by Roy Porter
9 For Christianity, see Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (1952); Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear (1990); Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell (1990). For death, see Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death (1991); Philippe Ariés, Western Attitudes towards Death (1976); and John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (1981).
10 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1966 [1796]), p. 23. By contrast he thanked fate for his own good fortune:
When I contemplate the common lot of mortality, I must acknowledge that I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life. The far greater part of the globe is overspread with barbarism or slavery: in the civilized world the most numerous class is condemned to ignorance and poverty; and the double fortune of my birth in a free and enlightened country in an honourable and wealthy family is the lucky chance of an unit against millions. [p. 186.]
11 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (1969), vol. i, no. 32, p. 175 (7 July 1750). For Rasselas, see B. Bronson, Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Poems and Selected Prose, 3rd edn (1971).
12 John Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson (1820), vol. ii, p. 205.
13 George Savile, marquis of Halifax, The Character of a Trimmer, 2nd edn (1689), p. 17. Compare Byron's remark: ‘I am almost most religious upon a sunshiny day’: L. A. Marchand (ed.), Byron's Letters and Journals (1973–82), vol. ix, p. 46. For Addison commending ‘Chearfulness in Religion’, see Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. iv, no. 494, pp. 251–4 (26 September 1712).
14 Conflict between the self-interested rational individual and the hierarchical society forms the premise of James L. Clifford (ed.), Man versus Society in Eighteenth-century Britain (1968).
15 John Hedley Brooke, Science And Religion (1991); A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being(1936); Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (1976).
16 On such environmental views, see C. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967).
17 Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the Problem of Evil (1975).
18 William Paley, Natural Theology (1802), p. 490; M. L. Clark, Paley: Evidences for the Man (1974).
19 Abraham Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued (1768), vol. ii, pt III, ch. 28, pp. 373, 375.
20 Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (1994). Shaftesbury was echoed by Sterne: Parson Yorick, Tristram tells us, ‘had an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature to gravity’, being ‘mercurial and sublimated’: Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1967 [1759–67]), vol. 1, ch. 11, p. 55. Sterne himself wrote:
‘I have not managed my miseries like a wise man – and if God, for my consolation under them, had not poured forth the spirit of Shandeism into me, which will not suffer me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else, just now, lay down and die – die –’
Letter to John Hall-Stevenson (1761), in Lewis P. Curtis (ed.), Letters of Laurence Sterne (1935), p. 139.
21 John Darling, ‘The Moral Teaching of Francis Hutcheson’ (1989).
22 On benevolence, see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (1992).
23 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962).
24 Roy Porter, ‘Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment’ (1995).
25 The Wants of the Mind are infinite, Man naturally Aspires and as his Mind is elevated, his Senses grow more refined, and more capable of Delight; his Desires are inlarged, and his Wants increase with his Wishes, which is for every thing that is rare, can gratifie his Senses, adorn his Body and promote the Ease, Pleasure and Pomp of Life. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (1905 [1690]), p. 14, quoted in Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury (1994), p. 112. For the psychological individualism entailed in such views, see J. O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self (1978); Patrick Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self (1976); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989); G. S. Rousseau, ‘Psychology’ (1980).
26 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]), bk II, ch. 3, para. 28, p. 341. For further discussion, see below, chapter 17.
27 Quoted in Stephen Copley (ed.), Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-century England (1984), pp. 121, 115.
28 Gary Hatfield, ‘Remaking the Science of the Mind’ (1995); David Carrithers, ‘The Enlightenment Science of Society’ (1995).
29 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk I, ch. 2, p. 55, para. 15; J. A. Passmore, ‘The Malleability of Man in Eighteenth-century Thought’ (1965); G. A.J. Rogers, ‘Locke, Anthropology and Models of the Mind’ (1993).
30 For Locke's theory of mind and its influence, see John W. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (1956), and Thinking Matter (1983); Kenneth MacLean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1936).
31 Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957), p. 124. See also a Locke manuscript, quoted on p. 123:
It is a man's proper business to seek happiness and avoid misery. Happiness consists in what delights and contents the mind, misery is what disturbs, discomposes or torments it. I will therefore make it my business to seek satisfaction and delight and avoid uneasiness and disquiet and to have as much of the one and as little of the other as may be.
32 For Hartley, see M. E. Webb, ‘A New History of Hartley's Observations on Man’ (1988).
33 Philippa Foot, ‘Locke, Hume, and Modern Moral Theory’ (1991). Eighteenth-century thinking emphasized the pleasurability of moral acts, as in philanthropy: Betsy Rodgers, Cloak of Charity (1949).
34 Charles Strachey (ed.), The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son (1924), vol. ii, p. 68 (19 July 1750); F. L. Lucas, The Search for Good Sense (1958) has a sensible essay on Chesterfield. See also his The Art of Living (1959); S. M. Brewer, Design for a Gentleman (1963).
35 Henry Fielding, ‘An Essay on Conversation’ (1972 [1743]), pp. 199, 204.
36 Soame Jenyns, Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), p. 46; P. Rompkey, Soame Jenyns (1984).
37 See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (1977); J. Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order (1972); Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue (1983); Joyce Oldham Appleby, ‘Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought’ (1993).
38 For counter-currents reasserting traditional, conservative, Christian thinking, see J. H. Plumb, ‘Reason and Unreason in the Eighteenth Century’, in In the Light of History (1972), pp. 3–24; Maurice J. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude (1941); for international comparisons and contrasts, see Robert Mauzi, L'Idée du bonheur dans la littérature et la pensée française au XVIII siècle (1960), and, largely for Italy, Piero Camporesi, Exotic Brew (1992).
39 In the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham of course attempted to do just that – to create a calibration of pleasure. For his felicific calculus, see chapter 18.
40 For Britain as a commercial society generating a ‘consumer revolution’, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982). Because the Dutch had created modern pleasures before Britain, they had first to come to terms with their moral dilemmas: see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (1988).
41 For material culture, see Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images (1983); Alan Macfarlane, The Culture of Capitalism (1987).
42 ‘By this invention,’ wrote the first British aeronaut James Tytler, respecting ballooning, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘the schemes of transporting people through the atmosphere, formerly though chimerical, are realized; and it is impossible to say how far the art of navigation may be improved, or with what advantages it may be attended.’ See C. Gillispie, The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation 1783–1784 (1983).
43 On aristocratic lifestyles, see David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990); J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (1986); G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (1963); Lawrence
Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? (1984). For a collective biography of a pleasure-loving aristocratic family, see Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats (1994).
44 Classic is Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1912).
45 The pioneer work came from J. H. Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-century England (1973); see also J. H. Plumb, Georgian Delights (1980).
46 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994); Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (1998), pp. 24ff; David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells (1989).
47 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (1978); Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (1985); Lawrence Stone, The Residential Development of the West End of London in the Seventeenth Century’ (1980).
48 R. W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (1973); Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-century England (1985), p. 6; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978); Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun (1996), pp. 23f.
49 For cultural performers, see Emmett L. Avery (ed.), The London Stage 1600–1800 (1968); Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics (1994); and on the commercialization of the visual arts, see Pears, The Discovery of Painting, Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London (1983).
50 Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820 (1994); Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds), Consumers and Luxury (1999); Neil McKendrick, introduction to McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 1–8.
51 For the spread of objects of pleasure, see Carole Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (1990); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 1660–1760 (1988), and ‘The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-century England’ (1993); T. H. Breen, ‘ “Baubles of Britain” ’ (1988), and ‘The Meanings of Things’ (1993); B. Fine and E. Leopold, ‘Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution’ (1990).
52 Peter Borsay (ed.), The Eighteenth-century Town (1990); Peter Borsay and Angus McInnes, ‘The Emergence of a Leisure Town’ (1990).
53 ‘Fashion is infinitely superior to merit in many respects’: Josiah Wedgwood in a 1779 letter to his partner Bentley, in Ann Finer and George Savage (eds), The Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood (1965), p. 235.
54 Alison Adburgham, Shopping in Style (1979); David Alexander, Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution (1970); Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-century England (1989). London's pavements – unknown in Paris – aided window-shoppers.
55 Clare Williams (ed. and trans.), Sophie in London (1933), p. 87.
56 Williams, Sophie in London, p. 237; Robert Southey noted the splendour of English shops: Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1984 [1807]), p. 361.
57 For resorts, see William Biggs Boulton, The Amusements of Old London (1969).
58 For Vauxhall, see Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity (1998), p. 119. Paralleling the pleasure garden was the masquerade: Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (1986).
59 For the theatre, see Marc Baer, The Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (1991); Kristina Straub Sexual Suspects (1991).
60 Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, p. 19.
61 On sport, see Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c.1780-c.1880 (1980); R. Longrigg, The English Squire and His Sport (1977); John K. Walton and James Walvin (eds), Leisure in Britain 1780–1939 (1983); Dennis Brailsford, Sport, Time and Society (1990), British Sport (1992), and Bareknuckles (1988); John Ford, Prizefighting (1971); W. Vamplew, The Turf (1974).
62 John Ashton, The History of Gambling in England (1898); Cecil Henry L'Estrange Ewen, Lotteries and Sweepstakes (1932).
63 H. C. Robbins-Landon, Handel and His World (1984); Eric David Mackerness, A Social History of English Music (1964).
64 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (1978), pp. 121–33, 303–16; Ricky Jay, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (1986), pp. 277–8.
65 Admirably discussed in Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-century England, and Georgian Delights.
66 Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums (1975); Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet (1973).
67 Roger Elbourne, Music and Tradition in Early Industrial Lancashire 1780– 1840 (1980).
68 Peter Clark, The English Alehouse (1983). The 1730s and 1740s saw the gin craze: Peter Clark, ‘The “Mother Gin” Controversy in the Early Eighteenth Century’ (1988); Roy Porter, ‘The Drinking Man's Disease’ (1985). Compare Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History (1993).
69 For general introductions, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977); P.-G. Boucé (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth-century Britain (1982); Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (1997); Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility (1980).
70 Frederick A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell's London Journal, 1762–1763 (1950); V. Bullough, ‘Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-century England’ (1987); A. R. Henderson, ‘Female Prostitution in London, 1730–1830’ [1992]; Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (1998), vol. i; Peter Martin, A Life of James Boswell (1999).
71 William Wimsatt Jr and Frederick A. Pottle, Boswell for the Defence 1769–1774 (1960), p. 108 (10 April 1772); Susan Manning, ‘Boswell's Pleasures, the Pleasures of Boswell’ (1997); Bruce Redford, ‘Boswell's “Libertine” Correspondences’ (1984); David M. Weed, ‘Sexual Positions’ (1997–8).
72 Pottle, Boswell's London Journal, p. 84 (14 December 1762).
73 Boswell's sex life and sexual attitudes have been analysed in Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, pp. 572–99.
74 Peter Wagner, Eros Revived (1986); Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography, 1500–800 (1993); David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745 (1965); Patrick J. Kearney, The Private Case (1981), and A History of Erotic Literature (1982); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Georgian England (1994); Karen Louise Harvey, ‘Representations of Bodies and Sexual Difference in Eighteenth-century English Erotica’ [1999]. Women too contributed to the genre: see Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms (1992).
75 John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1985 [1748–9]), p. 144.
76 Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure; Leo Braudy, ‘Fanny Hill and Materialism’ (1970–71); see Randolph Trumbach, ‘Modern Prostitution and Gender in Fanny Hill’ (1987).
77 The fullest discussion is Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life (1994).
78 Desmond King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution (1977), p. 240.
79 The prick and the pen were merged: Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (1995), pp. 10–11; G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (1992), p. 41; Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John, Earl of Rochester (1680), pp. 57, 72.
80 In A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724), Mandeville made the case for legalized and publicly regulated prostitution as a means of protecting other women from seduction and rape. Men must, one way or another, have sexual relief, and ‘our Business is to contrive a Method how they may be gratify'd, with as little Expence of Female Virtue as possible’ (p. 44). Prostitution was a private vice with clear public benefits, and should be made more safe and convenient for clients and customers.
81 John Wilkes, An Essay on Woman (1972 [1763]), p. 213. See also George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (1962); Adrian Hamilton, The Infamous Essay on Woman (1972); Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (1996), p. 4. For Wilkes's rakish activities, see Donald McCormick, The Hell-Fire Club (1958); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People (1995), p. 219.
82 Strachey (ed.), The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son, vol. ii, p. 133 (25 March 1751).
83 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1789–91), vol. i, 1l. 57–64. Genista is broom. Darwin compared plant promiscuity with the newly discovered information about free love i
n Polynesia. For more on Darwin, see below, chapter 19.
84 Janet Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen’ (1989); Darwin, The Botanic Garden, vol. i, 11. 57–64.
85 Discussed in Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981), pp. 129f.
86 Brian Fothergill (ed.), Sir William Hamilton: Envoy Extraordinary (1969); Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus (1996); Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 130ff. William Blake too became preoccupied with sexual freedom and erotic energy (‘the lineaments of gratified desire’), or perhaps with the perils of phallic sexuality and the evils of thwarted sexuality. He produced erotic engravings: see Peter Ackroyd, Blake (1995), p. 281.
87 See Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny (eds), The Arrogant Connoisseur (1982), pp. 14, 59; Marilyn Butler, Peacock Displayed (1979), p. 32. Christianity, according to Payne Knight, had transformed ‘the Creator and Generator Bacchus’ into a ‘jealous and irascible God’; Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1967), p. 259.