Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  74 Neil McKendrick, ‘Introduction. The Birth of a Consumer Society’ (1982); Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury (1999); John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (1993); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 1660–1760 (1988); Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (1990).

  75 Addison and Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. i, no. 69, p. 293 (Saturday, 19 May 1711). Other books puffing England included William Camden's Britannia (1695), edited and modernized by Bishop Gibson, and Edward Chamberlayne's Angliae Notitia (1669).

  76 Alexander Catcott, The Antiquity and Honourableness of the Practice of Marchandize (sn, 1744), p. 14, quoted in David Dabydeen, ‘Eighteenth-century English Literature on Commerce and Slavery’ (1985), p. 26.

  77 Edward Young, The Merchant (1730), vol. ii, p. 1, quoted in Dabydeen, ‘Eighteenth-century English Literature on Commerce and Slavery’, p. 31.

  78 Quoted in Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, p. 202. On roads see Henry Homer, An Enquiry into the Means of Preserving and Improving the Publick Roads of This Kingdom (1767), pp. 3, 6, 8. A Warwickshire clergyman, Homer claimed that there had never been a ‘more astonishing Revolution accomplished [in transportation] in the internal System of any Country, than has been within the Compass of a few Years in that of England’: ‘Every Thing wears the Face of Dispatch’.

  79 C. Bruyn Andrews (ed.), The Torrington Diaries (1934–8), vol. ii, p. 149: ‘I wish with all my heart that half the turnpike roads of the kingdom were plough'd up,’ he groused: ‘I meet milkmaids on the road, with the dress and looks of strand misses.’

  80 Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, p. 203; Howard Robinson, The British Post Office (1948), pp. 99f; John Rule, The Vital Century (1992), pp. 224–5, 249; Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (1998), p. 234.

  81 The Times (28 February 1794).

  82 George Colman in St James's Chronicle (6 August 1761).

  83 Quoted in Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 117.

  84 L. Simond, An American in Regency England (1968), p. 59.

  85 Quoted in Robert DeMaria Jr, Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986), pp. 132–3. Compare Oliver Goldsmith's remark that ‘Learning is most advanced in populous cities… where the members of this large university, if I may so call it, catch manners as they rise, study life not logic, and have the world as correspondents’: Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), PP. 183–4.

  86 E. P. Thompson, quoted in Linda Colley, ‘Radical Patriotism in Eighteenth-century England’ (1989), p. 183.

  87 Jeremy Black (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (1984), p. 1.

  88 James Thomson, The Masque of Alfred (1740), in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-century Verse (1984), p. 192. Freedom created a flourishing commerce, the consequence of which was:

  The muses, still with freedom found,

  Shall to thy happy coast repair;

  Blest Isle! with matchless beauty crowned,

  And manly hearts to guard the fair!

  ‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves,

  Britons never will be slaves.’

  89 Oliver Goldsmith, ‘The Comparative View of Races and Nations’ (1760), p. 286. For the secularization of the Protestant notion of the chosen nation into a kind of manifest destiny, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972), p. 248.

  90 Charles Churchill, The Duellist (1984 [1764]), p. 512.

  91 Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (1985), p. 174. See also Black's ‘Ideology, History, Xenophobia and the World of Print in Eighteenth-century England’ (1991). Touring Italy, Gibbon abhorred the oppression, and found the once-famous university of Padua a ‘dying taper’: Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, p. 135.

  92 Black, The British and the Grand Tour (1985), p. 180.

  93 C. de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in 1725–29 (1995), p. 111.

  94 Madame Van Muyden (ed. and trans.), A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I & George II (1902), p. 67.

  95 Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, A Picture of England (1791), p. 85.

  96 Carl Philip Moritz, Journeys of a German in England (1982 [1783]), p. 36.

  97 Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City (1998); Porter, ‘Visiting London’.

  98 In 1752 Dr Lyttelton observed in Cornwall that there were very few cottages without sash windows. Six years later Mrs Montagu, visiting Lumley Castle, complained it had been excessively ‘modernized by sash-windows’: B. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste (1619–1800) (1958), vol. ii, p. 73. Note the new use of ‘modernized’.

  99 Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1963), pp. 196, 347; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night (1988), p. 11. For further information, see D. King-Hele (ed.), The Letters of Erasmus Darwin (1981), p. 146 ( Darwin wrote eleven letters to Wedgwood, mainly about oil-lamps); Benjamin Rumford, ‘Of the Management of Light in Illumination’ (1970 [1812]). Many Lunar Society luminaries were painted by that painter of light, Joseph Wright; see Benedict Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby (1968); see also Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (1995).

  100 Quoted in Caroline A. Davidson, A Woman's Work is Never Done (1982), p. 33.

  101 Isaiah 9:2; Matthew 4:16; John 1:9; I Corinthians 13:12. Compare Rosalie L. Colie, Light and Enlightenment (1957). The passage from Isaiah was set in Handel's Messiah.

  102 Frederick J. Powicke, The Cambridge Platonists (1971), pp. 23f. Cambridge Platonists insisted that one light did not extinguish another. For an exclusively Christian view of light see Charles Wesley's ‘Morning Hymn’ (1740):

  Christ, whose glory fills the skies,

  Christ, the true, the only light…

  Anthologized in Lonsdale, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-century Verse, p. 335.

  103 Isaac Newton, Opticks, or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light (1704); George Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, 2nd edn (1709); G. N. Cantor, ‘The History of “Georgian” Optics’ (1978); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (1946).

  104 James Thomson, ‘Ode to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’ (1727), in Lonsdale, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-century Verse, p. 190.

  105 Alexander Pope, ‘Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey’ (1730), in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 808.

  106 Joseph Priestley spoke of the ‘change from darkness to light, from superstition to sound knowledge’: Memoirs of Dr Joseph Priestley, Written on Himself (1904 [1795]), p. 156.

  107 Jeremy Black (ed.), Eighteenth Century Europe 1700–1789 (1990), p. 186.

  108 Gilbert Stuart, The History of the Establishment of the Reformation of Religion in Scotland (1780), p. 206.

  109 Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, p. 186; Thomas Spence, The Meridian Sun of Liberty (1796); Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1995 [1790 and 1792]), p. 112; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), p. 207. The Burkean sublime, of course, reinstated darkness: Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).

  110 Thomas Paine, ‘American Crisis’ (1776–83), in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (1945), vol. i, p. 125.

  111 In his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Johnson divided vision into four categories –

  Sight; the faculty of seeing.

  The act of seeing.

  A supernatural appearance; a spectre; a phantom.

  A dream; something shown in a dream. A dream happens to a sleeping, a vision may happen to a waking man. A dream is supposed natural, a vision miraculous; but they are confounded.

  – two related to perception of the visible, two to the invisible. The Lockean tradition dismissed perception of the invisible (spectres, phantoms, supernatural ghosts, miracles, dreams) as the work of a diseased
imagination.

  112 William Paley, Natural Theology (1802), p. 81, quoted in Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. iii, p. 299.

  113 See the discussions in Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment 1750–1820 (1997), p. 28; Leigh Schmidt, Hearing Things (2000), ch. 1; and chapter 3 below. Locke viewed human psychology in terms of ‘the Bounds between the enlightened and dark Parts of Things’.

  114 Rogers, Eighteenth Century Encounters, p. 1. The device is equivocal: the glasses help him. see but confirm that his vision is poor.

  115 Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), pp. 15–16.

  116 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1984 [1791]), p. 159.

  117 Quoted in Theo Barker (ed.), The Long March of Everyman 1750–1960 (1978), p. 64.

  118 George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934–50), vol. iii, p. 3; see the discussion in D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain (1990), p. 40.

  119 Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. iii, p. 3, and vol. iv, p. 217. ‘I do sincerely think,’ the biographer opined, ‘that this age is better than ancient times’: James Boswell, ‘On Past & Present’, The Hypochondriack (January 1782), in M. Bailey (ed.), Boswell's Column (1951), no. 52, p. 267.

  120 Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government (1988 [1776]), p. 3.

  121 Clark, English Society, 1688–1832, p. 42. My passage is a précis of Clark.

  3 CLEARING AWAY THE RUBBISH

  1 Isaac Watts, Logick (1724), introduction.

  2 Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (1962), p. 1: Willey stressed escape achieved (‘One meets everywhere a sense of relief’); no less important was escape sought. Throughout the long eighteenth century, the themes of imprisonment and deliverance remained to the fore: John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (1987).

  3 Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (1970).

  4 For Blake's phrase, see G. Keynes (ed.), The Complete Writings of William Blake (1957), p. 170.

  5 See W. B. Carnochan, Confinement and Flight (1977); for the theme in folklore, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde (1994). For Christian tellings, see Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People (1989), and The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolution (1993).

  6 John Toland, quoted in Stephen H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (1984), p. 6; Linda Colley, Britons (1992); John Lucas, England and Englishness (1990).

  7 For an analysis of such prejudices, see Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-century England (1971).

  8 P. C. Almond's Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (1994) illuminates the Rational Protestant rejection of the Greek metaphysics colouring Christian theology; see also J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (1985), p. 143. For Plato as mystagogue, see Joseph Priestley, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1871 [1721]), pp. 9, 113, 132, where he was tarred with the brush of ‘oriental philosophy’. See chapter 5 below.

  9 Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Essays on Human Knowledge, in The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (1969 [reprint of 1841 edn]), vol. iii, p. 294.

  10 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1994 [1776]), vol. i, pp. 398–9.

  11 On ‘priestcraft’, see below, chapter 5. Catholicism was doubly dangerous since it was so seductive. Not a few Enlightenment figures underwent temporary conversion, including Pierre Bayle, Edward Gibbon and James Boswell: Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-century England, c.1714–80 (1993).

  12 J. E. Norton (ed.), The Letters of Edward Gibbon (1956), vol. ii, p. 245; commented on by Iain McCalman: ‘Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte’ (1996); Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 155.

  13 For the trauma of the wars of religion, see Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (1980); Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (1995); R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm (1950).

  14 Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I and II and Selected Other Writings (1973 [1663]), The First part, canto 1, ‘The Argument’, p. 7, ll. 193–5.

  15 See R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (1936); Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books (1992).

  16 See Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle (1983).

  17 Well discussed in Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon (1999).

  18 Bentham's favourite term: Jeremy Bentham, The Book of Fallacies (1824); ‘The season of Fiction is now over,’ he pronounced in his A Fragment on Government (1988 [1776]), p. 53 – Mary P. Mack notes that ‘as early as A Fragment on Government he denounced “the pestilential breath of Fiction” ’: Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792 (1962), p. 76.

  19 Jones, Ancients and Moderns, p. 261. As Thomson's words make evident, rhetorics contrasting old and new, fiction and fact, were far from exclusive to the Enlightenment.

  20 Quoted in David L. Jacobson and Ronald Hamowy (eds.), The English Libertarian Heritage (1994), p. 272.

  21 G.J. Warnock, Berkeley (1969), p. 15. See also Ian Tipton, Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism (1995); Peter Walmsley, The Rhetoric of Berkeley's Philosophy (1990).

  22 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1999 [1711]), ‘Miscellany III’, vol. ii, ch. 1; ‘’Tis the persecuting Spirit has rais'd the bantering one’: ‘Sensus Communis’, section 4.

  23 Shaftesbury, ‘Miscellany III’, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. ii, ch. 1, p. 206. Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (1994), p. 34. He speared Calvinism and Hobbes with the same argument: their moralities of fear took the virtue out of virtue; thus they were both ungenteel. Shaftesbury's preferred dialogue form shows his leanings towards intellectual openness: Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment (1996).

  24 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667), p. 43; P. B. Wood, ‘Methodology and Apologetics’ (1980); Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure (1982), pp. 8f; Robert Markley, Fallen Languages (1993).

  25 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), para. 17; he nevertheless defended words, concluding: ‘I wish… that signs might be made permanent, like the things they denote.’ See Robert DeMaria Jr, Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986), p. 155.

  26 George Berkeley, Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), p. 152.

  27 C. H. Hull (ed.), The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (1899), vol. i, p. 244. See also Richard Olson, The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642–1792 (1993); Alessandro Roncaglia, Petty: The Origins of Political Economy (1985); Richard Stone, Some British Empiricists in the Social Sciences, 1650–1900 (1997), PP. 41f.

  28 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1728), book IV, ll. 653–6 in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 800.

  29 Pope was, indeed, in some measure popularizing Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, both of whom derived many of their ideas from Locke: Brean S. Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke (1984).

  30 See C. G. Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government (1989), p. 46. Locke, who oversaw the great recoinage of 1695–6, believed the value of legal tender must be seen to be intrinsic – it should not depend upon the politicians: John Dunn, Locke (1984), p. 40. Fears over clipped and counterfeit coins paralleled anxieties over false faces, and other forms of false pretences in an age of image-making: see Roy Porter, ‘Making Faces’ (1985).

  31 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Angent of Change (1979). For parallel iconoclasm in art, see Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art (1996).

  32 Of course there is something arbitrary in picking out three precursors: others were immensely influential too. Spinoza readily doubled with Hobbes as the atheist bogeyman. See R. L. Colie
, ‘Spinoza and the Early English Deists’ (1959).

  33 For discussion, see John Cottingham, Descartes (1986); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, ‘The Early Stage of Cartesianism in England’ (1929); Martin Hollis (ed.), The Light of Reason (1973); William Barrett, Death of the Soul (1987), pp. 14f.; Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The First Person’ (1984); Roger Smith, ‘Self-Reflection and the Self’ (1997).

  34 Alan Gabbey, ‘Cudworth, More and the Mechanical Analogy’ (1992); Rosalie L. Colie, Light and Enlightenment (1957), p. 124; G. A. J. Rogers, ‘Descartes and the English’ (1985).

  35 There was, for instance, the lover's gland: ‘The Pineal Gland… smelt very strong of Essence and Orange-Flower Water… We observed a large Antrum or Cavity in the Sinciput, that was filled with Ribbons, Lace and Embroidery’: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. ii, no. 275, p. 571 (Tuesday, 15 January 1712). Or the free-thinker's, which Berkeley purported to visit. The understanding he found ‘narrower than ordinary, insomuch that there was not any room for a Miracle, Prophesie, or Separate Spirit… I discover's Prejudice in the Figure of a Woman standing in a Corner’: Guardian (1713), no. 39, p. 155 (Saturday, 25 April 1713). In a narrative purporting to be the biography of Martin Scriblerus, who in vain devoted his life to the pursuit of knowledge, chapter 12 describes his ‘Enquiry after the Seat of the Soul’ ‘At length he grew fond of the Glandula Pinealis, dissecting many Subjects to find out the different Figure of this Gland, from whence he might discover the cause of the different Tempers in mankind’: Charles Kerby-Miller, Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries ofMartinus Scriblerus (1988 [1742]), p. 286.