by Roy Porter
Industry and the machine have been the parent of this happy change. A well directed and long continued series of industrious exertions, has so changed, for the better, the face of our country, its buildings, lands, roads and the manners and deportment of its inhabitants, too.35
Business, in other words, promoted not just wealth but well-being too.
Manufacturing was producing, boosters claimed, a new breed of heroes, principally the ‘captain of industry’, retailed as the self-made man, raising capital for factories, forges and foundries, ploughing back profits, organizing productive capacity, recruiting, training and deploying the workforce and calculating market trends and opportunities. Long before Samuel Smiles, the industrialist was vaunted as a national hero. One of the children's tales in Anna Barbauld's improving Evenings at Home: Or the Juvenile Budget Opened (1794–8) celebrates Richard Arkwright's rise to fame and fortune. ‘This is what manufacturers can do,’ Papa explains to his children, in an enlightened idiom approaching profanity: ‘here man is a kind of creator, and like the great Creator, he may please himself with his work and say it is good.’ Showing his youngsters round a factory, the fictional father insists what fun it all is: there is ‘more entertainment to a cultivated mind in seeing a pin made, than in many a fashionable diversion’.36
The entrepreneur was hailed as the exemplar of modern energy. ‘I shall never forget Mr Boulton's expression to me,’ recalled James Boswell of a visit to the Soho works: ‘ “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have, – Power.” He had about seven hundred people at work… he seemed to be a father to this tribe.’37 In a motif congenial to minds analysing the transition from feudal to commercial society, industry was commended as the means to beat swords into ploughshares, supplanting war with peaceful rivalry. ‘Do you really think we can make a compleat conquest of France?’ Josiah Wedgwood inquired in 1771 about market prospects – the very thought made his ‘blood move quicker’.38
Wedgwood, like Boulton, was one of a remarkable new breed of men conspicuous for pursuing business through enlightened thinking. Though of meagre formal education, he displayed a consummate faith in reason, and a passion for measuring, weighing, observing, recording and experimenting: all problems in ceramics manufacture would, he maintained, ‘yield to experiment’.39 His rational outlook extended beyond business to Unitarianism in religion and radicalism in politics – he was hostile to slavery, and a warm supporter of the American colonists and later of the French Revolution. He thought big: ‘I shall Astonish the World All at Once,’ he declared to his partner, Thomas Bentley, ‘for I hate piddling you know.’40 Becoming ‘vase-maker general to the universe’, he died worth half a million.
If the businessman might thus figure as Britain's answer to the enlightened absolutist, Robert Owen was the Sun King among entrepreneurs, a consummate illustration of the application of enlightened ideas to the empire of industry. Born in mid-Wales, Owen got his first employment as an errand boy; then he moved into drapery, rising to take a partnership in a Manchester firm, before, at the turn of the century, becoming partner and manager of the New Lanark Mills on Clydeside. For the next two decades he combined entrepreneurship with social reform. In his A New View of Society (1813) – in today's jargon it would be called his ‘mission statement’ – Owen urged rational social rebuilding on the basis of universal education. Manufacturing would provide the foundation for happiness, but only once divested of the arbitrariness of the market and reorganized according to social utility. Character could be moulded by correct environmental influence. If the labouring classes were currently ignorant, brutalized and criminal, society must shoulder the blame.
Owen trumpeted the changes he saw all around him and which he was helping to bring about. ‘Those who were engaged in the trade, manufactures, and commerce of this country thirty or forty years ago formed but a very insignificant portion of the knowledge, wealth, influence or population of the Empire,’ he explained:
Prior to that period, Britain was essentially agricultural. But, from that time to the present, the home and foreign trade have increased in a manner so rapid and extraordinary as to have raised commerce to an importance, which it never previously attained in any country possessing so much political power and influence.41
Laissez-faire was futile, however, for ensuring long-term prosperity and welfare – market forces would produce ‘the most lamentable and permanent evils’, unless there were ‘legislative interference and direction’.42 Though industrialization held out the promise of untold human benefit, under the competitive system some grew fabulously rich while others were doomed to poverty. Co-operation was needed to effect industry's potential social advantages. Since people were products of circumstances, education would make all the difference, according to Owen's plan for a ‘national, well digested, unexclusive system for the formation of character, and general amelioration of the lower orders’:
On the experience of a life devoted to the subject I hesitate not to say, that the members of any community may by degrees be trained to live without idleness, without poverty, without crime, and without punishment; for each of these is the effect of error in the various systems prevalent throughout the world. They are all the necessary consequences of ignorance.43
In his New Lanark factory village, the provision of schooling, along with such amenities as a museum, would programme workers for happiness. Here was a veritable social experiment in action:
The experiment cannot fail to prove the certain means of renovating the moral and religious principles of the world, by showing whence arise the various opinions, manners, vices and virtues of mankind, and how the best or the worst of them may, with mathematical precision, be taught to the rising generation.44
An unbeliever, Owen secularized Christian idioms in envisaging ‘the foretold millennium… when the slave and the prisoner, the bond-man and the bond-woman, and the child and the servant, shall be set free for ever, and oppression of body and mind shall be known no more’.45 While hardly approving, Robert Southey nevertheless found this pioneer of Heaven on Earth remarkable. ‘What ideas individuals may attach to the term Millennium, I know not,’ Southey recalled, hearing Owen hold forth,
but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any, misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased an hundred-fold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment, except ignorance, to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.
To overcome that obstacle, a school, a museum, a music hall and a ballroom had been built, Southey noted, reflecting the entrepreneur's desire to increase the happiness of his work people a hundredfold. Owen was thus a logical terminus ad quem of enlightened thought, imagining and realizing comprehensive benevolent control within a scheme of industrialization, and displaying Helvétius-like concern with education and discipline over his ‘human machines’.46
Uniting science and imagination, poetry and social theory, many penned anthems to improvement, from the Poet Laureate Henry James Pye's Progress of Refinement (1783) to Shelley's The Triumph of Life, uncompleted at his death in 1822. 47 Modelled on Lucretius's De rerum natura, Richard Payne Knight's The Progress of Civil Society (1796) was divided into six books whose very titles – ‘Of Hunting’, ‘Of Pasturage’, ‘Of Agriculture’, ‘Of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce’, ‘Of Climate and Soil’ and ‘Of Government and Conquest’ – clearly show that he was setting enlightened speculative anthropology to verse, giving a poetic rendition of the lessons of Adam Smith's stages of society:
Each found the produce of his toil exceed
His own demands, of luxury or need;
Whence each the superfluity resign'd,
More useful objects in return to find:
Each freely gave what each too much possess'd,
In equal plenty to enjoy the rest.48
The most notable and prominent poetic prophet of progress, however, was Erasmus D
arwin. Born near Nottingham in 1731, Darwin was the son of an ‘honest and industrious’ lawyer with a taste for antiquities.49 In 1750 the lad went up to St John's College, Cambridge, then crossed the Tweed (like so many others) to complete his medical training in Edinburgh. He then set up in medical practice in Lichfield, which proved his home for twenty-five years.
Though, like Priestley, a stammerer, the energetic and ebullient Darwin was a domineering talker, becoming noted for his wit and raillery directed against conventions and Christianity. From the 1760s he became familiar with the circle which developed into the Lunar Society, with its ‘learned insane’. His earliest close friend was Matthew Boulton, at that time still primarily a buckle manufacturer. Darwin was flirting with the idea of building a ‘fiery chariot’; though Boulton was not convinced of the practicality of such a steam carriage, Darwin's enthusiasm drew him to steam and thus paved the way for his partnership with James Watt. In the late 1760s Darwin's ‘favourite friend’ was Dr William Small, who had arrived from America with a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin, but he also grew close to Josiah Wedgwood, whose pottery works had opened in 1760. On promoting the first major English canal, the Trent and Mersey, the energetic Wedgwood found a staunch ally in Darwin, who helped by writing pamphlets and drumming up influential support for the costly investment.
The next addition to Darwin's set was Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who shared with him a desire to design a carriage which would not overturn. Both were also keen educationalists – Darwin's interest being partly stimulated by an acquaintance with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then living in exile in Derbyshire; Edgeworth's Practical Education (1798) (see chapter 15) proved far more substantial than Darwin's no less progressive, Plan for the Conduct of Female Education (1797).50
The Glasgow-based James Watt had pioneered the separate condenser as an improvement to the steam engine. Coming to England in 1767 with his invention still undeveloped, he visited Darwin, already a steam enthusiast, and disclosed the blueprint of his invention. Darwin and Watt became fast friends, and over the years Watt looked to him for encouragement, ideas and medical counsel. In the same year Darwin's old Edinburgh chum, James Keir, retired from the army to live at West Bromwich, where at his Tipton alkali works he succeeded in making caustic soda from salt on a large scale and thus helped launch industrial chemistry.
From the late 1760s this group of friends – Boulton, Darwin, Small, Wedgwood, Edgeworth, Watt and Keir – with later additions (notably Joseph Priestley, who settled in Birmingham in 1780) would occasionally meet up. The gatherings grew more regular, held monthly at full moon, to help light them home – hence Lunar Society – at the very hub of the modern technological world.
A physician first and foremost, Darwin practised for some forty years, and Zoonomia (1794–6) – his 1,400-page magnum opus which in its third edition ran to 2,000 pages – was essentially a work of medical theory, heavily influenced by Hartleyan materialist neurophysiology.51 Despite his busy practice, Darwin poured his boundless energies into many other channels. In 1771 he was dabbling with a speaking machine or mechanical voicebox;52 in the next year he had long discussions with Wedgwood and the engineer James Brindley about extending the Grand Trunk Canal; with his friend Brooke Boothby he founded the Lichfield Botanic Society, which in time brought out translations of Linnaeus. His botanic interests also blossomed on a site west of Lichfield, where in 1778 he established a botanic garden, the inspiration of his later poem of the same name.53
Uniting arts and sciences, medicine, physics and technology, the corpulent Darwin was not only a man of the broadest interests but the very embodiment of enlightened values. ‘All those who knew him will allow that sympathy and benevolence were the most striking features,’ wrote Keir. ‘He despised the monkish abstinences and the hypocritical pretensions which so often impose on the world. The communication of happiness and the relief of misery were by him held as the only standard of moral merit.’54
Darwin's was a benevolence independent of – indeed, hostile to – Christian values and motives. From early years, he had rejected Christianity in favour of Deism. ‘That there exists a superior Ens Entium, which formed these wonderful creatures, is a mathematical demonstration,’ he proclaimed, but reason gave no warrant for believing that that First Cause was a Jehovah: ‘That He influences things by a particular providence, is not so evident… The light of Nature affords us not a single argument for a future state.’55 Indeed, he found the Christian Almighty quite repellent: how could a truly loving Father visit terrible diseases upon innocent children?56 Darwin regarded the notion of a jealous Lord as quite perverse; he loathed the Church's fixation upon punishment, guilt and suffering; and his Zoonomia pathologized religious enthusiasm and superstition, diagnosing such religiosity as symptomatic of madness.57 Like many other enlightened scoffers, Darwin had a taste for the blasphemous: his speaking machine, for example, was meant to recite ‘the Lord's prayer, the creed, and ten Commandments in the vulgar tongue’.58
Championing Hartley's philosophy, Darwin was a materialist through and through. ‘Dr Darwin often used to say,’ remembered the pious Quaker Mrs Schimmelpenninck,
Man is an eating animal, a drinking animal, and a sleeping animal, and one placed in a material world, which alone furnishes all the human animal can desire. He is gifted besides with knowing faculties, practically to explore and to apply the resources of this world to his use. These are realities. All else is nothing; conscience and sentiment are mere figments of the imagination.59
(One suspects that, in front of his male cronies, Darwin used a phrase other than ‘a sleeping animal’.)
Anti-Christian materialism shaped Darwin's humanitarianism: bigots loved blaming, but men of reason would inquire and sympathize. Hearing of an infanticidal mother, he wrote a commiserating letter to his correspondent:
The Women that have committed this most unnatural Crime, are real Objects of our greatest Pity; their education has produced in them so much Modesty, or Sense of Shame, that this artificial Passion overturns the very Instincts of Nature! – what Struggles must there be in their Minds, what agonies!…
Hence the Cause of this most horrid Crime is an excess of what is really a Virtue, of the Sense of Shame, or Modesty. Such is the Condition of human Nature!60
Politically Darwin was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. His books and letters echo with condemnations of bloodshed (‘I hate war’), despotism and slavery.61 ‘I have just heard,’ he raged on one occasion to Josiah Wedgwood, ‘that there are muzzles or gags made at Birmingham for the slaves in our island. If this be true, and such an instrument could be exhibited by a speaker in the House of Commons, it might have a great effect.’62 From its outset he supported the French Revolution, and after the 1791 Birmingham riots he wrote to Priestley deploring his victimization by fanatics – while also courteously advising him to quit his theological maunderings and get on with something more useful, namely scientific experiments. ‘Almost all great minds in all ages of the world, who have endeavoured to benefit mankind, have been persecuted by them,’ he wrote to him, on behalf of the Derby Philosophical Society:
Galileo for his philosophical discoveries was imprisoned by the inquisition; and Socrates found a cup of hemlock his reward for teaching ‘there is one God’. Your enemies, unable to conquer your arguments by reason, have had recourse to violence.63
Darwin's politics were, however, never revolutionary. Law, order and property were essential components of the social progress which would be achieved within the framework of free-market capitalism and industrialization.
Articulating his myriad ideas and outlooks, Darwin developed the first comprehensive theory of biological evolution: ‘would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which The Great First Cause endued with animality?’64 Though different from the now generally accepted theory of his grandson, Charles, Erasmus Darwin's speculations were well grounded in the science of his day and gave vo
ice to philosophical tenets central to the Enlightenment.65 Nature, he contended, was everywhere in motion: the butterfly emerged from the caterpillar, and creatures adapted themselves to their environment – hares and partridges of the latitudes which are long buried in snow, become white during the winter months’.66 Through ‘artificial or accidental cultivation’, moreover, beings underwent ‘great changes’ transmitted from generation to generation, as in the breeding of pedigree cats and dogs.67 Man's capacity to produce artificial breeds via domestication seemed to be transforming the very face of Nature: ‘Many of these enormities of shape are propagated, and continued as a variety at least, if not as a new species of animal.’68
Nature thus changed and, for Darwin, the starting point for understanding its dynamics lay in the inherent motility possessed by organized matter: ‘In every contraction of the fibre there is an expenditure of the sensorial power, or spirit of animation.’69 Living beings were those entities which did not react solely in a mechanical manner to environmental inputs, but possessed an inherent responsiveness of their own:70 living bodies, in short, were those with the capacity to interact with their environment.71
Fibres had the power to contract, producing ‘irritation’; irritation led to ‘sensation’; while, in their turn, pleasure and pain generated feelings of desire and aversion, creating the superior plane of bodily operation, volition, which constituted a creature's capacity to act in response to pleasure and pain sensations. Volition should not, however, be confused (he explained, drawing on Hartley and Priestley) with the discredited theological conception of free will, which was no better than an arbitrary act of the mind or understanding.72