by Roy Porter
95 Robert Burns, ‘To a Louse’ (1786), in The Poetical Works of Burns (1974), p. 44 - virtually a gloss on Smith.
96 E. G. Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable (1994), p. 173. ‘It is the great fallacy of Dr Mandeville's book The Fable of the Bees to represent every passion as wholly vicious’: Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt VII, sect. 2, p. 312.
97 Quoted in Michael Ignatieff, John Millar and Individualism’ (1983), p. 329.
9 SECULARIZING
1 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975), p. 451.
2 Pieter Spierenburg, The Broken Spell (1991); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994). For a balanced adaptation of Weber's Protestant ethic, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), especially the conclusion. C. John Sommerville's The Secularization of Early Modern England (1992) is widely regarded as exaggerating the secularization process. By way of prelude, see the discussion at the beginning of chapter 5.
3 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1970–83), vol. vi, pp. 83, 100, 101; Henri Misson, Memoirs and Observations in His Travels over England (1719), pp. 36–7; on time, see D. S. Landes, Revolution in Time (1983); on clock ownership, see Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 1660-1760 (1988), pp. 25–8; Stuart Sherman, Telling Time (1996).
4 M. Grosley, A Tour to London (1772), vol. i, p. 107.
5 Robert Southey, Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1984 [1807]), p. 361.
6 For these quotations and discussion, see E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ (1991), pp. 385–6; Neil McKendrick, Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline’ (1961).
7 Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’.
8 Charles Strachey (ed.), The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son (1924), vol. i, p. 192.
9 On hospitals, see J. Woodward, To Do the Sick No Harm (1974); Roy Porter, ‘The Gift Relation’ (1989). For the Magdalen, see Vivien Jones (ed.), Women in the Eighteenth Century (1990), p. 87; Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity (1998), pp. 39–74.
10 P.J. Bishop, A Short History of the Royal Humane Society (1974); Elizabeth H. Thomson, The Role of the Physician in Humane Societies of the Eighteenth Century’ (1963). Carolyn Williams has shown that the Humane Society was promoted within aframework of polite values: ‘The Genteel Art of Resuscitation’ (1982). Inspired by the Society, newspapers began to carry advicefor dealing with accident victims. Thus Jopson's Coventry Mercury (31 May 1784):
a correspondent has communicated the following directions for the recovery of persons seemingly drowned. – In the first place, strip them of all their wet cloaths; rub them and lay them in hot blankets before the fire: blow with your breath strongly, or with a pair of bellows into the mouth of the person, holding the nostrils at the same time: afterwards introduce the small end of a lighted tobacco-pipe into the fundament, putting a paper pricked full of holes near the bowl of it, through which you must blow into the bowels…
For Humane Society insertions in the Gentleman's Magazine, see Roy Porter, ‘Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century’ (1985), pp. 140, 156.
11 Max Weber's concept: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930).
12 Mark Jackson, New-Born Child Murder (1996), pp. 46f.
13 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798). See also chapters 17 and 20.
14 Julian Hoppit, ‘Political Arithmetic in Eighteenth-century England’ (1996).
15 Ulrich Trohler, ‘Quantification in British Medicine and Surgery 1750–1830’ [1978]; James C. Riley, Sickness, Recovery and Death (1989).
16 G. Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (1957); Andrea Rusnock, The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684–1750) (1996).
17 I. Hacking, The Taming of Chance (1990); Lorraine J. Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), and ‘The Domestication of Risk’ (1987); Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, Robin E. Rider (eds), The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (1990); Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives (1999).
18 Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler (eds), Inventing Human Science (1995); Richard Olson, Science Deified and Science Defied (1990), vol. ii, and The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642–1792 (1993).
19 For press support for inoculation, see C. Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (1997), p. 157; see also Simon Schaffer, ‘A Social History of Plausibility’ (1993).
20 C. Bruyn Andrews (ed.), The Torrington Diaries (1954 [1781–94]), vol. ii, p. 120; Clark, Betting on Lives. For the roles of knowledge, data and quantification in conceptualizing a more regulated world, see Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods (1996); Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948); Roy Porter, ‘Accidents in the Eighteenth Century’ (1996).
21 Cecil Henry L'Estrange Ewen, Lotteries and Sweepstakes (1932). The elimination of lotteries – for defying Providence – was central to the Evangelical platform: Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians (1961), p. 107.
22 James Kelly, That Damned Thing Called Honour (1995); V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History (1989).
23 William Cadogan thus justified his Essay upon Nursing, and the Management of Children (1748): ‘this business has been too long fatally left to the management of women, who cannot be supposed to have proper knowledge to fit them for such a task’ (p. 3). See the discussion in Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery (1995).
24 V. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies (1986), and Wetnursing (1988).
25 C. Hardyment, Dream Babies (1983).
26 ‘When I think of dying, it is always without pain or fear’: Desmond King-Hele (ed.), The Letters of Erasmus Darwin (1981), p. 279, letter 95E, to Richard Lovell Edgeworth (15 March 1795).
27 Hume retained to the end the capacity to madden Boswell. See the account of their final meeting in Boswell's journal (3 March 1777) in Charles M. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (eds.), Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778 (1971), pp. 11–15, especially p. 11: ‘He [Hume] then said flatly that the Morality of every Religion was bad, and I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal.’ The pious Christian Boswell was also disappointed when he attended the deathbed of Lord Kames:‘
I said the doctrine of eternity of Hell's torments did harm’. ‘No’, said he. ‘Nobody believes it’. I could make nothing of him tonight.
Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (1972), p. 370.
28 Philippe Ariés, L'homme devant la mort (1977). Ariès felt repugnance towards Enlightenment rituals of dying; for alternative views, see Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death (1991); John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (1981) Roy Porter, ‘Death and the Doctors in Georgian England’ (1989).
29 See Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (1995), p. 8.
30 See Gibbon's comment:
In old age, the consolation of hope is reserved for the tenderness of parents, who commence a new life in their children; the faith of enthusiasts who sing Hallelujahs above the clouds, and the vanity of authors who presume the immortality of their name and writings.
Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1966[1796]), p. 188.
31 See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (1989), p. 215. Compare Locke's demystification of darkness.
32 Ralph A. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (1998), pp. 329–30.
33 C.J. Lawrence, ‘William Buchan: Medicine Laid Open’ (1975); Roy Porter, ‘Spreading Medical Enlightenment’ (1992).
34 W. Buchan, Observations concerning the Prevention and Cure of the Venereal Disease (1796), p. xxii.
35 Buchan, Observations concerning the Prevention and Cure of the Venereal Disease, p. xxvi, quoting Benjamin Rush, An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever (179
4).
36 Buchan, Domestic Medicine (1769), p. 730. People might look dead but be recoverable: see pp. 730–58.
37 Buchan, Domestic Medicine.
38 Roy Porter, Doctor of Society (1991), throughout.
39 Thomas Beddoes, Hygëia (1802–3), vol. ii, essay vi, p. 46.
40 Roy Porter, ‘Civilization and Disease’ (1991).
41 Charles F. Bahmueller, The National Charity Company (1981), p. 7; see discussion in David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined (1989), p. 211.
42 A key theme of V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree (1994).
43 Bahmueller, The National Charity Company, p. 6. See below chapters 16 and 18.
44 Robert Poole, ‘ “Give Us Our Eleven Days!” ’ (1995).
45 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (1989), p. 300.
46 S. I. Tucker, Protean Shape (1967), esp. pp. 33–48.
47 Gentleman's Magazine no. 58 (1788), p. 947, discussed in Penelope J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (1991), p 102. The suggestion was originally Addison's.
48 Robert DeMaria Jr, Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986), p. 6; John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80 (1983), pp. 149–50; Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800 (1999), discusses the gentrification, standardization and codification of the language. Radical language reform schemes are mentioned in chapter 20; theories of language are discussed in chapter 10.
In the preface to his Dictionary, Johnson opposed the formation of an English academy for the improvement of the language because he could ‘never wish to see dependence multiplied’ (para. 90), being proud that he completed his book ‘without any patronage of the great’ (para. 94). See the discussion in Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80, ch. 9. Defoe favoured an English academy partly to encourage learning, partly to stabilize the language – see James T. Boulton (ed.), Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe (1975), p. 29.
49 Jeremy Black, introduction to Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 1660–1800 (1991), pp. 5–6.
50 Thomas Sheridan, British Education (sn, 1756), pp. 241–2, quoted in John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), p. 475.
51 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753), title page; see the discussion in Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, The ‘Modern Moral Subject’ (1992–3), vol. iii, pp. 56–151.
52 D. V. Glass, Numbering the People (1973).
53 N. Robinson, A New System of the Spleen (1729), p. 174; see Akihito Suzuki, ‘An Anti-Lockean Enlightenment?’ (1994), and ‘Mind and Its Disease in Enlightenment British Medicine’ [1992]; and more broadly, Roy Porter, Mind Forg'd Manacles (1987).
54 Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penny Tucker and Keir Waddington, The History ofBethlem (1997); Michel Foucault, La Folie et la Déraison (1961); Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions (1993).
55 Alexander Crichton, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (1798), quoted in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry (1963), P. 559; thus, to refer back to the discussion in chapter 7, in the emerging field of psychiatry too, Christian pneumatology was being elbowed aside by a naturalistic ‘psychology’.
56 William Battie, A Treatise on Madness (1758), and John Monro, Remarks on Dr Battie's Treatise on Madness (1962 [1758]), pp. 61–2. Battie drew on Locke's psychology, not least his distinction between idiots and the insane:
In fine, the defect in naturals seems to proceed from want of quickness, activity, and motion in the intellectual Faculties, whereby they are deprived of Reason: whereas mad Men, on the other side seem to suffer by the other Extreme. For they do not appear to me to have lost the Faculty of Reasoning: but having joined together some Ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for Truths; and they err as men do, that argue right from wrong Principles.
John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1975 [1690]), bk II, ch. 11, pp. 160–61.
57 Thomas Arnold, Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of Insanity (1782–6), vol. ii, p. 432.
58 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1794–6), bk IV, pp. 83–4.
59 C. Hibbert (ed.), An American in Regency England (1968), p. 109; Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat (1813).
60 For what follows, see Michael MacDonald, ‘The Secularization of Suicide in England, 1600–1800’ (1986); Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls (1990); S. E. Sprott, The English Debate on Suicide from Donne to Hume (1961); R. Bartel, ‘Suicide in Eighteenth-century England’ (1959); and, for the longue durée, Georges Minois, History of Suicide (1999).
61 MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 180–81.
62 David Hume, On Suicide (1741–2), in Selected Essays (1993), p. 315.
63 I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride.
William Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802), quoted in MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 192.
Chatterton's suicide was widely interpreted as consequent upon an excess of sensibility: Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (1986), P. 53.
64 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic.
65 MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 323.
66 Alexander Pope, ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ (1817), 11. 6–10, in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 262.
67 Thomas Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and Humanitarian Narrative’ (1989). For discussion, see above, chapter 12.
68 See generally Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic.
69 For Priestley on ghosts, see John Towill Rutt (ed.), The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley (1817–32), vol. iii, p. 50 and vol. iv, pt 1, ‘Remarks concerning the Penetrability of Matter’; Simon Schaffer, ‘States of Mind’ (1990), pp. 241f.
70 For Bentham on ghosts, see John Bowring (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham (1995 [1843]), vol. x, pp. 11–21.
71 Porter, Mind Forg'd Manacles, pp. 63f.; Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (1997).
72 Of course it changed elsewhere, too. For France, see Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle (1968).
73 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1968 [1651]), p. 92. Hobbes was the bogeyman who confirmed the old dictum that denial of witchcraft was the Devil's work.
74 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, vol. i, no. 117, pp. 480–82 (14 July 1711). The following section draws heavily on James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness (1996) and Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformation, c.1650–c.1750 (1997).
75 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. i, no. 117, pp. 480–82 (14 July 1711).
76 Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft (1718), p. vi. Hutchinson, subsequently bishop of Down and Connor, also wrote a Short View of the Pretended Spirit of Prophecy (1708).
77 Hutchinson, An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, p. viii.
78 See Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, pp. 284–5; R. D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake (1982), p. 81.
79 Hutchinson, An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, pp. 229, 230.
80 Hutchinson, An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, p. 69.
81 Hutchinson, An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, p. 63. Note the villain/victim reversal.
82 See Thomas Gordon, The Humorist, 3rd edn (1724), pp. 74–7; R. D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake (1982), p. 82. For Gordon's politics, see chapter 8 above.
83 Joseph Juxon, A Sermon upon Witchcraft (1736), p. 24; Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, pp. 372–4.
84 [Anon.], A System of Magick (1727). Like Shaftesbury, the author recommended laughing at such pretenders.
85 [Anon.], A Discourse on Witchcraft (1736), ch. 3, p. 6. Magic and witchcraft originated in ‘Heathen Fables’.
86 Reading Mercury and Oxfor
d Gazette (15 March 1773). After a ducking, the poor woman was ‘happily’ saved from a second by a magistrate.
87 Lloyd's Evening Post (2 January 1761). Similar newspaper items abound.
88 Hutchinson, An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, pp. 130–31.
89 Christopher Smart, The Genuine History of the Good Devil of Woodstock (1802).
90 K. M. Briggs, Pale Hecate's Team (1962); Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History (1996), pp. 179–249
91 Jonathan Keates, Purcell: A Biography (1995), pp. 107, 180; Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, p. 291; Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake, pp. 83–4.