by Roy Porter
86 Jonathan Swift, ‘On Poetry’ (1733), ll. 353–6, in The Complete Poems (1983), p.531. Swift wrote a ‘Digression Concerning Criticks’, where ‘a True Critick’ is presented as ‘a sort of Mechanick, set up with a Stock and Tools for his Trade, at as little Expence as a Taylor’: Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1975 [1704]), p. 62; see also Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965), p. 85.
87 Cole (eds), The Opinions of William Cobbett, p. 42. Characteristically Cobbett qualified: ‘The only critics that I look to are the public.’
88 For Steele: ‘In a Nation of Liberty, there is hardly a Person in the whole Mass of the People more absolutely necessary than a Censor’: Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler (1987), vol. ii, no. 144, p. 318 (Saturday, 11 March 1710). Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (1984), pp. 31, 4: for Eagleton, the irony of Enlightenment criticism lay in the fact that ‘while its appeal to standards of universal reason signifies a resistance to absolutism, the critical gesture itself is typically conservative and corrective, revising and adjusting particular phenomena to its implacable model of discourse’.
89 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (1969 [1750–52]), vol. i, p. xxviii.
90 Donoghue, The Fame Machine.
91 Edward A. Bloom and Lilian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal (1971).
92 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. i, no. 10, p. 54.
93 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1999 [1711]); Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (1994); Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: 1671–1713 (1984).
94 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. ii, p. 207.
95 David Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’ (1741), in Selected Essays (1993), p. 2.
96 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn (1978 [1739–40]), p. 269; Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (1954), ch. 6.
97 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1969 [1739–40]), p. 21.
98 David Hume, The Life of David Hume, Esq. (1741–2), in David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume (1874–5; repr. 1987), vol. 3, p. 2.
99 Hume, The Life of David Hume, Esq., in David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1898), vol. 4, p. 5. Unlike Hume, Hugh Blair complimented Locke's style: his ‘celebrated Treatise on Human Understanding’ was a model of ‘the greatest clearness and distinctness of Philosophical Style, with very little approach to ornament’: Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), vol. iii, lecture 37, p. 81.
100 See the discussion in Stephen Copley, ‘Commerce, Conversation and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-century Periodical’ (1995); Jerome Christensen, Practising Enlightenment (1987).
101 Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, vol. iii, pp. 78, 79, 80.
102 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. i, bk I, ch. i, p. 21, para. 9.
103 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. i, bk I, ch. 1, p. 21, para. 9.
104 For Smith's universal observer, see John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80 (1983).
105 Compare Jean Le Rond D'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot(1995).
106 For instructional and educational books, see Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-century England (1982); John Ashton, Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century (1882); Victor Neuberg, Popular Literature (1977), pp. 113f.
107 See S. F. Pickering Jr, John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-century England (1981), and chapter 15, below.
108 Herbert M. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth (1974); Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science (1994); Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860, pp. 17f.; Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822 (1994); Michael Duffy (ed.), The English Satirical Print, 1600–1832 (1986); Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (1983); Brian Maidment, Popular Prints, 1790–1870 (1995).
109 DeMaria, Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning; J. Harris, Lexicon Technicum (1736): it had 1,200 subscribers. For encyclopaedias, see Frank A. Kafker (ed.), Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1981), p. 108; Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias (1964), p. 99; Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions (forthcoming). Theology received little attention in the Lexicon Technicum.
110 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, Or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728).
111 Abraham Rees, The Cyclopaedia (1819).
112 Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771). See Collison, Encyclopaedias, pp. 138f.
113 Thus, Laurence Sterne drew heavily upon Chambers for the learned humour in Tristram Shandy: see Judith Hawley, ‘The Anatomy of Tristram Shandy’ (1993).
114 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 463; Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon (1999).
115 Quoted in B. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste (1619–1800) (1858), p. 85.
116 Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (1992); Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions (1989); Robert W. Babcock, The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, 1766–1799 (1931).
117 F. M. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation (1926 [1733]), p. 165; Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 473.
118 Jonathan Swift, letter to Dean Sterne (26 September 1710), quoted in Michael Foss, Man of Wit to Man of Business (1988), p. 163.
119 Thomas Beddoes, Hygëia (1802–3), vol. iii, ch. 9, p. 163. In the persona of his hero, Sterne facetiously asks the reader: ‘is this good for your worship's eyes?’: Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, p. 268. For the pathology of reading, see Roy Porter, ‘Reading: A Health Warning’ (1999).
120 Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, vol. i, pp. 42–3.
121 Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. iii, P. 332.
122 Henry Mackenzie, The Mirror (1779–80).
123 The phrase is Goldsmith's: Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (1977), p. 3; see Kramnick, Making the English Canon; Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning (1995); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983); Lorraine Daston, ‘The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment’ (1991).
124 Anthony Pasquin [pseud.], Memoirs of the Royal Academicians (1796), p. 148. Many would arraign the public:
There still remains to mortify a Wit,
The many-headed Monster of the Pit:
A sense-less, worth-less, and unhonour'd crowd;
Who to disturb their betters mighty proud,
Alexander Pope, ‘The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace’ (1733), ll. 304–7, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 646.
125 Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, pp. 162–3.
126 Samuel Johnson, Life of Gray (1915), p. 14.
5 RATIONALIZING RELIGION
1 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (1667), p. 374.
2 Edward Moore on Sunday observance, in the World magazine, no. 21, quoted in George S. Marr, The Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century (1971), p. 144.
3 For historiography, see Sheridan Gilley, ‘Christianity and the Enlightenment’ (1981). For background, see Gerald R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (1950), The Church and the Age of Reason (1950), and Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century (1964); David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland (1996); Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (eds.), Revival and Religion since 1700(1993); Sheridan Gilley and W.J. Sheils, A History of Religion in Britain (1994); James Downey, The Eighteenth Century Pulpit (1969).
This chapter is extremely selective, chiefly dealing with the question of religious rationality. It essentially omits the heated discussions taking place on particular doctrines, for instance questions of the soul and of Heaven and Hell and the afterlife; see, however, the
account in Roy Porter, ‘The Soul and the English Enlightenment’ (forthcoming); and P. C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (1994); B. W. Young, ‘ “The Soul-sleeping System” ’ (1994); Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven – A History (1988).
4 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1966 [1796]), p. 139. ‘Cassock'd huntsmen’ was a coinage of the poet George Crabbe. ‘Gay’ Quakers were those who abandoned seventeenth-century costume and accepted some worldly pleasures.
5 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. 1, no. 112, p. 459 (9 July 1711); John Beresford (ed.), The Diary of a Country Parson (1978–81).
6 John Walsh, Colin Haydon and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Church of England c.1689-c.1833 (1993), p. 19.
7 Quoted in Hiram Caton, The Politics of Progress (1988), p. 207; Roland N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-century England (1954), p. 2. For High Church men see George Every, The High Church Party 1699–1718 (1956). Many historians treat such ‘atheists’ as mere bogeymen, but David Berman counter-argues that they were actually numerous but forced to resort to subterfuge: A History of Atheism in Britain from Hobbes to Russell (1988), p. 43. In his Answer to Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (sn, 1782), William Hammon wrote (p. xvii):
as to the question whether there is such an existent Being as an atheist, to put that out of all manner of doubt, I do declare upon my honour that I am one. Be it therefore for the future remembered, that in London in the kingdom of England, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-one, a man publicly declared himself to be an atheist.
8 Joseph Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature (1899), p. 59; C. John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England (1992), p. 185. In London in 1766, Alessandro Verri wrote: ‘Nobody even talks about religion here’: quoted in Nicholas Davidson, ‘Toleration in Enlightenment Italy’ (2000), p. 230.
9 For the age of Watts, the Wesleys and Cowper, see Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England from Watts and Wesley to Martineau, 1690–1900 (1996). Isaac Watts's The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1719) contained such well-known hymns as ‘O God, our help in ages past’.
10 William Law, The Absolute Unlawfulness of the Stage Entertainment Fully Demonstrated (1726), p. 11. For Law, see A. Whyte, Characters and Characteristics of William Law (1898); for the quotation see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), p. 333. Law discerned a Trojan horse: ‘the infidelity which is now openly declared for pretends to support itself upon the sufficiency, excellency and absolute perfections of reason or Natural Religion’: William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), introduction. Gibbon wrote of him: ‘his last compositions are darkly tinctured with the incomprehensible visions of Jacob Behmen’: Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, p. 22.
11 See M. Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman's Religion (1964); C. F. Chapin, The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson (1968). For ‘the quiver of Omnipotence’ see W.J. Bate, J. M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (eds), Samuel Johnson: The Idler and Adventurer (1963), no. 120, p. 468.
12 Jonas Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days' Journey, 2 vols., 2nd edn (1757), vol. i, p. 35.
13 In the middle of the century John Leland found the attacks of Deists still threatening: A View of the Principal Deistical Writers That Have Appeared in England in the Last and Present Century (1754).
14 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event (1982 [1790]), p. 186. For Bolingbroke's Deism see Ronald W. Harris, Reason and Nature in the Eighteenth Century, 1714–1780 (1968), p. 151. Johnson too was rude about Bolingbroke, in his Dictionary defining ‘Irony’ as ‘A mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words: as, Bolingbroke was a holy man’. For Bolingbroke, see H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (1970).
15 Certainly that was the view of that earnest agnostic, Leslie Stephen: History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1962 [1876]).
16 Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1995 [1787]), p. 132. A contemporary who certainly did read the Deists was Hazlitt: Catherine Macdonald Maclean, Born Under Saturn (1943), p. 58.
17 Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion to the Constitution and Course of Nature (n.d.), advertisement.
18 Norman Torrey, Voltaire and the English Deists (1930). Like those thinkers, Voltaire, while passionately anti-Catholic, remained for most of his life a Deist, seeing belief in God as the foundation of order.
19 Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment 1660–1830 (1994), p. 200.
20 Joseph Granvill's Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) – significant title! – analysed on Baconian lines man's proneness to error, and denounced dogmatism. Locke opposed ‘untractable Zealots in different and opposite Parties’, moved as they were by unreasoning ‘enthusiasm’: R. D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake (1982), p. 85. John Fletcher Clews Harrison, The Second Coming (1979).
21 Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (1978), vol. i, p. 263: Sacheverell called Dissenters ‘miscreants begat in rebellion, born in sedition, and nursed in faction’. On church courts, see John Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century (1989).
22 Increasingly it was the laity who led in policing vice through bodies like the Society for the Reformation of Manners and the Proclamation Society; the Evangelical revival was spearheaded by non-ecclesiastics like William Wilberforce: T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck, ‘The Societies for the Reformation of Manners’ (1976); Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England, charts the shift from ‘a religious culture to a religious faith’ (p. 1); C. John Sommerville, The Secularization Puzzle’ (1994); Pieter Spierenburg, The Broken Spell (1991). See also the opening of chapter 9.
23 ‘If the voice of our priests was clamorous and bitter, their hands were disarmed of the powers of persecution’: Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, p. 159.
24 C. de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in 1725–29 (1995 [1902]), p. 132.
25 Jeremy Gregory, ‘Christianity and Culture’ (1997), p. 113. They thus in some ways anticipated Coleridge's ‘clerisy’.
26 Robert Southey, Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1984 [1807]), p. 111.
27 Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957), p. 125.
28 Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Parts land II and Selected Other Writings (1973 [1663–78]), p. 7, 11. 193–5. Butler mocked the ‘darkness’ of the Puritans' illumination:
'Tis a Dark-Lanthorn of the Spirit,
Which none see by but those that bear it:
A Light that falls down from on high,
For spiritual Trades to cozen by:
An Ignis Fatuus, that bewitches,
And leads Men into Pools and Ditches.
29 Loathing for the ‘tyrannical’ Christian God was powerfully expressed by William Godwin, The Enquirer (1965 [1797]), p. 135.
30 Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King, in Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (1969 [reprint of 841 edn), vol. ii, p. 382.
31 On Locke and religion, see John Marshall, John Locke; Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (1994); Ashcraft, ‘Anticlericalism and Authority in Lockean Political Thought’. On the debate surrounding his views, see Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines (1997).
32 John Locke, Journal (8 February 1677): R. I. Aaron and J. Gibb (eds), An Early Draft of Locke's Essay Together with Excerpts from His Journals (1936), p. ii.
33 John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), p. 2.
34 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1975 [1690]), bk IV, ch. 19, para. 4, p. 698; Ernest Campbell Mossner, Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason (1990), p. 43; see discussion in Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (1962), p. 35.
35 John Locke, Works (1714), vol. vi, p. 157.
36 Locke, T
he Reasonableness, in Works (1714), vol. vii, p. 113.
37 Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, in Works, vol. vii, p. 125.
38 Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, in Works, vol. vii, p. 133.
39 Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, in Works, vol. vii, p. 135.
40 Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, in Works, vol. vii, p. 139.
41 Acts 17:22–9.
42 Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, in Works, vol. vii, p. 176.
43 Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, p. 454.