Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  mere models or playthings, imitations as diminutive as his works will always be when compared with those of nature. What is now the boast of the architect! regularity the only part in which he fancied himself to exceed his mistress, Nature, is here found in her possession, and here it has been for ages undescribed.91

  Through such sentiments there emerged what has been called ‘natural supernaturalism’, the neo-pagan and Romantic notion that Nature is sacred and ‘measureless to man’, feelings perhaps mirrored in the new respect for living beings evident in, say, the vegetarianism of Shelley's Vindication of Natural Diet (1813).92

  *

  The cult of the sublime threatened aesthetic disorientation; and what constituted choice scenery was being called into question at precisely the moment when the countryside itself was experiencing a disturbing intrusion: heavy industry. If caves, crags and chasms could be sublime, and hence tasteful, what about furnaces and factories? Two locations became laboratories for this unplanned aesthetic experiment: Shropshire and Derbyshire. ‘Coalbrookdale itself is a very romantic spot,’ commented Arthur Young, still on the road, in 1785:

  it is a winding glen between two immense hills… all thickly covered with wood, forming the most beautiful sheets of hanging wood. Indeed too beautiful to be much in unison with that variety of horrors art has spread at the bottom: the noise of the forges, mills, &c. with all their vast machinery, the flames bursting from the furnaces with the burning of the coal and the smoak of the lime kilns, are altogether sublime.93

  The agronome's aesthetic bafflement is what we might expect. Anna Seward, being a poet, had more definite ideas. She was no enemy to industry and enthused about Birmingham, where ‘Hedges, thickets, trees, upturn'd, disrooted’ had been improved into ‘mortar'd piles, the streets elongated, and the statelier square’ – that is, urbanization and industry created civilization. But the right place for industry was in town, and her tone changed when she turned to once-lovely Shropshire:

  O, violated COLEBROOK!…

  – Now we view

  Their fresh, their fragrant, and their silent reign

  Usurpt by Cyclops; – hear, in mingled tones,

  Shout their throng'd barge, their pondr'ous engines clang

  Through thy coy dales; while red the countless fires,

  With umber'd flames, bicker on all thy hills,

  Dark'ning the Summer's sun with columns large

  Of thick, sulphureous smoke.94

  John Sell Cotman's 1802 watercolour Bedlam Furnace, near Madeley suggests a similarly disapproving judgement on a nearby industrial site. For Cotman, industry clearly ravaged nature – indeed forged Bedlam. The Romantic conviction was gaining ground that industry wrecked the environment, both physically and aesthetically.95

  Industrial Derbyshire became another focus of aesthetic controversy. Its economy and beauties found many champions – notably Joseph Wright, who painted local worthies like the cotton spinner Richard Arkwright – and also renowned locations: Dovedale, Matlock High Tor and the Derwent valley with its caves, castles, mines, mineral springs and factories. Praising Wright's ‘sweet and magic pencil’, James Pilkington'ss View of the Present State of Derbyshire (1789) declared: ‘Perhaps no country… can boast of finer scenes.’ Wright's Arkwright's Mill. View of Cromford, near Matlock (c. 1782–3) shows nature and industry as twin sources of delight, complementing each other. In his sets for The Wonders of Derbyshire, staged in 1779 at Drury Lane, the painter and theatre designer Philip James de Loutherberg likewise sought to show how industry and dramatic scenery both partook of the sublime.96

  Not everyone was convinced. ‘Speaking as a tourist,’ remarked that crusty traveller John Byng, Viscount Torrington, in 1790, ‘these vales have lost their beauty; the rural cot has given way to the lofty red mill… the simple peasant… is changed to an impudent mechanic… the stream perverted from its course by sluices and aqueducts.’97 His indignation grew when he lighted upon ‘a great flaring mill’ in the ‘pastoral vale’ of Aysgarth:

  All the vale is disturb'd; treason and levelling systems are the discourse; the rebellion may be near at hand… Sir Rd. Arkwright may have introduced much wealth into his family and into the country, but as a tourist I execrate his schemes.98

  As is evident, for Byng, as for Anna Seward, natural disorder presaged social disorder.

  Byng's condemnations were endorsed by aesthetic experts. The landscape theorist Uvedale Price loved the ‘striking natural beauties’ of the river Derwent, and hence deplored the factories erected on its banks near Matlock: ‘nothing can equal them for the purpose of disbeautifying an enchanting piece of scenery’; ‘if a prize were given for ugliness’, he quipped, those factories would win.99

  More tellingly still, it even came to be argued that what had long been championed as agricultural improvement actually spelt environmental degradation and aesthetic impoverishment. Capitalist agriculture had always, of course, had its critics. Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770) damned the depopulating effects of enclosure; William Cowper censured the rural asset-stripping that enclosure unleashed – ‘Estates are landscapes… gaz'd upon awhile and auctioneer'd away’; and John Clare later took up the charge most forcibly.100 But what is remarkable is that some erstwhile enthusiasts also grew disgruntled. Even Arthur Young came to question his sacred cow, recognizing how improvement had made conditions worse for rural labourers: ‘I had rather that all the commons of England were sunk in the sea, than that the poor should in future be treated on enclosing as they have been hitherto.’101

  It is a crisis reflected in the career of Humphry Repton, after Brown the leading British landscaper of the Enlightenment. Embittered by difficulties and debts, his last work includes a homily on the irresponsibility of the landed interest. ‘I have frequently been asked,’ he reflected,

  whether the Improvement of the Country in beauty has not kept pace with the increase of its wealth… I now may speak the truth… The taste of the country has bowed to the shrine which all worship; and the riches of individuals have changed the face of the country.102

  Repton illustrated these distasteful changes by executing a delicious parody of his own technique. He had won fame through his ‘Red Book’, in which he presented clients and the public with ‘before’ and ‘after’ scenes which showed the merits of landscaping. But now he contrasted the horrors of a recently ‘improved’ estate with the original, before it had been sold by its ‘ancient proprietor’ to one of the nouveaux riches.

  The unimproved prospect was attractive. In the foreground Repton presented an ‘aged beech’ shading the road, its branches pointing to a family relaxing on a bench; nearby was a stile and a public footpath leading through a park full of ‘venerable trees’; on the right lay a leafy common. The feeling was one of landed benevolence.

  All had then been wrecked by the new proprietor, for whom ‘money supersedes every other consideration’:

  By cutting down the timber and getting an act to enclose the common, [he] had doubled all the rents. The old mossy and ivy-covered pale was replaced by a new and lofty close paling; not to confine the deer, but to exclude mankind… the bench was gone, the ladder-stile was changed to a caution about man-traps and spring-guns, and a notice that the footpath was stopped by order of the commissioners.103

  This nouveau riche was perhaps the model for Sir Simon Steeltrap in Thomas Peacock's Crotchet Castle (1831), who, as ‘a great preserver of game and public morals’ had ‘enclosed commons and woodlands; abolished cottage-gardens; taken the village cricket-ground into his own park – out of pure regard to the sanctity of Sunday; shut up footpaths and alehouses’.104 For villagers and onlookers alike, the environment had thus been ruined. Small wonder perhaps that the painter John Constable was to declare that ‘a gentleman's park is my aversion. It is not beauty because it is not nature.’105

  William Blake too hated commercial capitalism, its metaphysical foundations (the three witches: Bacon, Locke and Newton) and its
artistic toadies (Reynolds), its callousness and ugliness. The poem popularly known as ‘Jerusalem’ (actually the prefatory verses to his epic Milton (1804–8)) looks back to England's green and pleasant land, contrasting it with the modern ‘dark satanic mills’. But if that makes Blake sound like an aesthetic tourist, scouting round Coalbrookdale or Derwentdale, nothing could be further from the truth. Blake was a Londoner through and through, born in Soho, resident in Lambeth; indeed, those dark satanic mills may well have been not Arkwrightian cotton factories but the steam-powered Albion Flour Mills on bankside opposite Blackfriars.106 And when Blake wrote about the New Jerusalem, where in the green and pleasant land did he imagine it?

  The fields from Islington to Marybone,

  To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood,

  Were builded over with pillars of gold;

  And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.107

  Environments, as this Blakean coda shows, are imagined landscapes, and ecology lies in the eye of the beholder. Enlightened culture created environments of the senses and the soil that fantasized the harmony of human production and natural sustainability.108 At the heart of enlightened attitudes towards Nature, however, lay a nest of paradoxes. Enlightened man, especially in his Picturesque embodiment, wanted to discover Nature unspoilt by man; and yet, when he found it, he could not resist the impulse, if only in the imagination, to ‘improve’ it, aesthetically or agriculturally.109 By the close of the eighteenth century, utilitarian Nature – Nature improved – was becoming problematized and Romanticism was making it transcendental, holy and subjective. Under Romanticism, Nature became the new religion.

  14

  DID THE MIND HAVE A SEX?

  He for God only, she for God in him.

  JOHN MILTON1

  why… must a female be made Nobody?

  FANNY BURNEY2

  Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?’

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT3

  Woman has everything against her.

  CATHARINE MACAULAY4

  I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy… But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.

  JANE AUSTEN5

  I am persuaded if there was a commonwealth of rational horses (as Doctor Swift has supposed) it would be an established maxim amongst them that a mare could not be taught to pace.

  LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU 6

  The world the Enlightenment inherited and critiqued was a man's world, patriarchal both in actuality and by imprimatur – after all, the key apology for the Stuarts had actually been titled Patriarcha.7 Scripture, the law and other authorities jointly confirmed male superiority and the subordination of women.8 ‘By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law,’ stated the leading jurist William Blackstone; ‘that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband.’9 Every wife, bar a queen regnant, glossed The Laws Respecting Women (1777), was under her husband's authority, as was her movable property: ‘She can't let, set, sell, give away, or alienate any thing without her husband's consent.’10 An anonymous poet grumbled:

  In youth, a father's stern command

  And jealous eyes control her will,

  A lordly brother watchful stands

  To keep her closer captive still.

  The tyrant husband next appears,

  With awful and contracted brow;

  No more a lover's form he wears:

  Her slave's become her sovereign now.11

  Such mandates were echoed by other males who set themselves up as experts. In his comprehensive History of Women, published in 1779, William Alexander listed, not uncritically, the judicial exclusions to which they were subjected. ‘We allow a woman to sway our sceptre, but by law and custom we debar her from every other government but that of her own family,’ he observed, ‘as if there were not a public employment between that of superintending the kingdom, and the affairs of her own kitchen, which could be managed by the genius and capacity of women.’12 Historically, women had been condemned to an unenviable role, ‘for the most part, but improperly, or slightly educated; and at all times kept in a state of dependence, by the restrictions of a severe legislation’.13 There were grounds for optimism, however, added the Scottish surgeon in a typically enlightened gesture. Women had begun as ‘slaves’, but society was advancing, and progress always went hand in glove with improvements in the status of women – it was, indeed, a litmus test of the civilizing process.14

  Sentiments abounded which sound slighting, if not contemptuous or downright misogynistic:

  That bold, independent, enterprising spirit, which is so much admired in boys, should not, when it happens to discover itself in the other sex, be encouraged, but suppressed. Girls should be taught to give up their opinions betimes, even if they should know themselves to be in the right.

  This pronouncement, surprising though it might seem, came from the pen of a woman, Hannah More.15 Other writers – and not only men – endorsed the gendered status quo, deeming it ordained by God and Nature. ‘You must lay it down for a Foundation in general,’ dogmatized the Earl of Halifax in his Advice to a Daughter (1688), ‘that there is Inequality in the Sexes, and that for the better Oeconomy of the World, the Men, who were to be the Lawgivers, had the larger share of Reason bestow'd upon them.’16 Men were thus not merely on top, but their superiority lay in an unequal divine apportioning of that essential Enlightenment quality, reason. ‘Women are only children of a larger growth,’ ribbed a fellow peer, Lord Chesterfield: ‘they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit, but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never in my life knew one that had it, or who reasoned or acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together.’17 Others, while avoiding such insults, nevertheless colluded in their underlying assumptions. Hannah More again, who penned Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1779), held that the ‘real’ aim of the education of girls should be to make them ‘good daughters, good wives, good mistresses, good members of society and good Christians’.18 ‘Keep your knowledge of Latin a dead secret,’ Sir William Hamilton alerted his niece when launching her into fashionable society: ‘a lady's being learned is commonly looked upon as great fault.’19 Such advice was given by men and women alike, in the conviction that they had a lady's true interests at heart.

  Many bridled at such humiliations. ‘We Live and Dye,’ ventured Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in 1663, ‘as if we were produced from Beasts, rather than from Men.’20 ‘There is no part of the world where our sex is treated with so much contempt as England,’ observed Lady Mary Wortley Montagu a couple of generations later; ‘we are educated in the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason.’21 Given the smug rhetoric praising British liberty over oriental despotism, it is richly ironic that, domiciled in Constantinople as the wife of the British ambassador, she concluded that Turkish ladies were freer than their English counterparts. Envying those she befriended at the baths,22 Lady Mary contrasted the female solidarity she saw there to London's backbiting tea parties. Polygamy notwithstanding, Turkish women enjoyed some freedom on account of the veil, that ‘perpetual Masquerade’ which ‘gives them entire Liberty of following their Inclinations without Danger of Discovery’.23 Wryly, she saw herself as the captive one, imprisoned as she was in the ‘machine’ – her stays, within which the local women assumed her Lord had caged her.24

  Lady Mary's resentment towards the conspiracy of conventions perpetuating female subservience was widely shared. Like Jane Austen later, Judith Drake, author of an Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696) – which had gone through five editions by 1750 – observed that nothing could truly be learned about women from books, because their authors were typically men, and ‘as men are parties against us their evidence may justly be rejected’. Citing nevertheless the authority of ‘some learned Men’, sh
e countered that ‘all Souls are equal, and alike, and that consequently there is no such distinction, as Male and Female Souls’. Thus, ‘how falsely we are deem'd, by the Men, [to be] wanting in that Solidity of Sense which they so vainly value themselves upon… Our Souls are as perfect as theirs, and the Organs they depend on are generally more refined.’25

  Both ideologically and practically, women were thus discriminated against in the Georgian century. There was nothing new in that, although, some feminists argue, such prejudices were being intensified by an idealization of feminine virtues and sensibilities, which set them on a pedestal, and by fresh attempts (discussed below) to ground ‘separate spheres’ in biology. Collective male opinion certainly enjoined ladylikeness, with James Thomson lecturing the ‘British Fair’ on their duties:

  Well-order'd Home Man's best Delight to make;

  And by submissive Wisdom, modest skill,

  With every gentle Care-eluding Art,

  To raise the Virtues, animate the bliss,

  Even charm the Pains to something more than Joy

  And sweeten all the Toils of human Life:

  This be the female Dignity and Praise.26

  Too much should not be made of such prescriptions, however, for in many respects Enlightenment culture was quite women-friendly. There is manifest, if uneven, evidence of a general softening of patriarchy, in actuality though not in black-letter law. Expectations among the educated regarding courtship, engagement and marriage and parental behaviour towards children, were all undergoing that sea change which Lawrence Stone has styled the rise of ‘affective individualism’, the move from patriarchal distance and deference towards greater intimacy and even equality.27 Despite the obdurate inequality of the law, marriage became idealized in terms of affable companionship, and presented as a mutual exchange. ‘Husband and wife are always together and share the same society,’ gasped the Prussian visitor von Archenholz: ‘it is the rarest thing to meet the one without the other. They pay all their visits together. It would be more ridiculous to do otherwise in England than it would be to go everywhere with your wife in Paris.’28