Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  81 E. P. Thompson, ‘Patrician Society, Plebian Culture’ (1974), and ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society’ (1978), p. 139; Ian Gilmour, Riot, Risings and Revolution (1992); Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (1998).

  82 J. W. von Archenholz, A Picture of England (1790), p. 24.

  83 Madame du Boccage, Letters concerning England, Holland and Italy, p. 44.

  84 Quoted in G. May, Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution (1970), p. 131 (the whole of ch. 9 is illuminating); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982).

  85 ‘Of the First Principles of Government’ (1741), in David Hume, Selected Essays (1993), p. 25.

  86 See the suggestive remarks in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977) and Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain (1978).

  87 See Thompson, ‘Patrician Society, Plebian Culture’, for a gloss on this concept.

  88 See J. Woodward, To Do the Sick No Harm (1974); M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement (1938).

  89 Nettel, Journeys of a German in England in 1782, pp. 30, 69; M. Grosley, A Tour to London, or New Observations on England (1772), vol. iii, p. 168; C. de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in 1725–29 (1995), p. 25; Hibbert, An American in Regency England, p. 25; Abbé Prévost, Adventures of a Man of Quality in England (1930), p. 119.

  90 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978).

  91 [Anon.], A History of Little Goody Two Shoes (1766), title page.

  92 Quoted in Hibbert, An American in Regency England, p. 52.

  93 Obviously there is a parallel with politics as interpreted in J. H. Plumb's The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (1967). On remoulding human nature, see J. A. Passmore, ‘The Malleability of Man in Eighteenth-Century Thought’ (1965).

  94 Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, p. 34. Voltaire was echoing Addison's celebration of the concourse at the Royal Exchange – ‘so rich an Assembly of Countrymen and Foreigners consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth’: Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. i, no. 69, p. 293 (Saturday, 19 May 1711). The Amsterdam Exchange had been admired for the same reasons.

  95 F. A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell's London Journal (1950), p. 63; ‘learn retenu’: F. A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764 (1952), pp. 47, 49, 390.

  96 Samuel Johnson, letter to Richard Congrev (25 June 1735), in R. W. Chapman (ed.), The Letters of Samuel Johnson (1952), vol. i, p.6.

  97 D. Hartley, Observations on Man (1749), vol. ii, p. 255.

  98 J. Brewer, ‘Commercialization and Politics’ (1982).

  99 Henry Fielding, ‘An Essay on Conversation’, in Miscellanies, by H. F., Esq. (1743), vol. i, p. 159.

  100 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. i, p. 39.

  101 For the sociable presentation of self, see R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (1977); F. L. Lucas, The Search for Good Sense (1958), and The Art of Living (1959); S. M. Brewer, Design for a Gentleman (1963).

  102 American academics in particular have seized upon Jürgen Habermas's notion of the creation of a ‘public sphere’ (a sector made up of private individuals understood to have their roots primarily in the private realm, including the family). Since the importance of public opinion in Georgian England has never been denied, this is to reinvent the wheel. See, however, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), and ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere (1992); for helpful expositions, see Craig Calhoun, ‘Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere (1992), pp. 1–50; Geoff Eley, ‘Nations, Publics and Political Cultures' in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 289–339; Robert C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (1991). For hints towards a critique, see Dena Goodman, ‘The Public and the Nation (1995), an introduction to an issue of Eighteenth Century Studies devoted to Habermas and history.

  103 The play on swords and pens (and by implication, pricks) had long been commonplace: ‘thy Pen, is full as harmlesse as thy Sworde’, deemed Sir Carr Scrope at the Restoration: Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (1995), p. 80.

  2 THE BIRTH OF AN IDEOLOGY

  1 John Dryden, ‘Secular Masque’ (1700), in The Poems of John Dryden (1959), pp. 202–3.

  2 Quoted in Joseph Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature (1899), p. 60.

  3 Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957), p. 42. For Stuart politics, see Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed (1996); Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict (1986); Barry Coward, The Stuart Age (1980). For interregnum radicalism, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972), and God's Englishman (1970).

  4 E. S. De Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn (1955), vol. iii, p. 246.

  5 Ronald Hutton, The Restoration (1985); J. R. Jones (ed.), The Restored Monarchy, 1660–1688 (1979). For continuing threats, see Richard Greaves, Deliver Us From Evil (1986), Enemies Under His Feet (1990), and Secrets of the Kingdom (1992); Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (1978), vol. i, p. 222. The 1662 rising was viciously put down.

  6 Ursula Henriques, Religious Toleration in England 1783–1833 (1961), p. 9; Robert S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement (1951).

  7 On Hobbes, see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), and chapter 3 below. For the trappings of Divine Right kingship, see Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd, The King's Evil (1911); Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (1973).

  8 On Restoration culture, see Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics (1994); John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), ch. 1; James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (1987); Michael Foss, The Age of Patronage (1971).

  9 Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (1981), The Royal Society and its Fellows 1660–1700 (1994), and Establishing the New Science (1989).

  10 For international politics, see Jeremy Black, A System of Ambition? (1991).

  11 Watts, The Dissenters, vol. i, pp. 221f.

  12 See John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (1972); Paul Hammond, ‘Titus Oates and “Sodomy” ’ (1997); John Miller, Popery and Politics in England 1660–1688 (1973).

  13 See W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries (1988); Robert Beddard (ed.), The Revolution of 1688 (1991).

  14 J. R. Jones (ed.), Liberty Secured? (1992); J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 (1980); Geoffrey Holmes, The Making of a Great Power (1993); Lois G. Schwoerer's The Revolution of 1688–1689 (1992) stresses, against recent revisionism, the radicalism of the Bill of Rights.

  15 G.J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (1975); for Shaftesbury's rebuttal of Divine Right theory, see Paul Hammond, ‘The King's Two Bodies’ (1991), p. 33.

  16 Though, of course, billed in later English ideology as the revolution to end all revolutions: Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (1980), p. 19.

  17 For political tensions under William and Mary, see Geoffrey Holmes and W. A. Speck, The Divided Society (1967); Geoffrey Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution 1689–1714 (1969), and The Birth of Britain (1994); J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles (1977); Clyve Jones (ed.), Britain in the First Age of Party, 1684–1750 (1987), pp. 195–219; Holmes and Speck, The Divided Society. For refugees, see I. Scoutland (ed.), Huguenots in Britain and their French Background, 1550–1800 (1987).

  18 Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (1987).

  19 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power (1989); Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England (1982).

  20 For rancour under Anne, see Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (1973).

  21 Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen (1968).

  22 See Cranston, John Locke: A Biography; John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility
(1994).

  23 Mark Goldie (ed.), Locke: Political Essays (1997), pp. xiiif. This contains an excellent introduction.

  24 John Dunn, Locke (1984), p. 23.

  25 Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, p. xvi.

  26 Quoted in J. W. Gough, John Locke's Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), p. 134; J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (1985), p. 47: Hearne groused that Locke's Essay was ‘much read and studied at Cambridge’. On unbelievers, see Michael Hunter, ‘The Problem of “Atheism” in Early Modern England’ (1985).

  27 Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988), p. 97; compare also her earlier remark: ‘The Enlightenment, in both its moderate and radical forms, began in England,’ in The Radical Enlightenment (1981), p. 79, and her view (p. 84) that ‘the actual roots of the European Enlightenment… lay in the English revolutionary experience against Stuart absolutism as well as in the Continental opposition to French absolutism’. For the wider European radicalism of the 1680s, see P. G. M. C. Hazard, The European Mind, 1680–1715 (1964), and Margaret Jacob, ‘The Crisis of the European Mind’ (1987).

  28 ‘The Enlightenment, in both its moderate and radical forms, began in England but achieved intellectual maturity in Europe’: Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 79, and ‘The European Enlightenment begins in 1689’ (p. 84).

  29 For early Hanoverian politics, see J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (1967); G. Holmes, ‘The Achievement of Stability’ (1981); Jeremy Black (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (1984), and The Politics of Britain, 1688–1800 (1993); Hiram Caton, The Politics of Progress (1988). For Jacobites, see Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (1989).

  30 Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (1982).

  31 For Continental censorship, see Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1996).

  32 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions’ (1989), p. 84.

  33 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment (1980), p. 105.

  34 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce’ (1985); compare Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 94.

  35 Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce’, p. 528; compare Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 94.

  36 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975), p. 477, and Barbarism and Religion (1999), vol. i, p. 294. Like Pocock, Jacob sees the English ploughing a Sonderweg. Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988), p. 139.

  37 J. C. D. Clark applies ‘ancien régime’ to Hanoverian England in English Society, 1688–1832 (1985) and in Revolution and Rebellion (1986).

  38 Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 94.

  39 Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (1976). She has also claimed that there was a more radical movement to the left of Pocock's conservative Enlightenment: The Radical Enlightenment.

  40 Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, p. 124.

  41 The battle for supremacy between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Labour in the 1990s affords some parallel.

  42 For Swift, see David Nokes, Jonathan Swift A Hypocrite Reversed (1985), p. 295; see also Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle (1968); Bertrand A. Goldgar, The Curse of Party (1961), and Walpole and the Wits (1976); J. A. Downie, ‘Walpole: The Poet's Foe’ (1984).

  43 Clark, English Society, 1688–1832, and Revolution and Rebellion; C. B. Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonians, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth-century Britain’ (1980). For Whig Cambridge, see chapter 3.

  44 Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1972 [1673]); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (1988).

  45 Quoted in Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 52.

  46 Compare Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment (1987); Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1993); Michael Foss, The Age of Patronage (1971).

  47 J. M. Beattie, The English Court in the Reign of George I (1967); R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court (1993).

  48 On the marvel of the metropolis, see Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity (1998); Roy Porter, ‘Visiting London’ (1994); M. Byrd, London Transformed (1978).

  49 Samuel Johnson, ‘London’ (1738), in Patrick Cruttwell (ed.), Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings (1986), p. 42.

  50 For Londoners’ delight in looking at themselves, see Roy Porter, ‘Capital Art’ (1997).

  51 Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities (1956); Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses (1963).

  52 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 44.

  53 See Geoffrey Alan Cranfield, The Press and Society from Caxton to Northcliffe (1978), p. 89.

  54 The Craftsman (4 October 1729), quoted in Herbert M. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth (1974), p. 61. See also The Craftsman (20 March 1727): ‘I could wish, Sir, that you would now and then, of an Evening, come incog. to the publick Coffee houses, as some of your Predecessors have done; for then you will be truly informed, of the Opinions and Sentiments of Mankind’: Simon Varey (ed.), Lord Bolingbroke: Contributions to the Craftsman (1982), p. 8. Jonathan Swift demurred: ‘It is the Folly of too many to mistake the Echo of a London Coffee house for the Voice of the Kingdom’: The Conduct of the Allies (1711), p. 47.

  55 C. de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in 1725–29 (1995 [1902]), p. 111.

  56 James L. Clifford (ed.), Dr Campbell's Diary of a Visit to England in 1775 (1947), p. 58.

  57 For clubs, see Peter Clark, Sociability and Urbanity (2000); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People (1995), p. 67; Marie Mulvey Roberts, ‘Pleasures Engendered by Gender’ (1996); Howard William Troyer, Ned Ward of Grub Street (1968), p. 151. For European comparisons, see Richard van Dülmen, The Society of the Enlightenment (1992), pp. if., 85.

  58 If all Johnson's friends had got together, reflected Boswell, ‘we should have a very capital university’: R. W. Chapman (ed.), Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1970), p. 228.

  59 D. G. C. Allan, William Shipley: Founder of the Royal Society of Arts (1968), p. 8.

  60 For enlightened sociability see Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 44. For salons, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters (1994). Daniel Defoe proposed a London university in Augusta Triumphans or The Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe (1728).

  61 Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (1992), p. 32, and The Radical Enlightenment, p. 110; for wider European dimensions, see Ulrich Im Hof, The Enlightenment (1994), p. 139; van Dulmen, The Society of the Enlightenment, pp. 151f. Masons found Newtonian metaphors attractive. In 1779, for example, the Kent vicar and freemason James Smith, preaching before his lodge, praised benevolence: ‘Attraction binds the universe as benevolence binds men’: Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 56.

  62 Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 110; John Money, ‘Freemasonry and the Fabric of Loyalism in Hanoverian England’ (1990); John Brewer, ‘English Radicalism in the Age of George III’ (1980), p. 359.

  63 Wilson, The Sense of the People, p. 71.

  64 On the politics of the theatre, see Marc Baer, The Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (1991).

  65 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 60; Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting (1988); David H. Solkin, Painting for Money (1993).

  66 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (1978), p. 25.

  67 Quoted and discussed in Roy Porter, John Hunter: A Showman in Society’ (1993–4), pp. 21–2.

  68 Altick, The Shows of London, pp. 60, 35, 47.

  69 The masquerade offered a bold form of freedom, for, as Fielding observed, to ‘masque the face’ was ‘t'unmasque the mind’: quoted in Terry Castle, Masquerade and
Civilization (1986), p. 73. Pat Rogers, Eighteenth Century Encounters (1985), pp. 11–17, 28; Pears, The Discovery of Painting, pp. 77–87; Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London (1983).

  70 Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics (1994), p. 172.

  71 Quoted in P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700 (1976), p. 156.

  72 Trevor Fawcett, The Rise of English Provincial Art (1974); Peter Borsay, ‘The Rise of the Promenade’ (1986), and The English Urban Renaissance (1989); Phyliss Hembry, The English Spa 1560–1815 (1990).

  73 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (1989); Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People (1994).