Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Bentham entertained a godlike vision of the power of his new science: J. B. the most ambitious of the ambitious,’ he mused: ‘His empire – the empire he aspires to – extending to, and comprehending, the whole human race, in all places… at all future time.’138 His was a lifelong fantasy of mastery, to serve the cause of maximizing utility. ‘If it were possible to find a method of becoming master of everything which might happen to a certain number of men,’ he thus pondered:

  to dispose of everything around them so as to produce on them the desired impression, to make certain of their actions, of their connections, and of all the circumstances of their lives, so that nothing could escape, nor could oppose the desired effect, it cannot be doubted that a method of this kind would be a very powerful and a very useful instrument which governments might apply to various objects of the utmost importance.139

  Bentham did not merely dream of playing God, he turned utilitarianism into a secular religion. ‘I dreamt t'other night that I was a founder of a sect’, he wrote: ‘of course a personage of great sanctity and importance: it was called the sect of the Utilitarians.’140 In this, he was spot-on. Unlike most other figures in the eddying stream of the British Enlightenment, he had dependable and devoted disciples: legal reforms, notably the campaign to reduce capital statutes, were pursued by Samuel Romilly;141 his secretary (and St Paul), James Mill, a low-born Scot consumed with hatred of aristocratic corruption, developed Benthamite political thinking in a democratic direction;142 the artisan Francis Place – like Bentham, a violent atheist and a birth-controller – helped usher his master's Not Paul but Jesus (1823) through the press.143

  Utility, however, was no Benthamite monopoly – after all, the idea itself had emerged from various sources, including the Revd John Gay, Francis Hutcheson and Joseph Priestley. Of the theological utilitarians, the high priest was William Paley.144 His first book, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), destined to become a Cambridge set text, reveals the striking theological radicalism of the pre-1789 era. Slavery was ‘abominable tyranny’; inequality of property was an evil per se; and ‘it is a mistake to suppose that the rich man maintains his servants, tradesmen, tenants and labourers: the truth is, they maintain him’. There should be, he argued, a ‘complete toleration of all dissenters from the established church’, while the Oath of Allegiance ‘permits resistance to the king, when his ill behaviour or imbecility is such, as to make resistance beneficial to the community’. Not least he related the parable of the pigeons, which ridiculed the ‘paradoxical and unnatural’ distribution of property, ninety-nine out of a hundred birds ‘gathering all they got into a heap’ and keeping it for ‘one, and the weakest, perhaps worst pigeon of the flock’.145 Strong stuff from a Cambridge divine, and small surprise that in 1802 the Anti-Jacobin Review ‘hesitated not to affirm’ that in it ‘the most determined Jacobin might find a justification of his principles, and a sanction for his conduct’.146

  The ‘second Enlightenment’ decisively underwrote earlier commitments to freedom, toleration and constitutionality. Its thrust, however, lay in stressing the shortcomings rather than the success of the British socio-political order, and it pressed for the completion of commitments half-fulfilled. The aspirations and demands of this ‘Enlightenment within the Enlightenment’ were well summed up by the Manchester cotton manufacturer, Dissenter and political activist, Thomas Walker:

  [We do not seek] an equality of wealth and possessions… The equality insisted on by the friends of Reform is AN EQUALITY OF RIGHTS… that every person may be equally entitled to the protection and benefit of society; may equally have a voice in the election of those persons who make the laws… and may have a fair opportunity of exerting to advantage any talents he may possess. The rule is not ‘let all mankind be perpetually equal’ – God and nature have forbidden it. But ‘let all mankind start fair in the Race of life’.147

  Commonplace in the 1770s and 1780s, these views found wellwishers across a broad spectrum. By 1794, however, the time Walker was writing, they had become contentious.

  19

  PROGRESS

  Nature revolves, but man advances.

  EDWARD YOUNG1

  All well written books, that discuss the actions of men, are in reality so many histories of the progress of mind.

  THOMAS HOLCROFT2

  [W]e live but to improve.

  ANNIE WATT3

  No Man can pretend to set Bounds to the Progress that may yet be made in Agriculture and Manufacture… is it not much more natural and reasonable to suppose, that we are rather at the Beginning only, and just got within the Threshold, than that we are arrived at the ne plus ultra of useful Discoveries?

  JOSIAH TUCKER4

  [D]rink success to Philosophy and Trade.

  ERASMUS DARWIN5

  History is progressive, proclaimed enlightened activists in an ever-swelling chorus, as they crested the wave in an age of improvement.6 ‘Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally,’ commented Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.’7 Sights became fixed on the future – though not the Apocalypse of Christian eschatology but one end-on with the here and now. Indeed, the Enlightenment brought the birth of science fiction and the futurological novel – Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733), for instance, or the anonymous and none too chronologically inaccurate The Reign of George VI, 1900–1925 (1763).8

  The scent of progress was pervasive. The Anglican Edmund Law professed his faith in the ‘continual Improvement of the World in general’, while the Scot John Millar taught of how ‘one of the most remarkable differences between man and other animals consists in that wonderful capacity for the improvement of his faculties’.9 ‘Who even at the beginning of this century,’ asked Richard Price, fired by rational Dissent,

  would have thought, that, in a few years, mankind would acquire the power of subjecting to their wills the dreadful force of lightning, and of flying in aerostatic machines?… Many similar discoveries may remain to be made… and it may not be too extravagant to expect that (should civil governments throw no obstacles in the way) the progress of improvement will not cease till it has excluded from the earth most of its worst evils, and restored that Paradisiacal state which, according to the Mosaic History, preceded the present state.10

  Even ‘Population’ Malthus set off his demographic gloom against intellectual glory, celebrating ‘the great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years in natural philosophy… the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails’.11 In all this, self-improvement became a keynote. In his Letters from a Father to his Son (1796), John Aikin stressed how man was ‘an improvable being’, and (glaring daggers at Burke) countered ‘Declamations against improvement’ and the ‘Sneering manner of opposing’ by stressing how ‘Perfection’ was ‘attainable in civil institutions’.12

  Late Enlightenment belief in progress was, to be sure, a secular theodicy – progress was the opium of enlightenment – but as a piece of religiose myth-making, ‘all will be right’ was not complacent in precisely the same way as earlier Leibnizian ‘all is for the best’ optimism. The world, as Wollstonecraft explained, was not perfect yet: rather it was man's duty to perfect it, through criticism, reform, education, knowledge, science, industry and sheer energy. The stunning information revolution then in train would make all the difference: the temporal ‘second cause’ of advancement, proclaimed David Hartley, was ‘the diffusion of knowledge to all ranks and orders of men, to all nations, kindred, tongues, and peoples’, a progress which ‘cannot now be stopped, but proceeds ever with an accelerated velocity’.13 And all this optimism about the future, this dropping of ancestral fears about ‘forbidden knowledge’, was buoyed up by the conviction, in the thinking of the likes of Hartley, Price and Priestley, that Providence – the ‘first cause’ – guaranteed such developments,14 or, as suggested in the model of the Deist Erasmus Darwin,
social progress was underwritten by biological evolution at large.

  Progress was the universalization of ‘improvement’, that ultimate Georgian buzzword. The public got hooked on novelty. Landscapes, gardens, manufactures, manners, taste, art and literature – all were constantly talked up as ‘improving’, while advertisers puffed the ‘latest’ in sartorial or culinary elegance or the ‘modern method’ in commerce, and literary classics were modernized for the masses. Not all were sold on it – Swiftian satirists ridiculed novelty for novelty's sake – and for that very reason the public had to be endlessly reassured that change was truly educative, morally edifying and socially advantageous.15

  Traditional doubts about the past and the present were addressed and allayed by Gibbon, a man constitutionally sceptical of facile credos. Would not, as civic humanists feared, the calamities that had destroyed Rome recur in ‘this enlightened age’? No: the great ‘source of comfort and hope’, soothed the Decline and Fall, was the permanency of improvement. From savagery man had ‘gradually arisen to command the animals, to fertilize the earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure the heavens’. Such betterment had no doubt been ‘irregular’, with ‘vicissitudes of light and darkness’, yet the ‘experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes’ - since technical skills could never be lost, no people would ‘relapse into their original barbarism’. At bottom, therefore, mankind could ‘acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race’. Moreover, progress had no foreseeable limits, for, once made, gains were irreversible. ‘Observations on the Fall of the Empire in the West’, the long essay which rounded off the first half of Gibbon's history, explained that any new ‘Gothic’ invaders could succeed only by first assimilating modern achievements, not least military technology: ‘before they can conquer they must cease to be barbarians’.16 In short, by 1800, progress was the big idea, set to turn into the great panacea, or ignis fatuus, of Whiggery in Macaulay's ‘march of mind’ - and as such to be sent up by that enlightened tailender Thomas Love Peacock.17

  As already highlighted in chapter 6, science and positive knowledge were mighty generators of optimism. Over time, the culture of science spread more widely and rapidly, percolating down through society and rippling out into the provinces.18 While the Royal Society remained the nation's senior scientific society, further bodies were added in the capital, notably the Linnean Society of London (1788) and the Royal Institution (1799). The Royal Society of Edinburgh was set up in 1783, and its Irish counterpart, the Royal Irish Academy, in 1785. In the English regions science, Dissent and political reformism joined forces in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and in similar organizations in Manchester, Newcastle and other commercial and industrializing centres. Science was acclaimed as integral not just to utility but to the civilizing process. Launching a literary and philosophical society in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Unitarian minister William Turner underscored its cultural no less than its practical value: would not such societies ‘increase the pleasures and advantage of social intercourse’?19 The leading light in Manchester, Thomas Henry, similarly pronounced the pursuit of natural philosophy preferable to ‘the tavern, the gaming table, or the brothel’.20 To realize this vision of science as rational culture, the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester had been set up in 1781, including among its early promoters local physicians and manufacturers, and among its honorary members Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood.

  The most energetic of such gatherings embodying enlightened faith in science was the Lunar Society, which brought together likeminded luminaries from the West Midlands. Though, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Birmingham was still a small market town, rapid expansion followed; by 1760, it had already grown considerably, to 30,000 inhabitants, and in Matthew Boulton's Soho factory it gained a machine-tool works of international repute. William Hutton, later the author of a patriotic history of the city, found in Birmingham an ethos he had not encountered elsewhere: ‘I had been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake.’21

  From about 1765 a group of friends – leading industrialists, scientists, educators, Dissenting ministers and physicians – began to meet at Boulton's home, once a month at full moon, to discuss innovations in science and technology and the new industrial order they were instrumental in creating. ‘The association of Lunar members and their activities,’ it has been claimed, ‘shows a conscious shaping of their world and a deliberate application to solve the problems of industrializing England that fits ill the picture of classic harmony and Augustan balance which is, somehow, at the same time also regarded as characteristic of eighteenth-century England’ – or, more pithily, ‘a nation of Newtons and Lockes became a nation of Boultons and Watts’.22

  ‘Improvement’ was a label also often applied to the use of the land, serving as a codeword for capitalist farming, notably enclosure. The improving spirit in agriculture, discussed in chapter 13, was increasingly associated with science. In the introduction to his 600-page Phytologia (1800), Erasmus Darwin, for instance, expressed his regrets that ‘Agriculture and Gardening… continue to be only Arts, consisting of numerous detached facts and vague opinions, without a true theory to connect them’.23 This had to change. Those domains would truly progress only when made fully rational and businesslike, thanks to the teachings of political economy. ‘Pasturage cannot exist without property both in the soil and the herds which it nurtures,’ he insisted,

  and for the invention of arts, and production of tools necessary to agriculture, some must think, and others labour; and as the efforts of some will be crowned with greater success than that of others, an inequality of the ranks of society must succeed.24

  With capitalist agriculture being thus cast as rational, farming became managed as a form of manufacturing, with Robert Bakewell's fat sheep serving, rather like Newton's prism, as icons of enlightenment.25 The Leicestershire stockrearer explicitly bred sheep, cattle and pigs as meat-producing engines, selected so as to maximize expensive cuts and minimize bones and waste: animals were thus turned into machines.26

  As this example hints, if agriculture was celebrated – indeed, in Arthur Young's phrase, as ‘the greatest of all manufactures’27 – it was another branch of progress which now received the warmest praise: manufacturing. Progressives had long expressed their fascination with industry in the traditional meaning of skilled work, promoting the image of homo faber:

  These are thy blessings, Industry, rough power!

  Whom labour still attends, and sweat, and pain;

  Yet the kind source of every gentle art

  And all the soft civility of life:

  Raiser of human kind!28

  sang James Thomson in 1744.

  Overcome with despair, Robinson Crusoe surveyed his predicament: ‘I was wet, had no clothes to shift me, nor anything either to eat or drink, to comfort me; neither did I see any prospect before me, but that of perishing with hunger, or being devoured by wild beasts.’ Salvation came, however, for Defoe's hero in the implements and weapons he fished out from the shipwreck: knives and forks, a spade and pickaxe, needles and thread, muskets, gunpowder and shot. Implements formed the basis of civilization reborn: ‘I had never handled a tool in my life; and yet, in time, by labour, application, and contrivance I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made, especially if I had the tools.’29

  Innovation was advancing on a broad front. Water-wheel technology became a model of experimental efficiency, and the engineer John Smeaton perfected lighthouse design. In 1758 the ‘Improved Birmingham Coach’ had blazoned on its side ‘FRICTION ANNIHILATED’, and by 1801 Richard Trevithick had a perfected steam carriage. Above all, textile technology was transformed and the steam engine revolutionized power. Industrialization gathered pace and production grew rapidly: averaging about £9 million a year in 1780, exports had rocketed to £22 mill
ion by the century's close. Iron and steel shipments, running at 16,770 tons in 1765–74, had almost doubled by 1800. Over the same period, cottons exports rose from £236,000 to a staggering £5,371,000.30

  At the dawn of this stunning transformation, John Dalton's Descriptive Poem (1755) carried a telling preface. It opened with a paean to agriculture:

  When we behold rich improvements of a wild and uncultivated soil, in their state of maturity, without having observed their rise and progress, we are struck with wonder and astonishment, to see the face of Nature totally changed.

  But then it significantly changed tack:

  But how great and rational soever the pleasure of such a sight may be, it is still surpassed by that arising from the extraordinary increase of a trading Town, and new plantations of Houses and Men. Such was the satisfaction the author felt at the appearance of the town and harbour of Whitehaven, after an absence of somewhat less than thirty years.31

  Admiringly recording technological progress with pen or paints, writers and artists encultured nascent industrialization. The Derbyshire painter Joseph Wright portrayed local industrial worthies with emblems of their enterprise: the geologist John Whitehurst with a stratigraphical section, the lead-mining squire Francis Hart with a chunk of galena and the factory owner Richard Arkwright with a model spinning frame – while Arkwright's cotton mills at Cromford also caught his eye.32

  The appeal of manufacturing to enlightened minds was many-sided. Technology became headline news as the cutting edge of novelty. ‘The people in London, Manchester and Birmingham are steam mill mad,’ Matthew Boulton assured James Watt.33 Industry also formed a prime instance of disciplined rationality. An experimentalist in his own right, Josiah Wedgwood the potter aimed to ‘make such machines of Men as cannot err’, introducing clocking-on to ensure punctuality among his workforce.34 In 1783 he applauded the progress visible across the West Midlands: