Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
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Paralleling this new Christian eudemonism ran traditions of moral philosophy and aesthetics espoused by Lord Shaftesbury and his admirer Francis Hutcheson. Scorning gravity and the grave, Shaftesbury's rhapsodies to the pleasures of virtue pointed the way for those who would champion the virtues of pleasure.20 And while Hutcheson despised the work of Mandeville, his formulations (in particular his precocious expression of the ‘greatest happiness’ principle) nudged morality in the same psychological direction.21
Early Enlightenment philosophers endowed ethics with a new, and hopefully sounder basis in psychology. Morality had traditionally been cast as an objective system of divine laws or cosmic fitnesses: absolute right and wrong, duty and justice. Increasingly, virtue was refigured as a matter of heeding inner promptings – goodness lay not in obeying commandments but in harnessing motives. It was newly emphasized that, contrary to Augustinian rigorism, human nature was not hopelessly depraved; rather, passions were naturally benign – and in any case pleasure was to be derived from sympathy. Virtue was, in short, part and parcel of a true psychology of pleasure – indeed, its own reward.22 Good taste and good morals fused in an aesthetic of virtue.
Such shifts in divinity and ethics matched changes in social perception. Pilgrim had traditionally been a character in a divine drama whose denouement had come right at the beginning of Act One in the original sinner expelled from Paradise. Enlightened thinkers, however, looked through rosier lenses: civilization was making rapid and wholesale changes to both the natural and the built environment as science and technology were asserting man's powers over Nature. People were changing, too – and, in any case, were seen to vary radically the world over, in physique and appearance, outlooks, prospects and expectations. Viewed thus, homo rationalis was not, after all, some transcendental soul occupying a preordained place in the Great Chain of Being, but the plastic product of multiple external influences and stimuli; man was not just homo faber but homo hominis faber, maker of his own destiny; mankind was born not in Filmerian chains, but, as Locke argued, naturally free.23
Like Nature at large, man comprised a machine made up of parts, open to scientific study through the techniques of a ‘moral anatomy’ which would unveil psychological no less than physical laws of motion.24 Building on such naturalistic postulates, thinkers championed individualism, the right to self-improvement – and to happiness. Robinson Crusoe (1719) fantasized man in the state of nature in terms of the dilemma of the shipwreck having to (re) invent civilization (almost) single-handedly and forge his own destiny. In fact, it became common, as in Mandeville, to represent society as a hive made up of individuals, each pulsating with needs, desires and drives, either colluding or colliding. ‘The wants of the mind are infinite,’ asserted the property developer and physician Nicholas Barbon,25 expressing views which pointed towards Adam Smith's celebration of ‘the uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition’.26
The natural right to pursue one's own interests became an Enlightenment commonplace. The paradox that self-interest was preferable to shows of public virtue, mooted by Mandeville, was maintained, less scandalously but more persuasively, by Hume and Smith. ‘Self Love,’ asserted Josiah Tucker, ‘is the great Mover in human Nature’; and since the ‘principle of self-interest’, according to Sir James Steuart, was ‘the universal spring of human actions’, it followed that
the best way to govern a society, and to engage everyone to conduct himself according to a plan, is for the statesman to form a system of administration, the most consistent possible with the interest of every individual, and never to flatter himself that his people will be brought to act… from any other principle than private interest.27
This atomization of the public good into disparate interests amounted to a privatization of virtue.
Questions of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, were thus recast in the early Enlightenment from dogma about duties into matters of fact about human nature. How do we know? Are we mere machines, or do we have free will? Or, perhaps, as in Lord Kames's suggestion (see chapter 10), do we merely think we have free will? Should we follow our impulses? Can we help doing so? For posing such questions, enlightened thinkers have often been credited as the first modern analysts of social man, the first sociologists and anthropologists, social psychologists, penologists and so forth.28
By postulating the mind as a tabula rasa and thus viewing man as radically pliable, capable of indeterminate change, Locke proved immensely influential. Denying not just the Cartesian cogito but also stark doctrines of human depravity, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) presented man's make-up as entirely a product of learning from experience, through the association of ideas.29 A child of circumstances, man in turn possessed the capacity to transform his milieu; ever challenged by that environment he was continually changing.30 Above all, reason, that candle of the Lord, guided him in the rational pursuit of happiness. ‘I will faithfully pursue that happiness I propose to myself,’ stated Locke, ‘all innocent diversions and delights, as far as they will contribute to my health, and consist with my improvement, condition, and my other more solid pleasures of knowledge and reputation, I will enjoy.’31 While in David Hartley's philosophy, rational hedonism found the soil in which to put down materialist roots32 the Unitarian Joseph Priestley, as will be explored in chapter 18, set the pursuit of happiness within a determinist yet Providential theory of progress.
These epistemologies of learning were incorporated by enlightened thinkers into psychological models which portrayed action as essentially driven by hedonic impulses. Reversing traditional priorities, David Hume cast reason as the slave of the passions: confidence in the emotions would contribute to social cohesion and benefit. Properly channelled and polished, ‘self love and social’ would prove ‘the same’.33
Projecting man as an ensemble of stimuli and responses, activated by sense inputs, sensationalist psychology sanctioned a new practical hedonism. ‘Pleasure is now the principal remaining part of your education,’ Lord Chesterfield instructed his son. The well-tempered pursuit of happiness in the here and now – indeed, the right to happiness – became the talk of belles lettrists.34 ‘Man is generally represented as an animal formed for, and delighted in, society,’ stressed Henry Fielding:
in this state alone, it is said, his various talents can be exerted, his numberless necessities relieved, the dangers he is exposed to can be avoided, and many of the pleasures he eagerly affects enjoyed. In short, by good-breeding… I mean the art of pleasing, or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.35
Among the polite, the teachings of Pilgrim's Progress thus began to sound quaintly passé. ‘Happiness is the only thing of real value in existence,’ asserted Soame Jenyns: ‘neither riches, nor power, nor wisdom, nor learning, nor strength, nor beauty, nor virtue, nor religion, nor even life itself, being of any importance but as they contribute to its production.’36 The codification of such views was utilitarianism, and Bentham's greatest happiness principle would chime with the new political economy systematized by Adam Smith: egoism pursued in accordance with free market competition would result, courtesy of the ‘Invisible Hand’, in the common good (see chapter 17).37
Enlightened thinking thus advanced new models of man and rationales for happiness. The plasticity of human nature meant people could be educated or conditioned, so as to be continually making and remaking themselves. Not least, confidence grew that the natural order would deliver not just pleasure but harmonious progress. And that was partly because ‘new hedonist’ was not ‘old rake’ in another guise, but the man or woman of sensibility who could pursue satisfaction through sociable behaviour, and whose good nature would tender pleasure as well as take it. We thus finally revert to the crucially important Addison and Steele.
The Spectator ridiculed various human failings, especially Puritan scrupulosity and Cavalie
r libertinism: the sanctimonious devalued Divine Benevolence, while rakes ruined themselves with drunken debauchery. A third way was proposed, that of the honnête homme, whose moderate pursuit of rational pleasures in social settings would produce lasting enjoyment. Stressing urbanity, politeness, rationality and moderation, Addisonianism authorized smart pursuits – light reading, tea-table conversation, the pleasures of the town – adjudged personally gratifying while socially harmonious. Enlightened thought thus gave its blessing to the pursuit of pleasure, precisely because it redefined the pleasures it was desirable to pursue. Overall, the English ideology, voiced through Lockean psychology, the Spectatorial stylistics of the self, utilitarianism and political economy, promoted refined hedonism and enlightened self-interest within consumer capitalism.38
Only the most cocksure quantitative historian would assert that some societies achieve more pleasure than others, or are more pleasure-loving. Bentham's felicific calculus notwithstanding, pleasure is hard to measure.39 It can be said, however, that desire assumes different forms from era to era. It would therefore be worthwhile examining the shifting sites of and outlets for the enlightened pleasure quest – responses to growing affluence within a commercial economy which left more people with more money spare to spend or squander.40
Pleasure-taking was transformed by changes in material culture – the built environment, the availability of urban pleasure sites, resorts indoor and outdoor and the ‘pleasure machines’ through which discriminating consumers might find pastime and amusement.41 An effervescent ‘feel-good’ factor buoyed people up – indeed, it was a society in which, by the 1780s, one could actually soar up into the air for the first time in human history, thanks to the hot-air balloon – or, failing that, buy a souvenir balloon hat;42 while, from 1808, in a ‘steam circus’ enclosure in Euston Square, you could even be driven on rails round and round by the Catch-me-who-can, the first ever passenger steam locomotive, designed by the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick. But who took which pleasures? With affluence spreading, enjoyments once for the few were opened, often to the many and occasionally to the masses: enlightened pleasures were meant, within reason, to be for the greatest number.
Traditionally, exclusiveness had been what gave the spice. Only the leisured classes had had the time and the money to devote themselves to conspicuous pleasure – and so it fell to them to define what pleasure and leisure were. But, because of these grandee associations, such values might also be disdained as symptoms of privileged profligacy. The lower orders were ‘debauched’ by idleness, thundered preachers, the great ‘corrupted’ by leisure.
Grandees experienced their relaxations through a value system framed by their classical education. Free time was the prized privilege of noble birth, lack of leisure the penalty of poverty, or a mark of the mercenariness of the miserly tradesman, proverbially obsessed with filthy lucre. The burden of perpetual toil bespoke dependency; leisure, by contrast, permitted cultivation of mind and body and promoted that greatness of soul eulogized by Aristotle and echoed by Shaftesbury.43
Landed society by no means despised negotium (business): it constituted, after all, an immensely ambitious, wealth-accumulating élite, cultivating economic interests as energetic agrarian capitalists and exercising sway as politicians, magistrates and military leaders. But grandees particularly prized otium (ease); they subscribed to Horace's ideals of the good life (integer vitae, sceleris purus); not least, being receptive to enlightened values, they recognized that their enduring authority must depend upon not might but magic, a conspicuous show of enviable lifestyles. They thus formed a ‘leisure class’, devoted to conspicuous cultural consumption.44 For the ruling class, business and pleasure traditionally went hand in glove. The eagerness of the affluent middle classes to buy themselves into landed leisure, even at the risk of ruin, bespeaks its awesome appeal. Yet enjoyments were also emerging which were quintessentially urban and bourgeois: in a new twist, pleasure and leisure were becoming commercialized.45
Pre-industrial Britain had sustained highly traditional modes of leisure, organized around the rhythms of agrarian life, Christian festivals and the political calendar, with their bells, bonfires and beanfeasts.46 ‘Old Leisure’ had worn a bucolic air. The propertied classes disported themselves on their estates, symbolically through hunting and shooting, rites and rights devoutly upheld by ever more bloody game laws. Holkham, Houghton, Blenheim and the other great houses cemented the association of the country estate with aristocratic enjoyments like art, book-collecting and antiquarianism. With the exception of the Grand Tour, that youthful rite of passage, patrician pleasures clustered around the familial acres, although it was also found necessary to have an urban headquarters, ideally in the fashionable West End.47
The lower orders for their part traditionally gained sporadic release through village sports, merrymaking, fairs and the drinking festivals associated with trades (apprenticeship rituals) and the rural calendar (harvest home, etc.). These, however, were to meet increasing opposition as preachers and magistrates denounced idleness and the disorder of saturnalian bouts of drunken dissipation, accompanied by riot and later telltale bastard births. Rural leisure was to grow more exclusively class-specific, and so it was essentially in the urban public sphere that pleasure catered to the many.48
The rights and wrongs of leisure and pleasure were hotly debated, but social change and commercial opportunism left the moralists behind. Evangelicals like William Law might still denounce the stage, but new modes of pleasure came into vogue willy-nilly, and the public voted with its feet, flocking to the theatre, to cricket matches, prize fights, spectacles and spas. An entertainment industry arose, controlled by professional actors, theatre managers, painters, sportsmen, art dealers, journalists, critics and back-up teams of cultural brokers. For the first time, the market supported a permanent pool of pleasure professionals.49 All this, of course, had its critics. But new lobbies of enlightened economists and progressive social commentators began to argue that market culture, sport, print and leisure were economically productive entities, forces for civilization and social cohesion, and indices of improvement.
The leisure and pleasure industries could expand, thanks, of course, to commercial energies and the ‘consumer revolution’.50 In curtains and carpets, plate and prints, households were acquiring new consumer durables. Homes grew more comfortable as domestic goods which hitherto had been the preserve of the rich became more common: upholstered chairs, tablecloths, glass- and chinaware, tea services, looking-glasses, clocks, bookcases, engravings and bric-à-brac to put on the wall or the mantelshelf. For children, shop-bought toys, games and jigsaw puzzles made their appearance. Alongside old favourites like the Bible and Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1554), magazines, novels, play texts, sermons, political pamphlets, almanacs and other ephemera tickled a taste for news and novelty, expanded horizons, made people more aware of how the other half lived, and so fed rising material and imaginative expectations.51
The urban space itself was restyled. The Georgian city served increasingly as a sociocultural centre, designed for spending time and money on enjoyments.52 Shops became more attractive, bright and airy, luring in customers with the latest fashions.53 The traditional shop had been a workshop; now it became a retail outlet displaying ready-made goods.54 Foreigners were bowled over: ‘Every article is made more attractive to the eye than in Paris or in any other town,’ commented the German novelist Sophie von La Roche: ‘behind great glass windows absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, and in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy.’55 Browsing was such fun: ‘What an immense stock, containing heaps and heaps of articles!’ she exclaimed, visiting Boydell's, the capital's biggest print dealer. Shopping became an eye-opening pastime.56
What better epitome of the Georgian love of pleasure than the pleasure garden? Up to two hundred or so such resorts sprouted among London's suburban villages, with their fishponds and fireworks, musicians and mas
querades, ideal for trysts.57 Laid out with walks, statues and tableaux, Vauxhall became London's first great fashionable resort. Bands played, there was dancing, or one could sup in gaily decorated alcoves amid the groves. Right by Chelsea Hospital, Ranelagh Gardens opened in 1742. Vying with Vauxhall, its chief attraction was a rotunda, 150 feet in diameter, with an orchestra in the centre and tiers of boxes. Open to all with a few shillings to spare, pleasure gardens and resorts crowned the Georgian pleasure revolution.58
Various forms of entertainment, like the theatre, were also now targeted at middle-brow audiences.59 Traditionally, sports had been community rituals, integrated into the agricultural and religious year – village football, for instance, on Shrove Tuesday.60 Now paid sportsmen emerged, as did the paying spectator. Pugilism got big, and such star professional prize fighters emerged as Daniel Mendoza, Tom Cribb and ‘Gentleman’ John Jackson, drawing crowds of thousands to their barefist bouts.61 Cricket too became a spectator sport; as with horseracing, much of its appeal lay in the gambling.62 Sports journalism whipped up the interest.
Like sport, other activities hitherto largely homemade or exclusive to courtly and noble patrons became organized, commercialized, professionalized, nationalized and discussed in literate culture. Georgian England supported a wide range of concerts and other musical events; Handel's Water Music (1717) and Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749) were first performed at Vauxhall, while piety and pleasure met in his sacred oratorios. Top continental musicians chose to do concert tours in London and some, Handel above all, settled because career opportunities were more inviting than those offered as a courtly kapellmeister.63
Shows and spectacles abounded. The great swathe of streets from Fleet Street and the Strand, up through Charing Cross and into Leicester Square, Soho and Piccadilly, hosted halls, booths and displays mixing sensationalism, news and wonder. Roll up for the ‘Ethiopian Savage’! ‘This astonishing Animal,’ reported the Daily Advertiser on 4 June 1778, ‘is of a different species from any ever seen in Europe, and seems to be a link between the Rational and Brute Creation… and is allowed to be the greatest Curiosity ever exhibited in England.’ The next year Robert Barker set up his Panorama, a display of huge paintings, in Leicester Place, and in nearby Lisle Street James Loutherbourg opened his Eidophusikon (magic lantern) – to say nothing of the menageries at the Tower and Exeter Change in the Strand and the raree-shows drawing the crowds to Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield every September.64