Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

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Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World Page 33

by Roy Porter


  In such developments it was market forces that mattered.65 The drive for museums and galleries in Georgian England typically came from leisure and educational entrepreneurs bent upon bringing their wares to the people and seeking to profit out of novelties, curiosities and commercial openings, and the public hunger for experience.66 This commercialization of leisure did not put a stop to traditional folk pleasures – indeed, in some ways it positively fostered amateur and community activities. For example, with the publication of sheet music, spurred by the enterprising John Walsh, it was easy for home musicmakers to be playing Boyce or Arne on their viols or flutes soon after such music had been composed.67 From Pepys onwards, letters and diaries give ample evidence of a joyous, if also uneasy, indulgence of pleasure. It was a time, for example, when conspicuous delight was taken in food, helped by low prices and the introduction of exotica like pineapples. And the pleasures of the table were washed down by those of the bottle. Drinking, judged Samuel Johnson, was life's second greatest pleasure.68

  Moderns might argue, of course, that the true barometer of a civilization's proclivities lies in its erotic culture. Samuel Johnson's number one pleasure, however, leaves relatively few records, and is unusually subject to sensationalist distortion. Nevertheless, it is clear that sex was publicly flaunted in eighteenth-century England in a manner historically atypical – one perhaps bearing comparison with our own times.69 The most visible index was, of course, prostitution. There were said to be up to 30,000 streetwalkers in London alone – James Boswell's journals suggest it was impossible (for that young man about town, at least) to saunter down the Strand or in St James's Park without being defeated by the attentions of hordes of harlots.70 Escaping a Presbyterian upbringing, Boswell had an itch for pleasure at large – ‘I felt a completion of happiness,’ he wrote in 1772, á propos being in Johnson's company: ‘I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.’71 As l'homme moyen sensuel he judged there was no ‘higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an amiable woman’.72 And he practised with gusto what he preached, performing many sexual feats while a young man about town in 1763, among others taking a whore (wearing a condom, for safe sex) on the recently opened Westminster Bridge.73

  The post-censorship age brought an explosion in the production of erotica.74 A significantly titled best-seller was John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), popularly known as Fanny Hill. Whilst the very notion of a ‘woman of pleasure’ evidently betrays macho prejudices – the female as sex object – it conveys a confidence in erotic enjoyment. In that book, Mrs Cole, the bawd, ‘considered pleasure of one sort or other as the universal port of destination, and every wind that blew thither a good one, provided it blew nobody any harm’.75 Cleland turned that ‘harlot's progress' which had been a tragedy for Hogarth into a triumph: Fanny enjoyed and profited from her profession, while also falling in love with her very first client, whom she finally married – thus combining pleasure, gain and romance all in one implausible enlightened fantasy.76

  Prostitution aside, moderns devoted themselves to erotic pleasures. Rather than condemning sexuality as lust, as in Augustinian theology, or regarding it primarily in procreative terms, Georgian sex advice literature maintained that sex constituted a pleasure in its own right and a contribution to conjugality.77 The leading physician Dr Erasmus Darwin, who sired fourteen children, twelve of them legitimate, panegyrized love as ‘the purest source of human felicity, the cordial drop in the otherwise vapid cup of life’.78

  The most flagrant male sexual icon in the Restoration era had been the rake, its paragon (or evil genius) being John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. ‘The restraining a man from the Use of Women,’ Bishop Burnet wrote of that libertine, ‘he thought unreasonable impositions on the freedom of Mankind.’ The philosophy behind Rochester's self-image as a ‘fucking machine’ was Hobbesian.79 Mandeville later rationalized anti-Puritan libidinal release; his A Modest Defence of the Public Stews; or An Essay Upon Whoring (1724) spoke not of curbing, but of channelling the discharge of sexual impulses.80 If the rake Lovelace was the villain of Samuel Richardson's sentimental Clarissa (1748), John Wilkes's Essay on Woman (1763) showed how free love could be assimilated into an enlightened pursuit of freedom in general:

  Since Life can little more supply

  Than just a few good fucks, and then we die.81

  Addisonian politeness was, however, undermining Rochester's roistering, as the favoured image of sexual gratification became that of the honnête homme, or ‘man of sense’. Lord Chesterfield famously informed his son that liaisons were part of a young man's education, and desirable, so long as they were conducted with decorum.82

  Eroticism and enlightenment further converged with the production of full-blown erotic philosophies upon the discovery (or invention) of paganism, a neo-classical taste for a civilization simple, elegant and natural. A key figure in this was the outright materialist and hedonist Erasmus Darwin, whose The Botanic Garden (1791), popularizing the Linnean sexual system of plant classification, implied polygamy amongst the plants:

  Sweet blooms GENISTA in the myrtle shade,

  And ten fond brothers wood the haughty maid.

  Two knights before thy fragrant altar bend,

  Adored MELISSA! and two squires attend.83

  Hailing ‘the Deities of Sexual Love’, Darwin wedded his scientific botany to ancient mythology, conjuring up a cast of nymphs and sylphs in classical and oriental tales offered as mythologizations of natural processes.84 The Greek myths he viewed as anthropomorphic representations of natural truths: pagan mythology was preoccupied by love precisely because natural man – before the inauspicious triumph of Christian asceticism – perceived that Nature was driven by sex.85

  Darwin's acquaintance with fertility cults and rites stemmed from accounts of the recently excavated Herculaneum and Pompeii. England's ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton, was a collector of objets d'art, a critic of Catholicism, the advocate of an unbiblical geological timescale and a proponent of paganism.86 His ‘Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus’, a demonstration that pagan phallic ceremonies survived veiled in modern Catholicism, was put out privately in 1786 by Richard Payne Knight, a wealthy connoisseur, together with his own ‘Discourse’ on the same subject. Payne Knight for his part held that the vestiges of phallic worship (such as maypoles) present in all faiths, not least Christianity, proved that the phallus was ‘a very rational symbol of a very natural and philosophical system or religion’ – that is, enlightened Nature-worship. Ancient Greece constituted the Golden Age, the only period when ‘the advantages of savage joined to those of civilized life’. Enthusiastic about the Greeks' festive celebration of the generative principle, he predictably censured Judaeo-Christianity: ‘the Jews… being governed by a Hierarchy, endeavoured to make it aweful and venerable to the people, by an appearance of rigour and austerity’. Organized religion had always been inimical to personal happiness and a tool of political oppression to boot, and Payne Knight damned ‘two of the greatest curses that ever afflicted the human race, dogmatical theology, and its consequent, religious persecution’.87 Attacking the indissolubility of marriage, he held that there were ‘many causes which ought to justify divorce, as well as that of adultery on the part of the woman’. Together with Godwin and Darwin, he became a butt of reactionary abuse, censured in the 1790s in the anti-Jacobin The Pursuits of Literature for undermining the morals of the nation.88

  Jeremy Bentham, too, was a sexual liberal, deploring bigotry and asceticism, and terming copulation a ‘cup of physical sweets’. He wrote in favour of matrimonial visits for convicts locked up in his panopticon while, seeking legalization of ‘irregularities of all sorts in the venereal appetite’, he called for the future toleration of ‘vice’ (that is, homosexuality), for irregular desire was simply a matter of ‘tastes’, just like a love of oysters. In any case, homosexuality was a victimless crime, ‘free from worr
y to third persons’. No more than religious dissent should ‘sexual nonconformity’ be penalized.89

  This is not the place to survey eighteenth-century sexual orientations – it would be folly to reduce them all to inflections of enlightened sentiments – but it is worth insisting that during this period old sexual taboos were being widely attacked as benighted prejudices, and the legitimacy of erotic pleasure championed. Evidence of this is to be found in the manuscripts of the Scot Robert Wallace, author of an extraordinary essay which was not only enthusiastic about sexual pleasure but also in some measure egalitarian.90 His ‘Of Venery, or of the Commerce of the two Sexes’ held that ‘love & lust are very nearly allied’, and that ‘the most bashful virgin or chastest matron has often more lust or inclination to Venery than the greatest prostitute’.91 Idealized or Platonic love was – like all things Platonic – an illusion:

  Seldom I believe can a man admire the good qualities of a fine woman's mind and conduct without a secret wish to be familiar with her person. Virtue, honour, prudence, may restrain him from any indecency, but his regard is allwayes mixed with something sensuall. If his health & the temperament of his body be vigorous he would gladly rush into her embraces: What women feel I know not but perhaps the most bashful virgin or chastest matron may not be without the same sort of passionate Desires.92

  While conceding that ‘fornication should be Discouraged’, Wallace believed that it should be ‘only gently punished’: he insisted that want of chastity should not ‘be accounted a very great blot even upon a woman's character’. After all, who denied that a widow might remarry? The public fixation upon female chastity showed how the moral majority had ‘gone into foolish, whimsicall, unnaturall, absurd, ill founded conceits on this head’. Desire was natural, and there was ‘no foundation in nature for placing so much happiness in the sole enjoyment of a woman’. Hence, he would ‘encourage a much more free commerce of the sexes than is allowed by our customs & permitt women to make proposals as well as men’.93 What is astonishing is that Wallace was a Presbyterian minister and moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

  It is hard to take the hedonic pulse of the past. Help is afforded, however, by visual evidence. The prints of Hogarth and others provide plentiful evidence that the English did not merely indulge in pleasures, but wanted to be recorded enjoying themselves. Alongside images of plebeian Beer Street and Southwark Fair, with a good time being had by all, Hogarth also depicted respectable bourgeois families, not, as their grandparents might have been shown, overshadowed by the memento mori of a skull or, like their Victorian grandchildren, engaged in solemnly improving activities, but rather amusing themselves, taking tea, playing with their children or pets, having a stroll, fishing, visiting pleasure gardens – doing all the Addisonian things, often with happy expressions on their faces.94 It is no accident that the Victorians, who prided themselves on the importance of being earnest and whose Queen was not amused, looked back with stern disapproval upon their pleasure-loving, enlightened forebears.95

  12

  FROM GOOD SENSE TO SENSIBILITY

  Oh! the number of miserables that novels have sent to perdition!

  ARTHUR YOUNG1

  It was public men holding forth on public matters who dominated early Enlightenment debate. The state had to be set upon a legitimate basis of law and freedom, religion made rational and tolerant, philosophy purged, reason rectified, the new science promoted and urban living elevated on to a superior plane of polite sociability. Matching the Classicism and Palladianism shaping the visual arts, the prestigious genres in literature were noble and civic – tragedy and the epic, as befitted those wearing the senatorial purple whose education had beaten into them a love of Antiquity; while, in a different register, Augustan satire purported to correct public manners and morals.

  For their part, the pacesetters of the early Enlightenment formed a coherent and powerful élite which included a fair sprinkling of noblemen (for instance, Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke), MPs (such as Addison and Steele, Trenchard and Gordon), upper clergy (notably Archbishop Tillotson), academics (like Newton and Locke), lawyers (like Anthony Collins), and all their ilk. Uniting top people political and literary, the high-profile Whig Kit-Cat Club was headed by the titled – the dukes of Newcastle, Somerset, Devonshire, Manchester, Dorset and Montagu, the earls of Lincoln, Bath, Wilmington, Carbery, Carlisle, Berkeley and Halifax. Only Tonson the publisher and Vanbrugh the playwright-architect did not hail from landed or wealthy backgrounds. The same applies to the wider constituency. The Tatler, for instance, boasted an impressive pro-portion of aristocratic and genteel subscribers. Of the 752 names on its subscription list, one in ten was an English peer; there were furthermore thirty-five Scottish or Irish lords, twenty-six peers' sons and as many ladies from aristocratic families. Include the eight bishops, and the list contains 166 aristocratic names, or 22 per cent of the total.2

  That situation changed, socially, intellectually and culturally, during the course of the century. The focus of intellectual inquiry shifted to enlightenment within – the personal became the political.3 To some degree this entailed a distancing or disengagement from ideals formerly promoted, critiques of the old critiques. Censure was levelled, for example, at the ‘insincere’ mask of Addisonian decorum, especially when it assumed such an eminently parodiable form as Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son – the Earl, in Dr Johnson's classic double-barrelled put-down, displayed the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.4

  Such shifts reflected an ongoing internal logic. With domestic peace and prosperity succouring consumption and print capitalism, more people had the time and leisure to participate in the openings afforded by polite culture and revalue themselves and their place in the world. Whether in the guise of activist or audience, the pool of cultural players encompassed ever larger numbers of women and provincials, and more middle- and even lower-class figures. Parties from beyond the old charmed clique of the great and the good achieved entry into this widening circle – a development encouraged and legitimized by enlightened vox populi universalism – if nevertheless retaining some sense of identity as ‘excluded’.5 The swelling band of these marginal people, simultaneously insiders and outsiders, inevitably bred tensions, and it is they who will be addressed in this chapter, which traces the dialectic of ‘inner enlightenment’ mainly after 1750 and examines new discursive modes of figuring the self and its dilemmas.

  It was enlightened philosophy which forged modern renderings of the individual psyche and of ‘psychology’ (see chapter 7). A synergism emerged between Lockean philosophies of mind and the models of subjectivity touted in such less rigid genres as novels, belles lettres, portraits, diaries and letters. This dialectic had key implications for emergent individualism, self-consciousness, self-definition and self-improvement: it is no accident that the word ‘autobiography’ first appeared at this time – or indeed that, in writing about the soul, the traditional Puritan genre of spiritual self-examination was supplemented by more secular modes of confession.6 There were also rethinkings of sex and gender as, in enlightened self-fashionings, the voice of women became more influential, from early romance writers like Delariviere Manley, through the sentimental novelists, up to Mary Wollstonecraft and her sister Jacobins. (For the voice of women, see also chapter 14.)

  The new selves – marked by the fictional Tristram Shandy – blazoning themselves forth in first-person epistles and fictions were often defiantly unconventional, decentred from canonical structures, self-absorbed and drunk on their own singularity. In a forsaking of classical precepts, the doubtful became prized over the definite, the incomplete over the finished, the rough over the suave, the capricious over the constant: flux, striving and mutability all acquired a new frisson. With growing regard being expressed for authenticity, experience, feeling and ‘truth within the breast’, a mutiny was in the air against tradition, convention, patriarchy and their totemic authority symbols.7

  This
rebelliousness ironically idolized one monumental male icon: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In confessional mode, Rousseau gloried in a selfhood which was infinitely fascinating: his ringing ‘If I am not better, at least I am different’ became the unofficial late Enlightenment credo before it was adopted by Romanticism.8 One's duty, in Addison's eyes, had been to sparkle as a convivial conformist; in the gospel of the Confessions, it was in the unbiddable rough diamond that true value lay; the spirit of nonconformity became de rigueur and self-preoccupation prized. The new privileging of inner experience subverted hard and fast classical distinctions between the inner and the outer, fact and fantasy, and taught individuals to remake themselves as originals, following inner promptings: ‘I know my own heart,’ Anne Lister told her diary, echoing Rousseau.9

  One signature of such changes was the reopening of the creativity debate. Locke's tabula rasa had seemingly settled the matter: all were born much of a muchness, innate genius no more existed than innate ideas, and differentials in mind and character were the products of experience. ‘Dr Johnson denied that any child was better than another, but by difference of instruction,’ recorded Boswell in 1773.10 By a nice irony, such anti-innatist views were also upheld by Lord Chesterfield, who taught his son the impeccably egalitarian sentiment that men – though hardly women – started intellectually on a level: ‘A drayman is probably born with as good organs as Milton, Locke, or Newton.’11 Priestley too denied that there was anything special about Newton's mind; Adam Smith concurred: ‘The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of’;12 and so did Godwin: ‘Genius… is not born with us, but generated subsequent to birth.’13

 

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