by Roy Porter
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
The Family
The nuclear family was prized by the enlightened as a natural institution, particularly in its progressive form, with stiff patriarchal authoritarianism being replaced by close and friendly links between husband and wife, and parents and children [10]. Indoors and out, polite society liked to be painted in informal groups, playing with children and pets [11, 13]. John Bacon's drawing room is significantly emblazoned with the icons of the age: a telescope, an air-pump, and cameos of Milton, Bacon and Newton [12].
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
Reform
‘I am a true Englishman,’ declared William Godwin, ‘formed to discover nothing but to improve anything,’ and in that he reflected the spirit of an age which itched to change the old ways and make everything better, faster, more efficient or cheaper. In the countryside, the English took pride in their rational farming methods [14], while communications between towns were sped by turnpike roads and timetabled stagecoach services (‘very commodious and warm’) [15]. The Foundling Hospital showed humanitarian care to abandoned babies [16], and, contrariwise, Tyburn showed the terrible fate awaiting the idle and incorrigible [17]. In 1783, Tyburn itself became the victim of improvements.
[18]
[19]
[20]
Leisure
The Moderns aimed to get the mix right between business and pleasure. The English liked to think of themselves as not wasting time – hence the habit (not just amongst poor chimney-sweep boys) of buying take-away meals from street-sellers [18]. But that was meant to give them more time for leisure. Those seeking cheap elegance could find it for a few shilling at Ranelagh Gardens with its magnificent rotunda (the Georgian ‘Dome'!) [19]; somewhat more rough-and-tumble was a free-for-all wintry skate on the Serpentine, captured here by Rowlandson [20].
[21]
[22]
[23]
Conviviality
Sociability, the enlightened agreed, made for the healthy, well-balanced individual and the polished, stable state. They went about ensuring conviviality through the colonizing of congenial urban spaces, like Covent Garden (where everything could be found from a fruit and vegetable market to quack doctors and high-class brothels) [21], and fashionable new institutions like free-masonry [22]. Given half a chance, English men would set up a club where they could be at ease smoking, talking or indulging themselves in blissful silence [23].
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[25]
[26]
Science
If anything was thought to guarantee the superiority of the Moderns over the Ancients, it was the progress of science. That advance was most tangibly embodied in instruments, widely offered for sale to grace middle-class drawing rooms [24], and in popular scientific lectures, such as those of Adam Walker, whose discourses on astronomy and other sciences ‘completely captivated’ the young Shelley [25]. The efforts of the likes of Walker to draw electricity down from the clouds might seem to others, however, laughable or impious [26].
[27], [28]
[29]
New Horizons
Discovery was the watchword of enlightened science and exploration, and the progress of geographical and ethnographical knowledge squared perfectly with the imperial and commercial ambitions of the Georgian state. The result was often deeply ambiguous. Hunting walrus may not have gone down well with the new love of animals [27], and the slave trade between West Africa and the New World certainly came under increasing fire [28]. To Western eyes, the wonders of the East often remained weird, contributing to a growing sense of European superiority over all other civilizations [29].
[30]
[31]
[32]
Portraiture
The Enlightenment venerated the famous, and so it is no surprise to find the Scottish philosopher David Hume being portrayed in all his glory by his compatriot Allan Ramsay [30], or the leading female intellectuals and artists being deified as the ‘Nine Living Muses of Great Britain’ [31]. But, before he became the autocrat of English science, Sir Joseph Banks was evidently prepared to be depicted more glamorously [32];
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[34]
[35]
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[37]
Lancelot Brown retained his ‘plain man’ stance [33], Erasmus Darwin was all determination [34], James Hutton the geologist was caught lost in thought [35], and his fellow Lunar Society member Joseph Priestley obviously wanted to go down in history ‘warts and all’ [36]. In his caricature of Lord Kames, Hugo Arnot and Lord Monboddo, James Kay caught the disputatiousness of the Scottish Enlightenment [37].
[38]
[39], [40]
[41]
[42]
[43]
The Science of Man
The science of man being central to the Enlightenment, artists gave themselves over to studies of the human skeleton [38]. The newly founded Royal Academy included a Professor of Anatomy whose task it was to teach art and anatomy to the life class [39]. Intense interest in the relations between foetus and mother in the womb helped underpin and reinforce the new conviction of the crucial importance of maternal love and good mothering [41, 42]. The doctor was accorded a newly heroic role, witness the involvement of the Quaker physician John Coakley Lettsom, in the activities of the Royal Humane Society, set up to resuscitate victims of drowning [43]. Yet if health counted for more, the Enlightenment was haunted by the spectre of the hypochondriac, the person who made himself (or increasingly herself) sick through too much thinking [40].
[44]
[45]
[46]
Industry
As befitted a burgeoning commercial and manufacturing nation, embarking on what proved to be the world's first ‘industrial revolution’, the links between art, artistry, and artisanship were prized in enlightened England. Quite apart from the famous Joseph Wright of Derby, other provincial artists gloried in manufacturing processes, as here with James Cranke of Warrington's depiction of glassmaking [44], while Zoffany caught a master spectacle-maker at work [45]. The pride of craftsmen shines through in their elaborate tradecards: Richard Siddall ‘at the Golden Head in Panton Street near the Haymarket makes and sells all manner of chymical and Galenical medicines’ [46].
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce’ (1985), p. 528.
2 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’ (1980), p. 91.
3 The Revd Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789), pp. 11–12.
4 For instance, Robert Darnton puts Locke and Toland in a ‘pre-Enlightenment’: ‘George Washington's False Teeth’ (27 March 1997). I can see no reason for detaching from the Enlightenment proper its most influential philosopher of empiricism, freedom and toleration and its most challenging Deist. I am likewise dubious about talk of ‘anticipations’, as, for instance, in A. C. Kors and Paul J. Korshin (eds.), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France and Germany (1987).
5 ‘Eighteenth-century people,’ it has been aptly noted, ‘were generally quite precise with their gender signifiers, and seldom used terms like “man” to mean anyone other than the males of the species’: Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort (1996), p. xiii. A contemporary observation nevertheless deserves consideration:
The word Man is used for one of the human species, for a male, for a full grown person, a corpse, a statue, a picture, or a piece of wood upon a chessboard, yet we never mistake the meaning, being directed thereto by what gave occasion for its being employed.
Abraham Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued (1997 [1768]), vol. i, p. 241.
6 Confusion easily sets in: aficionados of typos will relish the following: when we speak of the Scottish Englishtenment [sic]…’: Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, p. 92.
7 Norman Da
vies, The Isles (1999); Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (1995).
8 See, for political theory, J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975), and Virtue, Commerce and History (1985); for culture, John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997); for patriotism, Linda Colley, Britons (1992).
9 John Yolton's accounts of Locke and the Lockean tradition are exemplary: John Locke and the Way of Ideas (1956), Locke: An Introduction (1985), and Locke and French Materialism (1991).
10 A further aspect of the ‘English-speaking Enlightenment’ is here totally omitted: the American experience. Other scholars have already done the American job for me, notably Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (1976), and Ernest Cassara, The Enlightenment in America (1988).
11 For English exceptionalism, see E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in his The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978), pp. 35–91.
12 For valuable instances of that kind of scholarship, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment (1995); Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment (1995); Franco Venturi, ‘Scottish Echoes in Eighteenth-Century Italy’ (1985), pp. 345–62.
13 Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason (1978).
14 J. L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (1952).
15 For the Frankfurt School's road from Enlightenment to Auschwitz, see M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1990), p. 6. However good as polemic, it is historical baloney; after all, the Nazis loathed the philosophes. It should, however, be remembered that in Nazi usage Aufklärung (enlightenment) meant ‘propaganda’.
16 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1984). For discussion, see David R. Hiley, ‘Foucault and the Question of Enlightenment’ (1985–6); Christopher Norris, ‘ “What is Enlightenment?” ’ (1994); Jurgen Habermas, ‘Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present’ (1986).
17 On this ‘mind-forg'd manacles’ world fantasized by historically uninformed postmodernists, see Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (1994), p. 13. See also Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (1998), p. 123, on Jean Baudrillard's crazed postmodernist reading:
The main claim is that Enlightenment rationality is an instrument not of freedom and democratic empowerment but, on the contrary, of repression and violence. Likewise with the Enlightenment's secular emphasis upon a common humanity; for Baudrillard this resulted in what he calls ‘the cancer of the Human’ – far from being an inclusive category of emancipation, the idea of a universal humanity made possible the demonizing of difference and the repressive privileging of the normal.
18 The previous lines read: ‘one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated descent into darkness is the set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This is not a fashionable view’: Eric Hobsbawm, On History (1997), p. 254. For similar views, see also Robert Wokler, ‘The Enlightenment Project and its Critics’ (1997). Dismal structuralist and postmodernist readings of the Enlightenment, which stigmatize reason as an instrument of exclusion, ideological control and disciplinary power, have also been torpedoed by Robert Darnton in ‘George Washington's False Teeth’. The politics of Enlightenment in American postmodernism are exhaustively treated in Karlis Racevskis, Postmodernism and the Search for Enlightenment (1993).
19 Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’ (1993), p. 210. ‘In France,’ judged E. P. Thompson, along similar lines:
the armies of Orthodoxy and Enlightenment faced each other. [But]… the Enlightenment proceeded in Britain not like one of those flood-tides massing against a crumbling dyke, but like the tide which seeps into the eroded shores, mudflats and creeks, of an estuary whose declivities are ready to receive it.
‘The Peculiarities of the English’ in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978), p. 58.
20 Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (1994 [1780]).
21 The rallying cry was Robert Darnton's ‘In Search of the Enlightenment’ (1971). For recent assessments, see Haydn T. Mason (ed.), The Darnton Debate (1998); Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (1991), especially Jim Sharpe, ‘History from Below’, pp. 24–41; John Bender, ‘A New History of the Enlightenment?’ (1992); and for light and shade, see P. Hulme and L. Jordanova (eds.), Enlightenment and its Shadows (1990).
22 ‘Enlightened’ beliefs were not exclusive to enlightened activists. Espousal of this or that ‘enlightened’ conviction does not automatically turn an individual into a ‘spokesman’; nor did the enlightened corner the market in decency or criticism. Jonathan Swift, for instance, ridiculed obfuscatory metaphysics, Roman Catholicism and occultism as intensely as Locke or Hume, but his misanthropic Christianity equally led him to denounce progressives as presumptuous. To ring-fence the Enlightenment in Britain would involve a travesty of the open and pluralist character of the culture.
23 Cited in Yolton, Locke: An Introduction, p. 1.
24 See Mark Goldie (ed.), Locke: Political Essays (1997), p. xiii.
25 Janet Semple, Bentham's Prison (1993), p. 100.
26 R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm (1950), p. 388.
27 William Hazlitt, The New School of Reform (1901–6 [1862]), p. 188.
28 For wise words on enlightened casuistry regarding ends, means and lesser evils, see Jean Starobinski, The Remedy in the Disease (1992).
29 W.J. Bate, J. M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (eds.), Samuel Johnson: The Idler and Adventurer (1963), p. 457.
30 George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934–50), vol. ii, p. 170. See also Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (1987), p. 19.
31 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1898 [1741–2]), vol. i, essay vii, p. 54.
32 As will become apparent, I subscribe to the school which views eighteenth-century Britain as a cauldron of change rather than that ‘place of rest and refreshment’ hailed in George Saintsbury's The Peace of the Augustans (1916). I argue my case in ‘English Society in the Eighteenth Century Revisited’ (1990), and ‘The New Eighteenth Century Social History’ (1997).
1 A BLIND SPOT?
1 Perry Anderson, Origins of the Present Crisis’ (1965), p. 17.
2 Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage (1912–22 [1784]), vol. iv, p. 169. For a translation see Isaac Kramnick (ed.), The Portable Enlightenment Reader (1995), pp. 1–7. Another eminent contributor was Moses Mendelssohn: James Schmidt, ‘The Question of Enlightenment’ (1989). On such societies, see Richard van Dülmen, The Society of the Enlightenment (1992), pp. 52f.
3 ‘Our age,’ Kant maintained, ‘is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit’: see Norman Kemp Smith (ed.), Emmanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1963), p.9; R. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis (1988), p. 121.
4 See Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (1995), pp. 2f.
5 Kant broadened his outlook by reading, being famously awakened from his ‘dogmatical slumbers’ by reading Hume's Inquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748).
6 Jeremy Black (ed.), Eighteenth Century Europe 1700–1789 (1990), p. 402; C. B. A. Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment (1985).
7 For examples, see chapter 2 below and elsewhere in this book. Prussians like Pastor Moritz and Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz were scared to find so much liberty in England; Kant might possibly have had the same reaction had he ever gone west. My comments do not, of course, impugn Kant's philosophical genius, for which see Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought (1982); J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (1998).
8 For censorship, see Eckhart Hellmuth, ‘Enlightenment and the Freedom of the Press’ (1998); Black (ed.), Eighteenth Century Europe 1700–1789, p. 404. For Phillips, see George S. Marr, The Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century (1971), p. 57.