Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Locke's views proved exceptionally influential – ‘Mr Lock's excellent Treatise of Education, is known to every Body,’ stated Chambers' Cyclopaedia as early as 1728.27 Three-quarters of a century later, Some Thoughts concerning Education had come out in at least 25 English, 16 French, 3 German, 6 Italian, 1 Swedish and 2 Dutch editions. His faithful follower, Isaac Watts, held that his theories on government and education had together ‘laid the Foundations of true Liberty, and the Rules of Just Restraint for the younger and elder Years of Man’.28 With a nod at Locke, James Talbott urged founders of charity schools to pay particular attention to infants, since their minds resembled ‘blank Paper, or smooth Wax… capable of any Impression’,29 and John Clarke's Essay upon the Education of Youth in Grammar-schools (1720) likewise endorsed his psychological approach: the only book on the subject ‘worth the Perusal’, he insisted, was ‘Mr Locke's’.30 Such views, such acclaim, were everywhere. Indeed, pedagogics became all the rage: a staggering 200 educational treatises were published in English between 1762 and 1800.31

  Locke proved amazingly influential over enlightened educationalists. As already noted, the Whig Catharine Macaulay echoed him, arguing for unisex education. She called on parents to reject ‘the absurd notion, that the education of females should be of an opposite kind to that of males’ – they should give the same education to both. ‘Let your children be brought up together; let their sports and studies be the same; let them enjoy, in the constant presence of those who are set over them, all that freedom which innocence renders harmless, and in which Nature rejoices.’32

  Staunch patriot that she was, she opposed swaddling as a French habit.33 Children should be fed with fruit, eggs, vegetables and little meat – ‘the taste of flesh is not natural to the human palate’. Sugar was bad (‘Nature never intended to deprive us of our teeth’); ‘warm liquors, warm beds, and warm nightcaps’ were out, cold baths and ‘hardy habits’ in. Mothers should not overdress infants, never put girls in stays, nor let them wear shoes or socks. Baby talk was banned. With heavy irony, breastfeeding was also ruled out: how could ‘a fine lady’ possibly be expected to give up ‘all her amusements’ merely to ‘nourish her offspring with wholesome food’?34

  Other educationalists, while singing Locke's praises, put slants of their own on his theories, especially after the appearance of Rousseau's Émile in 1762. ‘In 1765… I formed a strong desire to educate my son according to the system of Rousseau,’ recalled Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the Lunar Society member and inventor.35 The experiment, however, proved a disaster. Little Dick (predictably) grew unmanageable: ‘I found myself entangled in difficulties with regard to my child's mind and temper,’ the father had to admit: ‘It was difficult to urge him to any thing that did not suit his fancy’ – and even the Genevan guru criticized the results when he saw them.36 Evidence of Rousseau's influence remained, however, in Edgeworth's monumental Practical Education (1798), co-written with his daughter Maria,37 which stressed learning by doing, and promoted technical, scientific and practical instruction – education that was in the widest sense ‘experimental’.38

  Like Locke, the Edgeworths held that the infant should be treated as a rational being, ‘lured sympathetically to think for itself, and kindled to delight in the development of its intellectual powers’. Children should be spurred to speak and act freely; games should teach dexterity, toys should be instructive and practical, and attention held by sympathy. Memory should be trained not by cramming but by ‘well arranged associations’, and the teacher should encourage the child ‘to generalise his ideas, and to apply his observations and his principles’.39 The ideal ‘school’ would be a household upon an estate, complete with pets and farm animals.

  For the Edgeworths, all education worth the name must rest on a true – that is, Lockean – psychology. Sidelining textbook learning, they maintained that what counted was the development of talents and the ripening of judgement, intellectual and moral. Nothing was to be left to chance; the learning environment was to be carefully regulated and contact with servants monitored, lest children catch ‘awkward and vulgar tricks’.40

  Practical Education went beyond Locke in some respects, notably in its accent on science and handiwork. Edgeworth had early ‘amused [himself] with mechanics’,41 and all through his life he dabbled with improved carriages and communications – exemplary enlightened projects. Signally silent on ladylike ‘accomplishments’ – and religion, too42 – the authors would have a girl learn mechanics and chemistry rather than, as Rousseau favoured, dressing dolls; she should become ‘a good oeconomist, a good mistress, as well as a good mother of a family’.43

  Edgeworth père et fille practised what they preached. They studied the growth of Maria's numerous younger siblings and, rather remarkably, they conducted experiments on Peter the ‘wild boy’. Caught in the woods outside Hanover, Germany in 1724, Peter – young, dumb and animal-like – had been brought to England and placed under the tutelage of Dr John Arbuthnot, who undertook to educate him and study his development. Practical Education describes the psychological experiments the Edgeworths performed upon Peter, who was by then quite an old man, in order to put the nature/nurture controversy to the test. While he had ‘all his senses in remarkable perfection’, Peter could only articulate ‘imperfectly a few words, in particular King George’.44 Experiments were devised to gauge his idiocy, and attempts made to activate his faculties by disrupting his ‘automatic habits’.45 For instance, in a daily routine, after Peter fetched water, the Edgeworth children would tip it out of the pail and replace it with a shilling – but all he ever did was to repeat the chore.46 Tests like that were essential to the aim of their father and elder sister to make education an ‘experimental science’.47

  No mere theorist, Richard Edgeworth was warmly committed to education's social mission. Advocating universal schooling for Ireland, he condemned the blinkered attitudes of those who feared that mass literacy would prove a timebomb. Instruction would not only mend the habits of the poor, it would make them more law-abiding: of 3,000 boys educated at the Gloucester Sunday school, he pointed out, only one had turned to crime.48

  The Edgeworths and others in late Enlightenment circles made a religion of education. Richard's son-in-law, the radical physician Thomas Beddoes, enthused over giving children ‘rational toys’ – chemicals, wood for carpentry, scientific instruments and simple machines to take to bits. Citing Thomas Day's slightly shocking view that ‘the soul of a child… essentially resides in his senses’,49 Beddoes endorsed Locke's experientialism. Concepts not derived from the senses (for instance, hellfire) were meaningless, and parrot learning a tool of despotism, a form of brain-washing designed to implant conformity. Proper education was vital for ‘humanizing the minds of the people. Upon this the welfare of civil society immediately depends.’50

  One logical consequence of Beddoes's thinking was universal education, as advocated in his Extract of a Letter on Early Instruction (1792). But on the execution of this matter the enlightened were hardly of a mind. Though Nonconformists were ardent educators, they adamantly opposed state-run schooling, lest that buttress the Church of England monopoly. Here, Priestley took on the crusty Revd John Brown.51 In his Thoughts on Civil Liberty, Licentiousness and Faction (1765), Brown had commended uniform Anglican instruction for the nation on the model of the revered Sparta.52 What Brown desired, Priestley deplored. Doubtless, standardized state education was best for maintaining the status quo – but that was precisely what the Dissenter detested! How could society truly profit by standing still? ‘Were the best formed state in the world to be fixed in its present condition,’ Priestley explained, ‘I make no doubt but that in a course of time it would be the worst.’53 Like John Stuart Mill later, he gloried in difference: ‘The various character of the Athenians was certainly preferable to the uniform character of the uniform character of Spartans.’54 And diversity demanded educational pluralism.

  Moreover, the British educational system had b
een designed to educate men for the Church. Circumstances had changed, however, and boys now needed to be trained for an ‘active and civil life’, particularly in commerce, and for this the modern curriculum should be geared to history and ‘civil policy’.55 Education for the lower orders should be strictly functional, however. Sounding oddly like the Sunday school pioneer Hannah More, whose rule was ‘no writing for the poor’,56 Priestley entertained limited horizons for labourers’ children, looking to schooling to teach them reading, writing and arithmetic while also keeping them docile: ‘Those who have the poorest prospects in life can be taught contentment in their station, and a firm belief in the wisdom and goodness of Providence.’57

  Dissenting academies won Priestley's praise as the ideal form of higher education, especially as their atmosphere grew increasingly liberal. It was said in 1711 of the Gloucester Academy, where the textbooks included Locke's Essay, that its tutor, Samuel Jones, allowed his students ‘all imaginable liberty of making objections against his opinion’. Teaching at the Kibworth and Hinckley academies from 1715, John Jennings also introduced his students to Locke, and encouraged ‘the greatest freedom of inquiry’. In teaching divinity, remarked Philip Doddridge while a Kibworth student, ‘Mr Jennings… is sometimes a Calvinist, sometimes an Arminian, and sometimes a Baxterian, as truth and evidence determine him’. Doddridge upheld the same liberal tradition in his own Northampton academy,58 which was continued after his death in 1751 by Caleb Ashworth at Daventry. When Priestley arrived in 1752 he found Ashworth open-minded: ‘The general plan of our studies,’ he wrote, ‘was exceedingly favourable to free inquiry’, for the two tutors ‘were of different opinions; Dr Ashworth taking the orthodox side of every question, and Mr Clark, the sub-tutor, that of heresy.’59

  As to the best mode of education, no consensus held. Locke, who loathed his six years at Westminster under the sadistic Dr Busby, favoured personal tutors; some preferred the old endowed public or grammar schools, others the new commercial academies. For the poor there were dame and charity schools and, by the end of the century, Sunday schools.60 Enlightened thought, however, united in criticizing the ancient English universities, particularly Oxford, which was damned by alumni like Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon, who jeered at the fellows’ ‘dull and deep potations’.61 In 1715, at government request, Humphrey Prideaux submitted a reform scheme. Condemning life fellowships and the majority of tutors – ‘I could scarce committ a dog to their charge’ – he urged that a ‘Drone Hall’ be endowed for superannuated dons.62 Despite the modernization of the curriculum and rationalization of examinations at Cambridge, university reform came to little in England, however, at a time when in Scotland Edinburgh and Glasgow were going from strength to strength. It was sites beyond academe which supported and stimulated enlightenment in England.

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  Alongside the welter of manuals and self-improvement texts,63 a key development at this time lay in the virtual invention of juvenile literature, meeting the demand of enlightened parents and tutors for books combining instruction, edification and rational amusement. Suggestive perhaps of Ariès's denial of ‘childhood’ in traditional society, writings or games created specifically for children hardly existed up to the Restoration: much of what, from today's viewpoint, might be mistaken as writing for children – fairy stories or chapbooks, for instance – formed part of popular culture at large.64 In the eighteenth century, however, child-oriented books became common, bearing the Enlightenment stamp; and some entrepreneurs specialized in tailoring print capitalism for children, notably John Newbery, publisher of Tom Telescope (1761) and Goody Two-Shoes (1765).65

  Reflecting the enlightened view that books needed to entertain and edify all at once, Goody Two-Shoes was crammed with messages like

  he that will thrive

  must rise by five.

  As with Hogarth's idle and industrious apprentices, in the new children's literature the good got on while the bad came to sticky ends.66 Violence was condemned, especially cruelty to animals;67 Locke taught children not to be nasty while, in his Treatise on the Education of Children and Youth (1679), the devout Isaac Watts insisted that they should not be allowed to ‘set up Cocks to be banged with Cudgels’: children who tormented animals turned into tyrants.68

  Indeed, paralleling its reconfiguration of the child, the Enlightenment rethought the status of animals and man's relations to them.69 Traditional agrarian society had instilled no-nonsense views which were ratified by Christian doctrine. Man was lord of Creation, because he alone was endowed with an immortal soul; God had granted Adam dominion over the animals; man might tame them, harness them, hunt them, kill, cook and eat them.70

  Things changed during the long eighteenth century. For affluent town-dwellers, contact with the animal world grew more attenuated: they might now never see animals being born, broken in or slaughtered; indeed, they might not even ride horseback any longer but rattle around in carriages. The educated came to relate to animals, not through working with them but through mind and heart. For one thing, the new science taught that it was society's right, duty and pleasure to investigate that Nature from which it was now becoming further and further divorced. Bug-hunting and beetle-collecting became fashionable, and animals were increasingly sacrificed for scientific research, the Revd Stephen Hales, for instance, performing pioneering – and extremely gruesome – experiments upon various species, from frogs to horses.71 While such pursuits could involve vivisecting or dissecting, any qualms they might arouse were stilled by the thought that it was all in the service of the nobler goal of understanding Nature and Nature's God.

  Urban society was not, however, only intellectually curious: it manifested new sensibilities. Along with children, slaves, noble savages, orphans, the blind, deaf and dumb, and fallen women, animals became objects of sympathy, and the philanthropic thrust for sparing their sufferings came, significantly, not from prelates or Parliament, magnates or the masses, but from the educated professional bourgeoisie. Casual violence – ‘swinging cats’ and other heartless pastimes – was targeted in Hogarth's Four Stages of Cruelty print sequence of 1751, and cruel sports like bear-baiting and cock-fighting came under attack.

  As workplace ties with animals dwindled, so a radically new claim emerged: humans and animals were basically the same. Forget the soul, both had feelings. ‘The question is not,’ explained Jeremy Bentham, ‘Can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’72 Pets were humanized, Bentham himself keeping a ‘beautiful pig’ which would ‘grunt contentedly as he scratched its back and ears’. And Sterne's Uncle Toby, for his part, could not hurt a fly that had ‘buzz'd about his nose’.73 Enlightened thinking thus led to a distinct softening of attitudes towards the animal world. Versifying Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, James Thomson expressed pity:

  But let not on thy Hook the tortur'd worm

  Convulsive twist in agonizing Folds;

  Which, by rapacious Hunger swallowed deep,

  Gives, as you tear it from the bleeding Breast

  Of the weak helpless uncomplaining Wretch,

  Harsh Pain and Horror to the tender Hand…74

  while Soame Jenyns and others supposed brutes would enjoy an afterlife.75

  Animal experiments were being ‘published every day with ostentation’ by doctors bent on extending the ‘arts of torture’, complained Samuel Johnson in 1758.76 And they included, he jibed, those whose ‘favourite amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive’.77 Such experimentation became crucial to this science versus sentiment dilemma, notably in the artist Joseph Wright's depiction of An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), a painting designed to excite compassion. Sacrificed by an itinerant lecturer to demonstrate the vacuum, a breathless bird, trapped in a belljar, flutters: Will it live or will it die? Some of the audience are held rapt by the demonstration of the gas laws, others shudder in horror. What Wright's composition also symbolized was the new separation of man and Nature. Traditionally th
e icon of the Holy Ghost, the dove is now isolated, physically and emblematically, from the humans by the experimental apparatus.78

  Animals thus became both ‘good causes’ and also marks of the uptake of enlightened ideas. Thomas Day, that omnipurpose enlightened man, championed dumb beasts. Believing that the breaking-in they received was both cruel and unnecessary – treat an animal well and it would need no severity – he tried out his theory on a colt. He had no more success, however, than he did with Rousseau's theories on how to train a wife. The horse bolted, throwing him from the saddle, and the humanitarian died from his injuries, the English Enlightenment's authentic martyr.79

  Educationalists were insistent that children should adopt new attitudes towards animals – and that animals themselves could even teach lessons. Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories Designed for the Amusement and Instruction of Young People (1786) pointed, for example, to ‘the exact regularity with which they discharge the offices of cleanliness and economy’. The idle might be admonished by the bee, a false servant by a dog.80 The bestselling Tom Telescope, John Newbery's children's science primer, urged compassion: stealing bird's eggs or tormenting fledglings was barbaric. Nor must kindness be but caprice: Tom told of a neighbour who treated creatures well so long as they amused him, but who also raged ‘at poor children who were shivering at his gate, and sent them away empty-handed’.81