by Roy Porter
JOHN ADAMS3
Postmodernism has one virtue at least – it has reopened inquiries into modernity and its origins.4 When, why, how did the ‘modern’ self and ‘modern’ society come into being? Should we root back as far as the ‘self-fashioning’ men of the Renaissance, or pitch our inquiries further forward?5 This book has rated the eighteenth century crucial to the creation of modern mentalities, claiming that British thinkers were prominent, indeed precocious, in such processes. To speak of enlightenment in Britain does not merely make sense; not to do so would be nonsense.
As contemporaries of all political stripes agreed, modern attitudes were inseparable from the explosion of print culture. ‘By this art we seem to be secured against the future perishing of human improvement,’ declared William Godwin.
Knowledge is communicated to too many individuals to afford its adversaries a chance of suppressing it. The monopoly of science [that is, knowledge] is substantially at an end. By the easy multiplication of copies, and the cheapness of books, everyone has access to them. The extreme inequality of information among different members of the same community, which existed in ancient times, is diminished.6
Professing that printing had aided ‘the emancipation of mankind’, Godwin credited Cardinal Wolsey's clairvoyance in stating: ‘we must destroy the press; or the press will destroy us’.7
The end of censorship spelt a new order. Supporters of the Glorious Revolution trumpeted press freedom, which subsequent radicals expected to usher in further transformations although in the dark days of the 1790s the pen might seem threatened once again.
Oh save, oh save, in this eventful hour
The tree of knowledge from the axe of power…8
beseeched the fearful Erasmus Darwin in The Temple of Nature. What enlightened activists were heralding was a new order presided over and masterminded by the writer as fighter. And since, back in the 1740s, David Hume had frankly confessed that ‘governors have nothing to support them but opinion’, the logic of the situation required traditionalists to retaliate in kind: not just for progressives but for everybody, the word had become the sword.9
Integral to these developments was an emergent cadre of cultural producers and brokers – from Hume down to Blotpage and his ilk – prefiguring in some ways what Coleridge would shortly dub the clerisy.10 ‘In opulent or commercial society,’ observed Adam Smith, ‘to think or reason comes to be, like every other employment, a particular business, which is carried on by a very few people, who furnish the public with all the thought and reason possessed by the vast multitudes that labour.’11
The illustrious historian Franco Venturi once wrote of eighteenth-century England that its ‘struggles’ were ‘not those of a nascent intelligentsia’; but he was surely wrong.12 Thinkers come in many guises, and the Italian avant-garde of the age of the carbonari, which is what Venturi perhaps had in mind, along with the French philosophes, naturally were not modelled on those of Georgian London, Manc-chester or Birmingham – or Edinburgh and Dublin, for that matter. But British writers were hardly minor promoters of change, be they the ‘true Whigs’ meeting at the Grecian coffee house under Queen Anne, mocking hellfire and damning tyrants and papists, the Lunar Society's liberal technocrats, the rosy-cheeked pantisocrats enthused by Coleridge or the authors milling around the bookshop of the radical London publisher Joseph Johnson and eating his suppers. John Aikin, Anna Barbauld, Erasmus Darwin – this is to go through an alphabetical list of just the more celebrated – John Disney, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Thomas Erskine, George Fordyce, William Frend, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Mary Hays, Thomas Henry, Thomas Holcroft, Theophilus Lindsey, John Newton, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Horne Tooke, George Walker and Mary Wollstonecraft, and, slightly later, Humphry Davy, Maria Edgeworth, William Hazlitt, Thomas Robert Malthus, Henry Crabb Robinson and William Wordsworth: all these intellectual notables were linked with just one single publisher.13 Such personages hardly resemble a cloak and dagger crew; few styled themselves, like Hazlitt, ‘Jacobin’, and some were to become downright reactionary. But that merely illustrates the complex and volatile allegiances of the knowledge-mongers in the high-tension French Revolutionary years. By what criterion would such a roll of ‘philosophers’ – ones who, in the enlightened sense of the term, ‘ought to be something greater, and better than another man'14 – be denied the title of a ‘nascent intelligentsia’?
While this ideas élite included ministers of religion, both Anglican and Dissenting, it was rapidly becoming detached from any primary identification with the organized churches; nor was it principally bankrolled by the Court, by grandees or by the ministry. Increasingly, writers and thinkers functioned as autonomous individuals, at bottom beholden to none but themselves, the public who bought their writings or subscribed to their lectures, and such cultural middlemen as publishers. ‘From a sociological point of view,’ the German sociologist Karl Mannheim once observed, ‘the decisive fact of modern times… is that this monopoly of the ecclesiastical interpretation of the world, which was held by the priestly caste, is broken, and… a free intelligentsia has arisen.’ Mannheim's reading illuminates the British scene better than Venturi's.15
New personae for the modern thinker were being forged: not the pedant, cooped up in a college, or the ‘dull and deep potations’ don, but an urban, sociable sort, in the vanguard of humanity, in touch with the people for whom he spoke and wrote, be he an essayist or an itinerant scientific lecturer. A generation or so later, celebrating ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, Thomas Carlyle eulogized the achievements of literary men and freelance intellectuals in spreading the word, eclipsing the pulpit and the despatch box: ‘literature is our Parliament’.16 And if, by the mid-Victorian era, John Stuart Mill would accuse public opinion of imposing a conformist straitjacket, its enlightened precursor was, by and large, regarded as a force for criticism and change.17
With the rise of belles lettres, novels, magazines, newspapers and pulp fiction, Britain found itself awash with print, and elaborate feedback loops emerged, real and virtual, linking authors and auditors. Enlightened men of letters assumed a multiplicity of garbs: as scourges, reformers, hand-wringing Jeremiahs, satirists, gossip columnists, prophets, gurus, watchdogs, publicists and tribunes of the people.18 Many assumed dramatic poses – self-promoting, self-advertising, even laceratingly self-confessional, as when Godwin or Mary Hays ‘told all’. Intellectuals came to exude the air of a narcissistic bien-pensant coterie writing about each other,19 surreptitiously propagating the idea that writers and artists were the people who really counted, the true legislators of the world.
Secular thinkers set themselves up as critics and above all as teachers. They would be the educators of mankind, possessed, like Peacock's Scythrop – a.k.a. Percy Bysshe Shelley – of a passion ‘for reforming the world’,20 a mission which meant stealing fire from the gods and bringing it down to earth, or at least countering convention with Promethean aspirations.
This coming intelligentsia prided itself upon being at the cutting edge of thought: it would strike off the shackles of tradition, prejudice, vested interests and oppression, and defend the first principles of freedom: habeas corpus, free speech, a free press, free trade, universal education. Refinement, or, in a later, modified idiom, self-improvement, came to the fore. Everyone was to make himself – with a little help from his guru, be he Mr Spectator or Tom Telescope.
From Bacon's New Atlantis to Robert Owen's New View of Society, the great buzzword was novelty. New terms were being coined and old ones acquiring new meanings: intellectual, autobiography, rationalism, humanitarian, utilitarian, public opinion, romanticism, ideology, primitive, decade, progressive, modernize, contemporary, antiquated, journalist and many more keywords of modernity. Predictably, neologism was itself a neologism, and ‘radical’ as a political noun a 1790s minting.21 Thought wars spawned multiple ‘-isms’ and ‘-ologies’, a development dazzlingly parodied in the satires of that last Enlightenment wit, Thomas Love Peaco
ck. ‘Men have been found,’ observed his Sir Telegraph Paxarett in Melincourt (1817), ‘very easily permutable into ites and onians, avians and arians… Trinitarians, Unitarians, Anythingarians.’22 There was a new pluralism of the pen in paper wars which some called anarchy, fearing it would lead to what the British Critic dubbed ‘a state of literary warfare’ in which defenders of the established order were dutybound ‘to wield the pen, and shed the ink’.23
Enlightened minds piqued themselves upon being not just new but different. Burke jeered at the ‘dissidence of dissent’,24 and, following in his footsteps, J. C. D. Clark is on the right track in concluding that what ‘did more than anything to break down the old order’ was ‘the advance of Dissent’.25 Clark, however, defines ‘Dissent’ too narrowly in ecclesiastical terms – better far to have characterized it as an ecumenical expression of the drive to criticize, question and subvert. How telling to be confronted with the reaction of Mary Shelley – that child (quite literally) of the Enlightenment – when she eventually said goodbye to all that.26 The deluge of personal tragedies that was her early life, beginning with the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, brought home the wretched folly of radical overreaching. Marriage to Shelley had left her with one small son. Told that young Percy should, like his father, be encouraged to think for himself, she recoiled in horror: ‘Oh God, teach him to think like other people.’ And, to make sure that this happened without a hitch, she sent him to Harrow. He rose without trace to become a Member of Parliament and, reassuringly, a conformist nonentity.27
It has not been the claim of this book that Britain was unique, or even necessarily first, in producing a crop of ideas unknown anywhere else.28 But neither should we be dismissive. Perry Anderson concluded, as we have seen, that Britain produced ‘no ferment of ideas’, and Robert Palmer judged the phrase English Enlightenment ‘jarring and incongruous’. But against such naysayers, I have argued for the importance of Locke and Newton, Addison and Steele, Hume and Smith, Hartley and Bentham, Price and Priestly, and many another, both in changing mentalities in Britain and, to some degree, in influencing developments abroad. In any novelty competition, British authors can certainly hold a candle to their Continental confréres. If the Enlightenment had a ‘father’, Locke's paternity claim is better than any other, and Bentham was the most innovative exponent of a utilitarianism destined to exert a worldwide appeal; there was no freer free-thinker than Anthony Collins, no more ornery liberal individualist than Joseph Priestley while, for his part, William Godwin, the author of anarchism, undertook an astonishing root and branch rational rethink of politico-moral life from first principles. Doubtless the prosy egghead whom Hazlitt called a ‘metaphysician grafted upon the Dissenting minister’ utterly lacked Diderot's charm and impish wit: but his model of the autonomous new man remains breathtakingly original and challenging.
It has not been my intention to write the history of ‘enlightenment in one country’, but in two key respects Britain did indeed do it ‘my way’, and a stress on the ‘Englishness of the English Enlightenment’ has some validity.29 Enlightenment came early to the British Isles, and so its champions were exercised not only with having to create it but also then to defend it once achieved – theirs became a labour not just of criticizing and demolishing but of explaining, vindicating and extending. In Britain enlightenment was thus both an end and also a beginning.30 The ‘mission accomplished’ mentality, however, certainly did not preclude ongoing criticism and subversion, the problematizing of the progressive. Not least, the late Enlightenment involved a restless quest for personal self-discovery among newly articulate circles not dissimilar to the 1960s youth revolt against the complacency of Western democracies, confronting the credibility gap between rhetoric and reality.
The other regard in which the British Enlightenment was distinctive from that typical on the Continent was its pervasive individualism. Locke stressed personal rights against the ruler; Hume prized private life over civic virtue; Smith championed the individual actor in the free market – the invisible hand would bring public good out of private; Bentham held all equal and every man the best judge of his own interests, while Godwin formulated a systematic anarchism. The hallmark of British thinking lay in casting progress as a matter of individual improvement or (as with hospitals, schools and charities) as the work of voluntary associations. Kantian categorical imperatives found their English counterparts in a hedonic calculus. At variance with Foucault's stress on discipline, surveillance and control, much enlightened thinking was directed towards dissent and disestablishment, was about dismantling ‘the Thing’ – or doing your own thing.31
Enlightened endeavours blossomed early. The Locke–Addison trinity of liberty, self-interest and polish gained a firm hold in polite society, being devalued and debunked only by dogged selfmarginalizers like Swift, Wesley and Blake.32 Over the longer haul, however, the pursuit of a free, open, yet stable society – combining dynamic individualism with social orderliness – was derailed by late-century social and ideological fractures; to switch metaphors, the chickens of possessive individualism were at last, just as the doomsters had warned, coming home to roost.33
Undergoing socio-political growing pains and tensions, liberal ideologies began to shiver into fragments. For some, as we have seen, libertarian rhetoric led to Jacobin radicalism – witness Tom Paine's very titles: Common Sense, The Age of Reason and The Rights of Man. Bourgeois liberalism, as endorsed by the Whiggish Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802), for its part put a different face upon enlightened ideology: individualism was there to obey the iron laws of political economy; social harmonization demanded time and work discipline, penology and scientific poor laws; while humanitarian impulses bled into proto-Victorian sentimentality.34 Meanwhile, Establishment apologists began to draw conclusions of their own from enlightened premises. Malthus in particular put a new gloss on desire, recruiting science to prove how legislative action could not, after all, relieve suffering and starvation.35 More dramatically, French Revolutionary turmoil led many to change sides.
Yet, in the long run, enlightened ideologies were not discarded: they had bored too deep into the bones. By providing secular legitimation for capitalism, they continued to inform Victorian self-help liberalism and free-market ideology – the road from Smith to Smiles.36 By touting rational self-help, they promised a meliorist, moralized future which immunized native radicals against Marxist creeds of class war or communitarian socialism. Phrenology, secularism and Fabianism were all, in their own ways, Enlightenment legacies. John Stuart Mill could declare at the beginning of the Victorian age that every Englishmen was by implication ‘a Benthamite or a Coleridgian’: the former were evidently children of the Enlightenment.37 The famous Halévy thesis perhaps needs modifying: perhaps it was not Methodism but rather the Enlightenment which inoculated the English against the French, indeed against all subsequent revolutions.38
None of these developments was unambiguous or without the most profound tensions. Enlightened activism always involved clashing interests, and its elastic ideological resources could be deployed for radical ends or equally by sections of the propertied, plutocratic and polite against those they sought to discredit, convert or marginalize. Mine has been no tale of ‘progress’, but rather one of Kulturkampf, racked with contradictions, struggles and ironies, and leaving in its wake multiple casualties and victims.
It is this continuing ideological warfare which shows that the Enlightenment's big idea really did take root. ‘Should free inquiry lead to the destruction of Christianity itself,’ it will be remembered Joseph Priestley once reflected, ‘it ought not, on that account, to be discontinued; for we can only wish for the prevalence of Christianity on the supposition of its being true; and if it fall before the influence of free inquiry, it can only do so in consequence of its not being true.’39 Substitute ‘Enlightenment’ for ‘Christianity’ and Priestley's statement becomes a fair gloss on the modern commitment to free inquiry, that liberty tree plant
ed by the Enlightenment, that impious demand to know ‘your reason, your reason’ and to deny and defy forbidden knowledge.40 One further substitution shall close this book. Combining hope, humanity and humility, William Hazlitt paid generous tribute to Thomas Holcroft, that most pugnacious of the late enlighteners:
He believed that truth had a natural superiority over error, if it could only be heard; that if once discovered, it must, being left to itself, soon spread and triumph; and that the art of printing would not only accelerate this effect, but would prevent those accidents which had rendered the moral and intellectual progress of mankind hitherto so slow, irregular and uncertain.41
Transferred to the British Enlightenment at large, there could be no more accurate summary of its ideals.
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[2]
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[4]
Light
The Enlightened English believed they had a special corner on light, since it was Newton who in his Opticks (1704) had first revealed the true scientific nature of that mysterious entity [2]. With tremendous patriotic pomp, a host of celebratory images deified the incomparable Sir Isaac [1]. Advances in light technology resulted, amongst other things, in improved lighthouses [3], alongside domestic lighting and street illumination; while the diffusion of useful and entertaining knowledge was aided by the invention of the magic lantern [4].
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
Words
Edward Gibbon gloried in his ‘early and invincible love of reading, which I would not exchange for the treasures of India’, and many would have agreed. But different sorts of readers and reading met with more or less approval. The gentleman with his feet up on the sofa reading Horace's Odes was obviously a good thing [5], but the bookworm in his Cambridge study gave off the odour of the past [6], the cottager at his door might have caused raised eyebrows, had he not been reading the Bible [7], and the ecstatic female philosopher was an object lesson in the dangers of a little learning [9]. Alexander Pope himself insisted that the proper study of mankind was man, yet books could help in that: the tomes in front of the tomb include Locke and Newton as well as Pope [8].