Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Such status distinctions formed the reflexes of enlightened minds. ‘A Man of Polite Imagination,’ held the Spectator, ‘is let into a great many Pleasures that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving.’30 Taste would tell – indeed, it had become, teased James Miller's The Man of Taste (1735), the true badge of distinction: ‘fine ladies and gentlemen dress with taste… the painters paint with taste’.31 David Hume for his part addressed ‘the elegant part of mankind, who are not immersed in mere animal life’.32 ‘Refinement and delicacy’, wrote Mary Anne Radcliffe, elevated ladies above the ‘poor and abject’, oblivious to manners.33 Blunter still was the poet William Shenstone: ‘the Vulgar are generally in the wrong’.34

  In this parade of discrimination, the prospect of being judged vulgar was insupportable. The Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid naturally distinguished the likes of himself from the mob: ‘The vulgar are satisfied with knowing the fact… But a philosopher is impatient to know how this event is produced, to account for it, or assign its cause.’35 But imagine his horror when he found himself hoisted by his own petard: rebuked by Hume's criticism, ‘to my great humiliation,’ he conceded,‘I find myself classed with the vulgar’.36 It had, of course, long been feared that ‘peasantry’, like smallpox, was catching, Locke fretting lest domestics pass on silly whimsies about goblins and witches, thereby imprinting false associations of ideas (see chapter 9).37 Equally worrying, the masses might mimic polite culture and, perhaps by reading novels, ‘indulge in dangerous dreams of pre-eminence’:38

  And if the rustics grew refined,

  Who would the humble duties mind?

  They might, from scribbling odes and letters,

  Proceed to dictate to their betters.39

  Overall, then, the definition of the ‘people’ lay in the eye of the beholder, and there was a repertoire of ‘peoples’ to enact varied ideological roles, be they as paragons or pariahs. If in their benevolent dreams the enlightened liked to imagine a perfected populace, it was strictly on their own terms; and in the short run, the people were portrayed mainly as problems.

  The enlightened temper was upbeat, and solutions to the people problem presented themselves to the sanguine. Hopes were vested in prospects of progress: today's vulgar might be tomorrow's polite. In the 1780s Mrs Thrale thus pointed to the improvement in ‘female manners’ perceptible since the turn of the century. When she read out the Spectator to her pre-teen daughters, they burst out laughing at its ‘vulgarisms’; most tellingly, ‘the maid who was dressing my hair’ joined in. If, seventy years on, even a servant might seem more suave than Mr Spectator himself, was that not reassuring indeed? The Gentleman's Magazine concurred in noting how vulgarity of speech was quite out – only ‘the lowest class’ now said ‘sweat’. ‘We are every day growing more delicate,’ ironized its author, ‘and, without doubt, at the same time more virtuous; and shall, I am confident, become the most refined and polite people in the world.’40 If peasantry was catching, why not politeness too?

  History hinted that all might be riding the civilization escalator. Looking back in 1801, the Revd Richard Warner bemoaned how ‘the sports which sufficiently satisfied our ancestors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ had been ‘the pranks of mountebanks, the feats of jugglers, tumblers, and dancers, the jests of itinerant mimes or mummers, and the dangerous amusement of the quintane, diversified occasionally by… the elegant pastime of bull-baiting’. In the past, even superior people had dabbled in coarse fun. Fortunately, all had changed: ‘as national manners gradually refined, the ideas of elegance were proportionally enlarged, and publick amusements insensibly approximated to the taste and splendour which they at present exhibit’.41

  If time itself was thus educative, schooling would speed things up. Initiatives for mass schooling largely came from Christian philanthropists – the charity school movement in the early decades of the eighteenth century and Sunday schools towards its close.42 But, as seen in the previous chapter, enlightened thinking played its part, too – as in the schemes of education devised by Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster which trail-blazed that ‘steam engine of the moral world’, the mechanized monitorial method of teaching. Deployed in a division of labour, student monitors were to funnel instruction down from a single teacher to the pupils. ‘Such is the intellectual organ,’ wrote Bell in 1797, ‘which puts the whole scholastic machine in motion; such… the principle on which every schoolroom, factory, workhouse, poorhouse, prison house, the administration of the poor laws, and every public or even private institution of any magnitude should be conducted.’43 The entrepreneur Robert Owen's new model society at New Lanark hinged upon enlightened faith in popular perfectibility and the malleability of man. That atheist follower of Locke and Helvétius laid on extensive schooling facilities designed to mould his workforce into happy hands.44

  Time and teaching might thus prove effective. Such processes, however, needed a helping hand. Energies had to be invested in discrediting and suppressing ‘brutal’ habits, to render the herd more restrained. Dissociating themselves from popular pastimes now deemed ‘vulgar’, élites set about cleaning up or closing down such violent amusements as bear-baiting, newly declared offensive to reason, morality, sobriety, law and order.45 Progressive opinion denounced plebeian drunkenness, fornication and waste, and attempted to promote a new self-respect among the labouring classes, to fit them to the new manufacturing economy. In his Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery (1783), published after local food riots, the ceramics manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood, a man whose ‘eleventh commandment’ was ‘Thou shalt not be idle’, denounced popular dissipations and detailed the tangible improvements industry would offer to the working population, if they cooperated and gave up inebriety, poor timekeeping, fecklessness and the leisure preference.46 His physician friend Erasmus Darwin campaigned against the evils of drink, as did his fellow radical, physician Thomas Beddoes.47

  Anti-alcohol propaganda was produced by many ‘friends of the people’. James Parkinson, a doctor with impeccably enlightened credentials – he was a leading member of the radical London Corresponding Society – wrote The Way to Health (1802) as a handbill intended for display in public places to be read by the labouring poor.48 He spoke man to man – that is, enlightened expert to hayseed: ‘As most of you are men who benefit society by your labours, gaining your livelihood by the sweat of your brows, you will not be surprised that I commence my instructions, with a few remarks on Exercise and Labour.’49 Manual work was framed within a pastoral vision: honest toil would endow labourers with sound constitutional health.50 Quoting John Armstrong, the sentimental Scottish medical poet, Parkinson endorsed the view that ‘By health the peasant's toil is well repaid’, for ‘strength is increased by being used, and lost by being too much hoarded’.51

  Drunks were thus appealed to in print, as were those who had fallen foul of the law. As explained earlier, enlightened models of causality and personality suggested new notions of blame and guilt. Certain groups like witches, who had traditionally been vilified, were now cast as victims. That was true also of whores, increasingly depicted as products of circumstance and hence as objects of sympathy.

  Prostitution was widely debated. Pondering the culpability of streetwalkers, the magistrate John Fielding demanded in 1758, ‘What must become of the Daughters of working widows, where Poverty and Illiterateness conspire to expose them to every Temptation?’ Answer: ‘They become Prostitutes from Necessity even before their Passions can have any Share of their Guilt.’52 What alternative did they have? ‘Scant are the means of subsistence allowed to the female sex… and those so much engrossed by our sex; so small the profits… and so difficult often the power of obtaining employment.’ Employers were loath to hire city girls, preferring the exploitable innocence of those up from the country.53 Punitiveness only made bad worse. As Jonas Hanway wrote in his Defects of Police (1775):

  Treat a woman, young in age, and not old in sin, as a felon, her sense of sham
e will be extinguished: she will be tempted to look on herself as an outcast of human nature: she will continue to sin without control: her heart will grow petrified: she will grow indifferent to all events, caring not how soon, or in what manner, she leaves a world, where she finds so little mercy, and such unrelenting severity against her.54

  Enlightened thinking thus deflected blame away from the individual harlot. In his A Modest Defence of the Public Stews (1724), Bernard de Mandeville maintained that, in utilitarian terms, commercial sex was a lesser evil in view of male sexual drives, and the only way to prevent the molestation of ‘virtuous’ women.55 The predominant image, however, was that of whore as victim: neither intrinsically virtuous nor vicious, she was a child of society, typically pictured, as in Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress (1730–31), as a guileless girl who had come up to the wicked city only to be exploited by hardened bawds and heartless clients. The enlightened framework was thus one not of personal guilt and atonement but of social problems and engineered solutions.56

  So what was to be done? Enlightened minds strategically came up with institutional answers: not punishment but rehabilitation, not whippings but reformatories. London's Magdalen Hospital was set up in 1758 for just this purpose, aiming to remove whores from risk, teach them discipline and an honest trade, and then place them in a situation.57 Just as children could be educated, so problem people could be retrained.

  In that reconditioning process, the enlightened physician often cast himself as possessing a brief extending to the diagnosis and treatment of social disorders. In a sick society riddled with idiocies and injustices, it was the upright doctor, according to enlightened figures like Thomas Beddoes, who was best placed to prescribe for the people's good58 – witness his The History of Isaac Jenkins, and of the Sickness of Sarah his Wife, and their Three Children (1792).59

  In this improving tale pitched at the labouring poor a Shropshire labourer's family is overtaken by illness. Unable to afford the doctor, the Jenkinses buy some medicine from the local quack. When they can no longer pay him, the huckster stops calling – ‘your quack doctors’, asides the narrator, ‘care not a farthing whether they cure or kill, all they want is to fleece those that know no better’.60

  Luckily, Surgeon Langford rides past one day, en route to attend the parson, injured (in a typical enlightened anti-clerical touch!) while out shooting. Langford gets talking to Sarah, hears that the children are sick, treats them for free and listens to her tale of woe. Her husband has taken to drink. This lapse, interpolates the preachy physician, stems not from inherent depravity but from a terrible accident which has befallen the family (some louts caused a horse to bolt and it trampled the Jenkinses’ eldest son to death). The grief-stricken Isaac is now drowning his sorrows, and the family suffers. While condemning the ‘heinous practice of drunkenness’, the narrator judges that Isaac is to be ‘pitied’ not ‘blamed’: ‘the poor are well disposed, and do wrong oftener for want of knowing better than from wickedness’.61

  The doctor has a heart-to-heart with Isaac, prescribes some medicines and shames him back to work. A loan from Langford enables the family to pay off the publican. Obeying doctor's orders, Isaac recovers – unlike his nasty master Simcox, who (in another class-oriented barb) comes to a disgustingly wretched end, his debauchery leading to death from dropsy. All ends happily, with Isaac learning the difference between ‘plenty with sobriety… and beggary with drunkenness and discontent’.62 An ‘epilogue’ for the ‘refined reader’ urges that, in the light of Locke, the poor should be viewed not as scoundrels but as victims of circumstances, capable of coming good, given proper care and attention.63 The parable thus teaches the rescue of miscreants, not through grace but through enlightened succour, and thanks not to priests but to physicians.64

  In practice, the bottom line lay in perspectives and programmes aimed at those whose destitution was judged likely to prove a drain on the nation or a flashpoint of disturbance. What was to be done about poverty? Reason looked askance at those aspects of Christ's teachings which saw holiness in the beggar and which took no heed for the morrow. Why reward laziness? Give thoughtlessly, warned Joseph Priestley in a fundraising sermon for his newly founded local hospital, the Leeds Infirmary, and ‘with the best intention in the world, you may be doing nothing better than encouraging idleness, profligacy and imposture’.65 The natural law rational individualism advanced by Locke held that each had a duty to take care of himself and of his own, and better his condition.66 Long before Lady Thatcher, Christian economists quoted St Paul: ‘if any would not work, neither should he eat’,67 while Mr Spectator's merchant friend Sir Andrew Freeport considered hand-outs to beggars worse than useless, for they would be confirmed in their idleness.68

  This is not to say that enlightened élites rejected charity – quite the reverse. Giving could be a duty, indeed a ‘luxury’ to be enjoyed by superior souls.69 Yet it should never be indiscriminate; it had to be properly targeted and calibrated; and it must produce results, neither impoverishing the donor nor debauching the recipient. Addressing the workings of charity, the enlightened analysed impulse and action, causes and consequences, weighing beneficence alongside value for money. If it sprang purely from the heart, philanthropy could all too easily be counter-productive, demoralizing and a prey to fraud. Yet charity was something that had to be dispensed, rather than dispensed with. It was, after all, the cardinal virtue, the armorial bearings of genteel humanity, a generosity soaring above sordid miserliness and the institutionalized dribblings of the parish Poor Law. Herein the Georgians sought to steer between the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of calculation, while guiding a generous heart with a heedful head.

  On this, as on so many other matters, the enlightened were nothing if not self-congratulatory. The generosity of donors, stated the Leeds Infirmary's Annual Report in 1784, proved that ‘the charity of Mankind… has been progressive, and reflects peculiar Lustre on the present Period’.70 In giving freely, Priestley held, we ‘reap all the advantages of the real refinements and true polish of the present age’;71 and, in a similar vein, another hospital fundraiser, William Watts, urged fellow citizens to be ‘charitable in an age, and nation, and instance, in which Charity abounds’.72 The East Midlands could lead the world: ‘In this, and every other humane, polite, charitable, and Christian, regard, may the very respectable county of Leicester ever, under the divine influence, be an example and praise to this land of Liberty and social Virtue.’73 Other arguments also carried weight. The infirmary, so Priestley pointed out, was ‘the cheapest of all charities, the most great good being done with the least expense’.74

  There was thus a role for rational philanthropy. But that had to be set in the context of another reality: the parish Poor Laws, calls on which were mounting ominously. Why did poverty persist, worsen even, despite prosperity and that institution? Might these laws perhaps create or exacerbate the very disease they claimed to cure? Should then the Poor Laws be reformed? Enlightened England brought fierce controversy over the running sore of poverty in a flourishing capitalist economy.

  Since Elizabethan times, England had been proud of its national statutory Poor Laws – unlike Catholic Europe and Calvinist Scotland, where alms distribution was left in the hands of the Church.75 As the 1662 Law of Settlement confirmed, responsibility lay with the parish. A destitute person had the right to outdoor relief in his parish and no other. The flipside of the settlement was the entitlement to remove: a parish had no responsibility for those without a settlement there, and the vagrant poor, old and sick were whipped away.

  Early in the eighteenth century, overseers of the poor seem to have been fairly generous with doles: so long as labour remained in short supply, it made good sense to husband it. But then numbers and rates soared. In 1700 the annual cost was around £600,000; by 1776 it had shot up to £1,500,000, and then it went through the roof to £4.2 million in 1803.

  The search for explanations and solutions got tied in knots because, at eve
ry level, public attitudes to the poor were so conflicting. The able-bodied were often blamed for their own fate. ‘When wages are good,’ Defoe groused of the ‘undeserving’,

  they won't work any more than from hand to mouth; or if they do work they spend it in riot or luxury, so that it turns to no account to them. Again as soon as trade receives a check, what follows? Why then they grow clamorous and noisy, mutinous and saucy another way, and in the meantime they disperse, run away, and leave their families upon the parishes, and wander about in beggary and distress.76

  In his An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), Henry Fielding levelled similar indictments. The principal causes of crime were the ‘luxurious’ habits of the ‘lowest sort of people’, along with maladministration of the Poor Laws. Trade booms and the commercialization of leisure had created vicious tastes and expectations among the poor. ‘To be born for no other purpose than to consume the fruits of the earth is the privilege… of very few,’ he grimaced. Gin and gaming were sapping industry, while the Poor Laws, compromised by administrative bungling and misplaced giving, made bad worse.77 ‘The miseries of the labouring poor,’ Frederick Morton Eden later pontificated, ‘arise, less from the scantiness of their income… than from their own improvidence and unthriftiness.’78 Only certain cadres, in other words, qualified for the new enlightened status of ‘victim’: for most, reason required responsibility.

  To encourage that virtue, many therefore stipulated that wages must be held low. ‘The only way to make the poor industrious,’ ruled Sir William Temple, ‘is to lay them under the necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from rest and sleep.’ ‘Everyone but an idiot,’ echoed Arthur Young, a century on, ‘knows that the lower class must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.’79 The drawback with low-wage solutions, however, as was pointed out, was that they kept labourers at destitution's door: the slightest accident, illness or trade downswing would instantly turn a sturdy family penurious, and hence publicly chargeable.80