Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
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88 Butler, Peacock Displayed, p. 30.
89 Charles F. Bahmueller, The National Charity Company (1981), pp. 98f.; Jeremy Bentham, ‘Offenses against One's Self: Paederasty’ (1978 and 1979 [originally written c. 1785 but not published]). On Enlightenment attitudes towards homosexuality, see G. S. Rousseau, ‘The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century’ (1987); and Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. i.
90 Discussed in Anand C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (1976), pp. 47f.
91 Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, p. 47.
92 Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, p. 48.
93 Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, p. 48.
94 Derek Jarrett, The Ingenious Mr Hogarth (1976); Michael Duffy (ed.), The English Satirical Print, 1600–1832 (1986). For the pleasures of the bourgeoisie, see Peter Earle, The World of Defoe (1976), and The Making of the English Middle Class (1989).
95 For a reassessment of the Victorian ‘anti-sensual’ reaction, see Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (1994).
12 FROM GOOD SENSE TO SENSIBILITY
1 M. Bentham-Edwards (ed.) The Autobiography of Arthur Young (1898), p. 421.
2 W. A. Speck, ‘Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription 1700–50’ (1982), p. 65, and the valuable discussion in Pat Rogers (ed.), The Context of English Literature (1978), introduction, p. 13.
3 See Stephen Mennell, Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-image (1989); Alain Boureau, et al. (eds), A History of Private Life (1989), vol. iii; Michelle Perrot (ed.), A History of Private Life (1990), vol. iv; Dena Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life’ (1992).
4 See George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934–50), vol. i, p. 266; for attacks on aristocratic corruption, see below, chapter 18.
5 On the middling ranks, and their participation in public life, see Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England (1982); Penelope Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain 1700–1850 (1995); Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (1989); Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort (1996).
6 Coined by William Taylor in 1797. For selfhood, see S. D. Cox, ‘The Stranger within Thee’ (1980); J. O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self (1978); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989); Quentin Skinner, ‘Who Are “We”?’ (1991); Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self (1997).
7 Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Angel Makers (1958).
8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1965 [1781–8]), p. 17. Translating Rousseau's Discours sur les sciences et les arts in 1751, William Howyer dismissed Rousseau's ideas, insisting he gave them currency only because of their great ‘singularity’. For Rousseau's radical critique, see Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment (1994); for his influence, see Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England (1979), pp. 14f.; and for his importance in transforming ideas of the self, see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (1977). Rousseau is echoed by Walter Shandy's comment on his child Tristram: thanks to the accidents of his birth, Tristram should ‘neither think, nor act like any other man's child’: Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1967 [1759–67]), p. 572.
9 H. Whitbread (ed.), I Know My Own Heart (1987). Rousseau was endlessly quoted: see, for instance, Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1996 [1796]), p. 8. For an exemplary study of how reality came to mirror the fictional imagination, see John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (1987).
10 Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. ii, p. 437, n.2. See Penelope Murray (ed.), Genius: The History of an Idea (1989); G. Tonelli, ‘Genius: From the Renaissance to 1770’ (1973).
11 Charles Strachey (ed.), The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to his Son (1924), vol. ii, p. 136. For Chesterfield on women, see chapter 14.
12 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]), bk I, ch. 2, para. 4, pp. 28–9; Simon Schaffer, ‘Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy’ (1990).
13 Joseph Priestley, Memoirs of Dr Joseph Priestley, Written on Himself (1904 [1795]), p. 70; William Godwin, The Enquirer (1965 [1797]), p. 17.
14 Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711), in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 153, ll. 297–300.
15 Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965), p. 104; John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (1986), pp. 124, 151f.
16 Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). On fear of imagination, see M. V. De Porte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses (1974); Donald F. Bond, ‘ “Distrust” of Imagination in English Neoclassicism’ (1937), and ‘The Neo-Classical Psychology of the Imagination’ (1937); S. Cunningham, ‘Bedlam and Parnassus’ (1971). For Johnson's phrase, see Roy Porter, ‘The Hunger of Imagination’ (1985).
17 For proto-Romantic ideas of genius, see J. Engell, The Creative Imagination (1981); Schaffer, ‘Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy’.
18 Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), p. 42; R. W. Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order (1969), p. 238; Howard Mumford Jones, Revolution and Romanticism (1974), p. 270.
19 Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, p. 42.
20 Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, PP. 52, 53–54.
21 William Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius (1755); Alexander Gerard, An Essay upon Genius (1774).
22 Quoted in G. Becker, The Mad Genius Controversy (1978), p. 26; Roy Porter, ‘Bedlam and Parnassus’ (1987).
23 Joseph Warton's The Enthusiast (1744) contrasted England and France, preferring ‘Gothick battlements’ to the artificialities of continental and classical taste:
What are the lays of artful Addison,
Coldly correct, to Shakespear's warblings wild?
Quoted in Ronald W. Harris, Reason and Nature in the Eighteenth Century (1968), p. 16. See C. Thacker, The Wildness Pleases: The Origins of Romanticism (1983).
24 On the refiguring of enthusiasm, see R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm (1950); M. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). For (pre-) Romanticism, see David Aers, Jonathan Cook and David Punter, Romanticism and Ideology (1981).
25 Michael Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake (1985), p. 29.
26 See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (1986); G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (1992); Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion (1996); Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment (1996); Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen (1986).
27 C. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modem Consumerism (1989), p. 90.
28 Especially when targeted at women: Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? (1996); Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture (1989).
29 Roy Porter, ‘Madness and the Family before Freud’ (1998).
30 John Mullan, Sentiment And Sociability (1988); G. S. Rousseau, ‘Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve’ (1991), and ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres’ (1991).
31 See the introduction by Roy Porter to George Cheyne, The English Malady (1990 [1733]).
32 G. S. Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres’.
33 Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807); Roy Porter, ‘Addicted to Modernity’ (1992).
34 Roy Porter, ‘Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?’ (1991).
35 Roy Porter, ‘Civilization and Disease’ (1991), Doctor of Society (1991), and ‘ “Expressing Yourself Ill” ’ (1991).
36 As ever, there were counter-currents. Gibbon was proud that ‘my nerves are not tremblingly alive’: Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1966 [1796]), p. 188. Many deplored sensibility as an affectation.
37 Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, p. 133.
38 Generally on the novel, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957); John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson (1992 [1969]); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (1987); R. F. Brissenden, Vi
rtue in Distress (1974). On the sense of self-identification, see Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism (1994).
39 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), p. 9.
40 See Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction, p. 90.
41 Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction, pp. 65-128; Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 71f; Taylor, The Angel Makers, p. 265.
42 Robert D. Mayo, The English Novels in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (1962), p. 223.
43 Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money (1995), p. 49; Katharine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-century England (1982), pp. 152f.
44 Mary Hays has one of her characters exclaim: ‘ “I have no home;” said I, in a voice choaked with sobs – “I am an alien in the world – and alone in the universe” ’: Memoirs of Emma Courtney, p. 161.
45 Janet Todd, The Sign ofAngellica (1989). Among men, only Sir Walter Scott achieved comparable popularity. See below, chapter 14.
46 George Colman, prologue to Polly Honeycombe (1760); Jacqueline Pearson, Women's Reading in Britain, 1750–1835 (1999).
47 Critical Review, no. 2 (November 1756), p. 379. Writing in 1750, Johnson portrayed fiction as dangerous:
These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life. They are the entertainments of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account.
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (1969), vol. i, no. 4, p. 21 (Saturday, 31 March 1750).
48 Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction (1788), pp. 1–2. That book showed women disoriented by light reading: the mother ‘was chaste, according to the vulgar acceptation of the word, that is, she did not make any actual faux pas; she feared the world, and was indolent; but then, to make amends for this seeming self-denial, she read all the sentimental novels, dwelt on the love-scenes, and, had she thought while she read, her mind would have been contaminated’. The pleasures such novels imparted were ‘bodily’ or ‘animal’: Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, p. 328. On masturbation and the novel, see Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appelatur’ (1989); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ (1995). For the paradoxes of advice literature warning against the perils of reading, see Roy Porter, ‘Forbidden Pleasures’ (1995).
49 Sylvana Tomaselli (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1995), p. 102.
50 Peter H. Pawlowicz, ‘Reading Women’ (1995), p. 45.
51 Vicesimus Knox, Liberal Education (1789), vol. i, p. 301.
52 A. S. Collins, The Profession of Letters (1973 [1928]), p. 95; R. W. Chapman (ed.), Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra & Others (1952), p. 38: letter to Cassandra (18 December 1798).
53 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1975 [1818]), p.58.
54 Jane Austen, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon, ed. Margaret Drabble (1974 [written 1817]), p. 191; for Austen's conservative moralism, see Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, pp. 287–8.
55 John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse (1987), pp. 26, 141.
56 Thomas Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and Humanitarian Narrative’ (1989), pp. 176–7; Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (1976).
57 Robert Southey, Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1984 [1807]), p. 348.
58 David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), vol. i, p. 377.
59 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1978 [1739–40]), bk I, sect. 6, p. 253.
60 As discussed in Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, pp. 170–71. And see above, chapter 8.
61 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self (1976), p. 16; Boswell loved to reflect upon his own self: ‘AAnd as a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal’: quoted in Spacks, Imagining a Self, p. 228.
62 Frederick A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell's London Journal, 1762–1763 (1950), p. 62. See the discussion in John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), p. 32; Spacks, Imagining a Self, p. 231. Boswell, of course, wrote a magazine column under the penname of ‘The Hypochondriack’: M. Bailey (ed.), Boswell's Column (1951).
63 Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1989 [1752]).
64 Lennox, The Female Quixote, p. 15; Mullan, Sentiment And Sociability, pp. 57–113; Pawlowicz, ‘Reading Women’, p. 45.
65 It was perceived from the beginning as a ‘fashionable’ novel – hence Samuel Johnson's assurance to Boswell that ‘nothing odd will do long, Tristram Shandy did not last’: Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. i, p. 449. Sterne said of his book: ‘'Tis… a picture of myself’ and signed letters ‘Tristram’ or ‘Yorick’: Max Byrd, Tristram Shandy (1985), p. 8.
66 Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, quoted in Spacks, Imagining a Self, p. 134.
67 Frank Donoghue, The Fame Machine (1996), pp. 74, 85f; Arthur Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (1986), ch. 2.
68 Peter Conrad, Shandyism (1978), p. 31.
69 For Gothic, see E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction (1995); David Punter, The Literature of Terror (1980); M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (1971), p. 74; Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (1989).
70 Born to a family of Rational Dissenters who encouraged her literary leanings, Mary Hays (1760–1843) moved in the circles of Thomas Holcroft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Like the Memoirs of Emma Courtney, her second novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799), was also violently criticized. She produced a feminist tract, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), and Female Biography (1803).
71 Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, p. 4.
72 See the introduction by Eleanor Ty to Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney; Marilyn L. Brooks, ‘Mary Hays: Finding a “Voice” in Dissent’ (1995); Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805, pp. 12, 85. Hays directly quotes from Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Helvétius, Abraham Tucker, Godwin, Sterne, Holcroft, Hartley (‘indissoluble chains of association and habit’) and Richardson, and alludes to many others, including Locke.
73 Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, p. 4.
74 Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, p. 365.
75 Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, pp. 3–5. She was a ‘woman to whom education has given a sexual character’: p. 117.
76 Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, p. 119.
77 A fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, William Frend converted to Unitarianism, and supported the campaign to abolish subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles. He was excluded from the college as a consequence of his involvement with the French Revolution. He became a freelance writer and teacher in London until 1806, when he became actuary to the Rock Life Assurance Company. Frida Knight, University Rebel (1971); Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge (1997), vol. iii, p. 410.
78 Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, p. 369.
79 Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason (1980), p. 135.
80 The Anti-Jacobin, no. 30 (4 June 1798); Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, pp. 92, 235; Edward Copeland, ‘Money Talks’ (1989), p. 156. Kotzebue's Lovers’ Vows (1798) attacked marrying for money and exalted relations based on feeling.
81 Taylor, The Angel Makers; Hagstrum, Sex And Sensibility. See also the discussion of sex in chapter 11.
82 Philip Carter, ‘An “Effeminate” or “Efficient” Nation?’ (1997), and ‘Mollies, Fops and Men of Feeling’ [1995].
83 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (1987).
84 Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House (1992); Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (1998), vol. i.
85 William Hazlitt, Selected Writings (1970), p. 447.
13 NATU
RE
1 David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1947 [1779]), pt X, p. 194: ‘Demea’, the spokesman for orthodox Christianity, is speaking.
2 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–4), epistle IV, ll. 29–30, in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 537; compare:
Nor think, in NATURE'S STATE they blindly trod;
The state of nature was the reign of God…
Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle III, 11. 147–8, P. 530.
3 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1995 [1767]), p. 15.