a Roman's part?
Is there no bright reversion in the sky,
For those who greatly think, or bravely die?66
Crucial to this reconceptualization of suicide was the rise of print culture. The role heretofore played by the Church in fixing its meaning – overwhelmingly punitive – was usurped by the media, whose line was humanitarian through and through. Newspapers and magazines turned suicides into ‘human interest’ stories, indeed sensations, and encouraged vicarious, often morbid, public involvement, with the printing of suicide notes, last letters and tales of blighted love. Here, as elsewhere, the media gave voice to new secular meanings, expressive of enlightened ‘humanitarian narratives’.67 Like life itself, suicide was secularized.
This shift in status from pariah, malefactor or sinner to object of pity, evident in the cases of lunatics and suicides (themselves often assimilated to the insane), was mirrored in many other walks of life, where what had heretofore attracted religious or moral blame might now find ambivalent exculpation. The quandaries of how to balance individual responsibility over and against moral judgementalism and the sociological gaze were to loom large in a spectrum of debates over vice and poverty, in controversies over free will and determinism, and in the consequentialist philosophy of utilitarianism (see chapter 16).
Perhaps the most telling instance of the rejection of traditional Christian dogmas in favour of new secular models is the discrediting of witchcraft, a shift which occurred against a backdrop of controversy regarding the reality and agency of spirits in general.68 As is highlighted by the critiques levelled by materialists like Hobbes, historic Christianity – élite and popular alike – was spirit-drenched. During his Yorkshire childhood in the 1730s, recalled Joseph Priestley, ‘it was my misfortune to have the idea of darkness, and the ideas of malignant spirits and apparitions, very closely connected’. Rendered ‘too full of terror’ by his strict Calvinist upbringing, he remembered ‘reading the account of the “man in an iron cage” in the Pilgrim's Progress with the greatest perturbation’. Recollection of that ‘state of ignorance and darkness’, he affirmed, ‘gives me a peculiar sense of the value of rational principles of religion’.69 Jeremy Bentham had a similarly horrifying memory of his own youth, some twenty years later: ‘This subject of ghosts has been among the torments of my life, the devil was everywhere in it and in me to too.' Commenting, like Priestley, on his early reading of Bunyan, he exclaimed: ‘how much less unhappy I should have been, could I have acknowledged my superstitious fears!’70 As mature intellectuals, both totally repudiated the spirits which had brought them to youthful fears and tears.
The prime example of the public disavowal of spirits is witchcraft. Belief in the terrestrial intervention of Satan and his satellites had long been upheld, not just by the churches, in line with the Bible (‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ the Lord told his people through Moses (Exodus XXII: 18)), but by such leading intellectuals as Robert Burton.71 That consensus crumbled after 1650.72 To a degree this was due to rationalist philosophers like Hobbes, whose materialism ruled out by definition the real presence of evil spirits. ‘The opinion that rude people have of fairies, ghosts and goblins and the power of witches’ was blamed in his Leviathan on the incapacity to distinguish ‘dreams’ from ‘sense’. ‘As for witches,’ he held, ‘I think not that their witchcraft is any reall power’ – though he approved of the punishment of such impostors for the ‘false beliefe they have, that they can do such mischiefe’.73
What is most evident in post-Restoration England, however, is not the triumph of a priori denials but a widespread de facto waning of belief on grounds of experience and humanity. ‘I believe in general,’ hejd Addison in the Spectator, ‘that there is, and has been such a thing as witchcraft’ – a feint that established his bona fides; yet he could ‘give no credit to any particular instance of it’. That deft formula established, he went on to explain how those mistaken for witches were pitiable old women victimized by the ‘ignorant and credulous’. Great
danger was in store once some old crone – call her Moll White – had got the ‘Reputation of a Witch’.
If she made any Mistake at Church, and cryed Amen in a wrong place, they never failed to conclude that she was saying her Prayers backwards… If the Dairy Maid does not make her Butter come so soon as she would have it, Moll White is at the bottom of the Churn. If a Horse sweats in the Stable, Moll White has been upon his Back.74
And thus he concluded with a call for an end to persecution:
I hear there is scarce a village in England that has not a Moll White in it. When an old Woman begins to doat, and grow chargeable to a Parish, she is generally turned into a Witch, and fills the whole Country with extravagant Fancies, imaginary Distempers, and terrifying Dreams.75
Addison's views squared with those set out in the Revd Francis Hutchinson's influential An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), a work lacking the theoretical barbs of Balthazar Bekker's Cartesian De Betoverde Weereld (The Bewitched World) (1691–3) but perhaps for that reason all the more effective.
A Whig who rose to become a bishop, Hutchinson, like Locke and Addison, upheld spirits, declaring that ‘sober belief’ in ‘good and bad spirits [was] part of every good Christian's faith’, while at the same time insisting that such convictions were totally different from ‘the fantastick doctrines that support the vulgar opinion of witchcraft’.76 ‘The credulous multitude,’ he little doubted, ‘will ever be ready to try their tricks, and swim the old women, and wonder at and magnify every unaccountable symptom and odd accident.’77 But education would in time erode error. ‘Witchcraft’ was explicable by natural causes; scriptural references to it had been mistranslated; popular ghost lore was fiddle-faddle;78 the confessions of ‘old Women’ were ‘not to be regarded’, and the conceit of compacts with the Devil he dismissed with a Lockean hand wave as ‘meer Imagination’.79
While rehearsing the scepticism of Johannes Weyer, Reginald Scot, John Webster and Balthasar Bekker, Hutchinson probed the psychology of the witch craze as social panic. Though never denying witchcraft in principle, and shrewdly appending two sermons against Sadduceeism – one affirming Christ's miracles, the other the reality of angels – he noted that witchcraft was rife mainly in backward Catholic kingdoms, and submitted that what triggered panics were rabble-rousing books and meddlesome witch-finders.
Hutchinson was the epitome of the moderate, progressive humanitarian Whig thinker so prominent in enlightened England. While Hobbes the ultra reduced ‘superstition’ to rank fraud, the Anglican divine judiciously made allowance for self-deception, hysteria, social pressure and labelling. It was all too easy for people to be talked into believing they were witches – ‘old women are apt to take such fancies of themselves’. ‘Imagine a poor old creature,’ he appealed to his readers' sympathies,
under all the weakness and infirmities of old age, set like a fool in the middle of a room, with a rabble of the town round about her house: then her legs tied cross, that all the weight of her body might rest upon her seat. Then she must continue her pain four and twenty hours, without any sleep or meat… what wonder was it, if when they were weary of their lives, they confessed any tales that would please.80
A case like that of Jane Wenham, the last English ‘witch’ to be condemned (in 1714), showed ‘how impossible it is for the most innocent Persons to defend themselves’. A meek crone living in a ‘barbarous parish’, she it was, in Hutchinson's view, who was the real victim of maleficium, and so the one who truly merited pity.81 Beliefs like those of Addison and Hutchinson took root amongst educated élites, capitalizing upon snobberies against the benighted and rancour towards priestcraft. In his essay ‘Of Witchcraft’ (1724), Thomas Gordon thus accused priests of whipping up fears about witchcraft because it was they who enjoyed the official monopoly in countering it. In this they had been aided by mob credulity, but England was now mending: ‘an old Woman may be miserable now, and not be hanged for it’. The Deist Whig piqued himself upon his liberal sentiments – he was ‘so much a heretick as to believe, that God Almighty, and not the Devil, governs the World’; like all enlightened spokesmen, he had no desire to dwell in a devil-infested world.82
Such humanitarian views, oozing condescension, rang out from press and pulpit alike as the idiom of the bien pensants. In a sermon preached in 1736 after a suspected witch was ‘swum’, a Leicestershire parson, Joseph Juxon, called witchcraft into doubt with an appeal to compassion. Suspects were typically ‘such as are destitute of friends, bow'd down with years, laden with infirmities; so far from annoying others, as not to have it in their power to take care of themselves’. Yet so prevalent were alarms and superstition that ‘there is always a party formed… against these poor, ignorant and helpless creatures’. Accusations had to be nipped in the bud, not least because, though ‘persons of ill fame be accused first… yet the suspicion may fall at last upon those of unblemished character and reputation’, precipitating ‘havock’. The élite certainly did not want to run the risk of being incriminated themselves!83
Witchcraft, magic and the supernatural continued to be debated long after the repeal of the witchcraft statutes in 1736. Many seized the Addisonian moral high ground, picking on sitting targets and deploring hidebound views – ‘the world has perhaps been imposed upon’ by no one more than pretenders to occult powers, declared the anonymous A System of Magick in 1727.84 Brought out in 1736 to coincide with repeal, A Discourse on Witchcraft, also anonymous, complimented Englishmen for living in an enlightened land at a happy time when the ‘impostures’ of priests and the folly of the ‘vulgar’ were finally being laid to rest.85
Colluding in a cosy superiority with its sophisticated readers, the press took pleasure in exposing sensational manifestations of witchcraft practices or bizarre superstitions. ‘The ridiculous notion of witches and witchcraft still prevails amongst the lower sort of people,’ declared one such paper in 1773, before reciting a cruel ducking meted out in Wiltshire to an alleged witch.86 In another Wessex village, ‘one Sarah Jellicoat escaped undergoing the whole discipline usually inflicted by the… unthinking vulgar on witches’, thanks, in true enlightened manner, to the timely intervention of ‘some humane gentlemen and the vigilance of a discreet magistrate’.87
In that age of conspicuous humanity, the witch, like the prostitute, could even become the heroine of a narrative, typecast as sad, lonely and bigot-beset. Such sentimental strains were already present in Hutchinson – when Jane Wenham ‘was denied a few Turnips’ by vicious parishioners, readers were told, ‘she laid them down very submissively’.88 Christopher Smart's The Genuine History of the Good Devil of Woodstock (1802) invited similar identification: the villagers were brutish to poor Jane Gilbert, called her witch and did her injury; but, sustained in part by compassionate social superiors, she bore it like a good Christian; finally she came into a legacy and behaved with exemplary benevolence to her erstwhile persecutors.89
With witches and ghosts discredited, the demonic and magical did not so much disappear from polite culture as change their face and place. The supernatural was sanitized and culturally revamped in the flourishing domains of entertainment and print culture. There was, of course, nothing wholly new in this. The supernatural had always been a staple of the arts – viz. the ghost in Hamlet or the witches in Macbeth.90 Yet the witch was to undergo a role change on the English stage. Shakespeare's witches had been sinister and supernatural; those, by contrast, in Thomas Shadwell's The Lancashire-Witches (1681) and Tegue o Divelly the Irish Priest (1682) provided crude comic relief in pot-boiling anti-Papist pro-Whig burlesque; they were made to fly across the boards, courtesy of stage machinery, in an aptly dramatic exposure of the absurdity of it all. The popularity of his portrayal shows how the witch had become a political football, exploited by enlightened Whigs to lampoon sinister Tories and the wild Irish in the Popish Plot panic. A few years later, Allan Ramsay's pastoral drama The Gentle Shepherd (1715) introduced a new figure: a harmless ‘witch’ invested,
however, with supernatural powers by fearful, credulous rustics: Ramsay was, of course, the Scottish Addison.91
Fantasy devils also loom large in the kitsch supernatural stage props of Augustan satire, notably Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1712). His Dunciad evoked a demonic universe in which infernal goddesses – ‘Dulness’ and ‘Cloacina’ – possessed mortals and required propitiation in a mock-classical extravaganza with bit parts for Gorgons, dragons, fiends and wizards. Satire also explains the supernatural apparatus in William Hogarth's engraving Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism (1762). Originally titled Enthusiasm Delineated, this conjured up the (by then thankfully) ludicrous confederation of Satan, witches and spirits, so as to mock the Methodists. A hysterical congregation appears in the throes of frenzy, while a thermometer, propped up on Joseph Glanvill's once esteemed pro-spirit Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681) and on John Wesley's sermons, takes the temperature of the Methodists' intellects on a scale rising from ‘despair’ up to ‘raving madness’. The source of all this mental mania? An enthusiast ranting in the pulpit astride a broomstick and topped by a steeple hat, clutching in one hand a puppet of Satan and in the other a witch doll.92 The Augustans could thus still stage the supernatural, but chiefly by camping it up. ‘A poet who should now make the whole action of his tragedy depend upon enchantment and produce the chief events by the assistance of supernatural agents,’ pondered Samuel Johnson, his finger as ever on the cultural pulse, ‘would be censured as transgressing the bounds of probability, be banished from the theatre to the nursery, and condemned to write fairy tales instead of tragedies.’93