Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  92 Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times (1974), pp. 404f. See also Maximillian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (1959); Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, pp. 257–8, 291–2. For Wesley's defence of witchcraft and satanic interventions, see Owen Davies, ‘Methodism, the Clergy, and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic’ (1997).

  93 W. K. Wimsatt, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1960), p. 128.

  94 For this new bogeyman/anti-hero, see B. Easlea, Witch-hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy (1980), pp. 249–50; Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (1986); David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Black (1985); Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (1989), vol. iv; Luther Link, The Devil: A Mask without a Face (1995).

  95 For the supernatural in children's literature, see Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (1977); Bette P. Goldstone, Lessons to be Learned (1984); Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ‘Fairy Tales and Folk-tales’ (1996).

  96 In Lamb's pseudo-Jacobean drama, John Woodvil (1802), one passage, later cancelled, runs:

  I can remember when a child the maids

  Would place me on their lap, as they undrest me,

  As silly women use, and tell me stories

  Of Witches – Make me read ‘Glanvil on Witchcraft’…

  Charles Lamb, ‘Witches, and Other Night Fears’, London Magazine (October 1821), p. 384; Geoffrey Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason (1984), pp. 254–62. Lamb's assumption that children absorb witch beliefs from nurses of course echoes John Locke, who had written ‘the Ideas of Goblines and Sprights have really no more to do with Darkness than Light, yet let but a foolish Maid inculcate these often on the Mind of a Child, and… he shall never be able to separate them again so long as he lives, but Darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful Ideas’: Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 33, para. 10, pp. 397–8.

  97 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Burke argued that the two strongest instincts known to man were self-preservation and the social impulse. All that directly threatened self-preservation caused terror; and terrifying experiences were the source of the sublime. Our experience of the sublime was far greater in intensity than our experience of beauty. The thrill of the sublime, this ‘agreeable horror’, depended on one's being able to enjoy danger at a safe distance: see Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic; Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-century Aesthetic Theory; Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth Century England; Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds), The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-century Aesthetic Theory (1996), pp. 131–43; Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology (1993); Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (1994). For the sublime, see also chapter 13.

  98 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959); M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (1971), p. 102.

  99 Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787), p. 50.

  100 A. Blackwall, The Sacred Classics Defended and Illustrated (1725), pp. 250–54; Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake, p. 107.

  101 Compare the apocalyptic set pieces in James Thomson's The Seasons (1726–30) or Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742–5): for the biblical narrative aestheticized, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 38.

  102 Blackwall, The Sacred Classics Defended and Illustrated, pp. 277–8. Pandaemonium was staged in West End theatres – what had been religion in Milton had turned into spectacle: R. D. Altick, The Shows of London (1978), p. 123; Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium 1660–1886 (1985).

  103 James Usher, Clio, 2nd edn (1769), pp. 101, 103, 107–9, 116, 237–40; Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake, pp. 107–8.

  104 Castle, The Female Thermometer, p. 120; see also E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction (1995), esp. pp. 172f; Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow (1987); Stephen Bann (ed.), Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity (1994); David Punter, The Literature of Terror (1980); Christopher Frayling, Nightmare, The Birth of Horror (1996).

  105 N. Powell, Fuseli's ‘The Nightmare’ (1956).

  106 T. E. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (1936 [1923]), p. 118. For Blake as visionary, see David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet against Empire (1954).

  107 Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolution (1993), illuminates the demotion of the Bible after the Restoration, along with Antichrist and millennialism. See also his Antichrist in Seventeenth-century England (1971); for the persistence of such themes, see John Fletcher Clews Harrison, The Second Coming (1979).

  108 David Nokes, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (1985). This, of course, brings to mind Carl Becker's celebrated critique: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers (1932).

  109 Quoted in Schaffer, ‘States of Mind’, p. 247; Mary P. Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792 (1962), p. 337.

  110 Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792, p. 370.

  111 John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (1965); Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd, The King's Evil (1977 [1911]); Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (1973).

  112 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (1988); Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge (1996).

  113 Daniel Defoe, A System of Magic (1727).

  114 Discussed in Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 285.

  115 For continuing absorption in the supernatural, see Schaffer, ‘A Social History of Plausibility’; and for fascination with freaks, see Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters (1995).

  116 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750.

  117 Katherine C. Balderston (ed.), Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale 1776–1809 (1942), vol. ii, p. 786; see also, for the marginalization of occult beliefs, Simon Schaffer, ‘Newton's Comets and the Transformation of Astrology’ (1987); Kevin C. Knox, ‘Lunatick Visions’ (1999).

  10 MODERNIZING

  1 George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934–50), vol. ii, p. 365.

  2 Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress (1968); Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (1980); D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain (1990).

  3 David Hume, ‘Of the Study of History’ (1741), in Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1898 [1741–2]), vol. ii, p. 389. For a discussion of David Hume as historian, see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (1999), vol. ii, sect. 3.

  4 Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the 17th-Century Revolution (1993), p.427.

  5 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. ii, p. 210.

  6 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1994 [1776]), vol. i, ch. 15, p. 446: The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings. See Pocock, Barbarism and Religion.

  7 For Pope, Thomas Hearne the Oxford antiquarian was the prototype dunce:

  But who is he, in closet close y-pent,

  Of sober face, with learned dust besprent?

  Right well mine eyes arede the myster wight,

  On parchment scraps y-fed, and Wormius hight.

  Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1728), bk III, ll. 185–9, in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 758. In true enlightened fashion, Hearne was pictured shut off from the world, neglecting life in indiscriminate fascination with bits of paper.

  8 Edwin Jones, The English Nation (1998), pp. 70f.

  9 Quoted in Jones, The English Nation, p. 154; see also Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain, p. 223.

  10 Hume, ‘Of the Study of History’, in Essays Moral, Politi
cal and Literary, vol. ii, p. 389.

  11 Hume, ‘Of the Study of History’, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, vol. ii, p. 389. According to Lord Monboddo, ‘The history of manners is the most valuable. I never set a high value on any other history’: reported by James Boswell, in 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. 209.

  12 Hume, ‘Of the Study of History’ in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, vol. ii, p. 389. Gilbert Burnet called the Middle Ages ‘the Darkness’ and referred to its writers as ‘that Rubbish’; for Gibbon's similar usage, see Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1966 [1796]), p. 49.

  13 Samuel Johnson was sceptical about ‘real authentick history’:

  JOHNSON: That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture.

  BOSWELL: Then, Sir, you would reduce all history to no better than an almanack, a mere chronological series of remarkable events.

  Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. i, pp. 365–6.

  14 See James William Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-classical Thought (1967), p. 33.

  15 Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (1969 [reprint of 1841 edn]), vol. ii, letter 2, p. 183. See J. B. Black, The Art of History (1965), pp. 30–31.

  16 Karen O'Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment (1997), p. 14; Laird Okie, Augustan Historical Writing (1992), p. 48. For the theme of escape, see above, chapter 3.

  17 Generally, for what follows, see Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology (1973).

  18 Samuel Shuckford, The Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected (1728); Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (1990), p. 143.

  19 See, for discussion, Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974); Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, p. 148.

  20 William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738–41); Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, p. 151.

  21 John Toland, Letters to Serena (1704), letter 3, p. 71; Feldman and Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology, p. 27; Stephen H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (1984), p. 32. Toland also did a translation of Aesop.

  22 Quoted in Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners and Mind, p. 32.

  23 Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind, pp. 33–4.

  24 Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1967), p. 15; Feldman and Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology (1973), pp. 28, 34. Hume's views have already been discussed in chapter 5.

  25 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1995 [1767]), pp. 76–7.

  26 Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 77.

  27 Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 77.

  28 W. K. Wimsatt, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1960), p. 128.

  29 Speaking animals were always a challenge. Locke discussed parrots: Peter Walmsley, ‘Prince Maurice's Rational Parrot’ (1995). From the Greeks onwards, man has been prized as the rational animal, homo sapiens, and the clinching proof of that rationality has been articulate speech. The rest of Creation may jabber and bay, bark or bray, howl or mew, or even sing the dawn chorus, but man alone has words, makes sentences, constructs arguments: Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language (1991).

  30 Christopher J. Berry, ‘James Dunbar and the Enlightenment Debate on Language’ (1987); Stephen K. Land, ‘Adam Smith's “Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages” ’ (1977), and The Philosophy of Language in Britain (1986).

  31 See Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (1983), and From Locke to Saussure (1982).

  32 Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth Century Britain, p. 360.

  33 E. G. Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable (1994), p. 90. John Locke, The Philosophical Works of John Locke (1905), vol. ii, p. 8.

  34 William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, Part I, bk IV, section 4, in Works (1788), vol. ii, p. 83. Part I of the Divine Legation was published in 1737, part II in 1741.

  35 Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, part 1, bk IV, section 4, in Works, vol. ii, p. 83; see also William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1985 [1793]), p. 158. For the history of such ideas, see Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice (1999), pp. 128f.

  36 James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92; repr. 1970), vol. i, pp. 214–15.

  37 Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, vol. i, p. 574; Berry, James Dunbar and the Enlightenment Debate on Language’.

  38 E. L. Cloyd, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1972), pp. 64–89.

  39 Such views had their own prehistory, for in 1699 Edward Tyson had published an anatomical comparison of a human being and a great ape which he named Homo sylvestris, thus including it within the human genus. As a result, the orang-utan was sometimes called, in English translation, ‘wild man of the woods’: Robert Wokler, ‘From l'homme physique to l'homme moral and Back’ (1993), ‘Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment’ (1995), and ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment’ (1988).

  40 Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, vol. i, pp. 187–8. Monboddo noted that he had his information from Buffon.

  41 Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, vol. i, p. 257.

  42 Monboddo's views were delightfully reworked by Peacock in Melincourt (1817), which starred Sir Oran Haut-Ton, Bart, a great ape who successfully passed as a (silent) backbench MP: David Garnett (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1948), pp. 120f.

  43 Roy Porter, The Making of the Science of Geology (1977); and for race, see below, chapter 15.

  44 Porter, The Making of the Science of Geology; P. Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time (1984).

  45 T. Goddard Bergin and Max H. Fisch (trans.), The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1948 [3rd edn, 1744]).

  46 ‘It is tempting to observe that the Enlightenment was born and organized in those places where the contact between a backward world and a modern one, was chronologically more abrupt, and geographically closer’: Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1971), p. 133. For discussion, see Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (1995), p. 6.

  47 Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (1977).

  48 Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness’ (1992); Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (1987) – a work strong on the covert history of English nationalism. There is no room to explore here the complex interactions between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the eighteenth century: see Hugh Kearney, The British Isles (1989); Jeremy Black, The Politics of Britain, 1688–1800 (1993); Norman Davies, The Isles (1999).

  49 A good instance lies in Adam Smith's review in the first Edinburgh Review (1755): see the discussion below.

  50 Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. ii, p. 50.

  51 David Nokes, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (1985), p. 111; Joseph McMinn, Jonathan's Travels (1994).

  52 On Wales, see Gwyn Williams, ‘Romanticism In Wales’ (1988); Peter D. G. Thomas, Politics in Eighteenth-century Wales(1998); Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales: 1642–1780 (1987); D. Moore (ed.), Wales in the Eighteenth Century (1976); Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class (1983). Peacock wrote:

  Harry Headlong, Esquire, was, like all other Welsh squires, fond of shooting, hunting, racing, drinking, and other such innocent amusements… But, unlike other Welsh squires, he had actually suffered certain phenomena, called books, to find their way into his house.

  Headlong Hall (1816), in Garnett, The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, p. 10. The Gentleman's Magazine said in 1747 that Wales was acknowledged ‘a dismal region, generally ten months buried in sno
w and eleven in clouds’: quoted in David Pepper, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism (1984), p. 80. Insofar as the English thought about Wales at this time, it was largely for the mountains. See Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque (1989), ch.6.

  53 See Whitney R. D. Jones, David Williams: The Hammer and the Anvil (1986).

  54 Gwyn Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (1979). Welsh Jacobinism was, in the event, small beer. The French who landed in Pembrokeshire were surprised to find themselves met not by enthusiasts but by hostile peasants armed with billhooks, and they surrendered without a shot being fired.

  55 Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (1983). On Druids, see pp. 62–6.