Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  90 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), p. 52. See above, chapter 9, for a fuller discussion.

  91 Joseph Banks in T. Pennant, A Tour in Scotland, and Voyages to the Hebrides (1774–6), vol. ii, p. 262. For Banks, see John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (1994).

  92 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vindication of Natural Diet (1813).

  93 For Young, see his Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts (1784–1815), vol. iv (1785), pp. 166–8; Barry Trinder, The Industrial Revolution in Shropshire (1973); Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (1975 [1947]); Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, p. 79.

  94 Sir Walter Scott (ed.), The Poetical Works of Anna Seward (1810), vol. ii, pp. 314–15.

  95 Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, p. 80; see also Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision (1993).

  96 James Pilkington, View of the Present State of Derbyshire (1789), p. 49. For key discussions of the above, see Daniels, Fields of Vision, pp. 60f; Charlotte Klonk, Science and the Perception of Nature (1996).

  97 C. Bruyn Andrews (ed.), The Torrington Diaries (1934–8), vol. ii, p. 194.

  98 Andrews, The Torrington Diaries, vol. iii, p. 81.

  99 Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1810), vol. i, p. 198.

  100 Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770); William Cowper, The Task (1785), bk III, ll. 755–6, in James Sambrook (ed.), W. Cowper, The Task and Selected Other Poems (1994), p. 136; Roger Sales, English Literature in History, 1780–1830 (1983); Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840, and The Dark Side of the Landscape (1980).

  101 Young, Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts, vol. xxvi, p. 214.

  102 Humphry Repton, Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1816), p. 191. There is a delightful spoof on Repton in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, in which the landscaper Noakes insists that ‘irregularity’ is ‘one of the chiefest principles of the Picturesque style’: Arcadia (1993), p. 11; Stephen Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (1999).

  103 Repton, Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, p. 193.

  104 Thomas Peacock, Crotchet Castle (1831), in Garnett, The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, p. 85.

  105 C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1949), p. 111.

  106 Peter Ackroyd, Blake (1995), p. 130.

  107 William Blake, ‘Jerusalem’ (1804–20), in G. Keynes (ed.), Blake: Complete Writings (1969), p. 649.

  108 Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm (1992); Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, in Keynes, Blake: Complete Writings, pp. 480–81, 649.

  14 DID THE MIND HA VE A SEX?

  1 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), bk IV, 1. 299.

  2 Fanny Burney, diary (1768), quoted in Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea (1981), p. 23. She addressed her diary to ‘Dear Nobody’: see B. G. Shrank and D.J. Supino (eds.), The Famous Miss Burney (1976), p. 5.

  3 Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria or The Wrongs of Woman (1994 [1798]), p. 11. She used the ‘vast prison’ phrase elsewhere, autobiographically: see Letters, Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1976 [1796]), p. 102.

  4 Catharine Macaulay, Letters On Education (1790), p. 212.

  5 Jane Austen, Persuasion (1965 [1818]), p. 237. The passage continues: ‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own stor Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.’ Such comments were common: compare Mary Astell, The Christian Religion, as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), p. 293:

  the Men being the Historians, they seldom condescend to record the great and the good Actions of Women; and when they take notice of them, ‘tis with this wise Remark, That such Women acted above their Sex. By which one must suppose they wou'd have their Readers understand, That they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats.

  6 Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Comet of the Enlightenment (1999), p. 526.

  7 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (1949 [1680]); G. J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (1975).

  8 For gender relations, see Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (1995); Mary Abbott, Family Ties (1993); Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700 (1984); Susan D. Amussen, An Ordered Society (1988). For women and the Enlightenment, see Bridget Hill, Eighteenth-century Women: An Anthology (1984), and Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-century England (1994); Margaret Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Phyllis Mack and Ruth Perry, Women and the Enlightenment (1984); Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–1760 (1994); Alice Browne, The Eighteenth-century Feminist Mind (1987); Laura Brown, Ends of Empire (1993); Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780–1980 (1997); Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge (eds.), A History of Women in the West (1993), vol. iii, and Phyllis Mack, ‘Women and the Enlightenment: Introduction’, (1984).

  9 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1979 [1765–9]), vol. i, p. 430. Mary Wollstonecraft called marriage ‘legal prostitution’: Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), p. 106.

  10 Quoted in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992), p. 238.

  11 Anon., quoted in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-century Women Poets (1989), p. 136.

  12 William Alexander, The History of Women (1779), vol. ii, p. 336, quoted by Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, p. 238. Modern politeness had raised respect for women; refinement and women were mutually reinforcing and advanced together.

  13 Alexander, The History of Women, vol. i, p. 210.

  14 Only with commercial society did women cease to be the slaves or idols of the other sex, and become their ‘friends and companions’; only in Europe were women neither ‘abject slaves’ nor ‘perpetual prisoners’, but ‘intelligent beings’: Alexander, The History of Women, vol. i, p. 300.

  15 Hannah More, quoted in Spacks, The Adolescent Idea, p. 120. More was aiming to make young women compliant to spare them future grief, but the sentiments also squared with her evangelical Christianity and social conservatism. For more on More see below and chapter 20.

  16 George Savile, marquis of Halifax, The Lady's New Year's Gift (1688), introduction; see discussion in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women in the Eighteenth Century (1990), p. 18.

  17 Charles Strachey (ed.), The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son (1932), vol. i, p. 261; cf. Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate (1984). Such views were often predicated upon gendered notions of duty. According to Lord Kames, ‘To make a good husband, is but one branch of a man's duty; but it is the chief duty of a woman, to make a good wife’: see Spacks, The Adolescent Idea, p. 121.

  18 Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects (1778), p. 133. This passage was copied out by the governess Agnes Porter: Joanna Martin (ed.), A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen (1988), p. 58.

  19 M. G. Jones, Hannah More (1952), p. 50; Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle (1990), p. 4. In the first volume of the Athenian Mercury, John Dunton provided space for questions from women. In May 1691 it was asked ‘Whether it be proper for Women to be Learned?’: G. McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House (1972), p. 103. He later set up the Ladies Mercury (1693).

  20 Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, Orations of Divers Sorts (sn, 1663), p. 225, quoted in Hilda Smith, Reason's Disciples (1982), p. 82. Note the deep cultural anxieties: Andrew Hiscock, ‘Here's No Design, No Plot, Nor Any Ground’ (1997).

  21 Letter (10 October 1753), in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters and Works, 3rd edn (1861), vol. ii, p. 242. For Montagu on female education, see Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Comet of the Enlightenment, pp. 503ff. Anne Finch deemed women ‘Education's more than Nature's fools’: Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (1998), p.
252.

  22 Montagu, Letters and Works, vol. i, p. 314; Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Comet of the Enlightenment, pp. 152f.

  23 Montagu, Letters and Works, vol. i, p. 328.

  24 Felicity A. Nussbaum, ‘Polygamy, Pamela, and the Prerogative of Empire’ (1995); Katharine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-century England (1982), p. 54, a letter of 1 April 1717, to Lady —; Katharine M. Rogers, Before Their Time (1979), p. 54.

  25 Judith Drake, Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696), pp. 11–12, 23, 143, quoted and valuably discussed in Estelle Cohen, ‘ “What the Women at All Times Would Laugh At” ’ (1997), p. 134.

  26 James Thomson, ‘Autumn’, in The Seasons (1744), pp. 157–8,11. 610–16; discussed in Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Angel Makers (1958), p. 19. For the domestic woman constructed ‘in and by print’, see Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture (1989), p. 5.

  27 On the new conjugality and egalitarian family, and companionate marriage, see R. Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (1978); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977); L. A. Curtis, ‘A Case Study of Defoe's Domestic Conduct Manuals Suggested by The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800’ (1981).

  28 Harry Ballam and Roy Lewis (eds.), The Visitors' Book (1950), p. 89.

  29 Browne, The Eighteenth-century Feminist Mind, p. 148. On the double standard, see Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-century England, p. 10.

  30 Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1924 [1714]), vol. i, p. 151.

  31 For a fine example of this in practice, see Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats (1994). On Steele, see Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility (1980), p. 166; Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740 (1997), p. 178.

  32 Quoted in Philip Carter, ‘An “Effeminate” or “Efficient” Nation?’ (1997), p. 438. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu praised ‘the frequency of the mixed Assemblies’ that her granddaughters enjoyed in the ‘enlightened’ 1760s, which provided ‘a kind of Public Education, which I have always considered as necessary for girls as for boys’: quoted in Jones, Hannah More, p. 7; on the new masculinity, see Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity (1996).

  33 Carter, ‘An “Effeminate” or “Efficient” Nation?’, p. 438; see also David Castronovo, The English Gentleman (1987).

  34 On the ‘man of feeling’, see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (1992).

  35 Anthony, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks (1723), vol. i, p. 48; vol. ii, pp. 12, 24, 148; Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century, p. 11. Philip John Carter, ‘Mollies, Fops and Men of Feeling’ [1995]; Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House (1992); Susan Staves, ‘A Few Kind Words for the Fop’ (1982).

  36 Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, ch. 6; the involvement of women in out of doors political activity, especially canvassing, is documented in Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (1998), ch. 7, pp. 215–47.

  37 Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence (1987), and The Struggle for the Breeches (1995).

  38 John Potter, Observations on the Present State of Music and Musicians (1762), p. 106; Joyce Ellis, ‘ “On The Town” ’ (1995), p. 22. Assumptions about the restrictiveness of separate spheres are also questioned in Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/ Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century’ (1995); Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter (1998).

  39 Helen Berry, ‘ “Nice and Curious Questions” ’ (1997).

  40 Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter, p. 257; Almack's Club was mixed and there was a female coffee house in Bath: Mary Thale, ‘Women in London Debating Societies in 1780’ (1995).

  41 Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen (1992), p. 46.

  42 George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934–50), vol. iii, p. 333. Predictably, Johnson also went on to warn against novels. See also Jacqueline Pearson, Women's Reading in Britain, 1750–1835 (1999).

  43 Kate Davies, ‘Living Muses’ [1995]; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), p. 78. For such achievers, see Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel (1986); Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, p. 276; Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (1986); on women's cultural underachievement, see Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race (1979), and Slip-Shod Sibyls (1995). For women's involvement in science, see Gerald Dennis Meyer, The Scientific Lady in England, 1650–1760 (1955); Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England 1650–1760 (1920); Patricia Phillips, The Scientific Lady (1990).

  44 Kathryn Shevelow sees the domestic woman as being constructed ‘in and by print’: Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, p. 5; Jean E. Hunter, ‘The Eighteenth-century Englishwoman’ (1976); only one quarter of the articles in the Gentleman's Magazine supported the traditional idea of women as the weaker sex to be kept from study and public activities. Most relevant articles were sympathetic to women, being concerned with lack of educational opportunities, lack of career opportunities, the injustice of marriage and the need for equality between the sexes. In ‘The Female Sex Not the Weakest’ (pp. 588–9 (October 1735)), ‘Climene’ argues that ‘women were inferior to men in nothing but brute strength’; women were deprived of learning because of the jealousy of men.

  45Mary Robinson, Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), p. 95; see the discussion in Anne K. Mellor, ‘British Romanticism, Gender, and Three Women Artists’ (1995), p. 121; and Cohen, ‘ “What the Women at All Times Would Laugh At” ’, p. 138.

  46 ‘Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented’: Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex (1990), p. 149. Laqueur argues that traditional one-sex hierarchical’ models yielded in the eighteenth century to the idea that the male and the female were radically different in anatomy and hence in temperament and function. While this hypothesis has weaknesses, both empirical and conceptual, Laqueur is right to perceive that difference between the sexes became a burning issue and strongly accentuated in certain schools of thought. For enlightened attempts to create the ‘science of women’, see Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? (1989); Lynn Salkin Sbiroli, ‘Generation and Regeneration’ (1993); Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Natural Facts’ (1980); Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Reflections on the History of the Science of Woman’ (1991).

  47 Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 148 and throughout.

  48 Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman (1990).

  49 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1995), p. 171; on Rousseau and women, see Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’ (1985).

  50 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 151, 236, and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1995 [1787]); E. Yeo (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminism (1997); Ludmilla Jordanova, Nature Depicted (1999).

  51 The youthful Day's Rousseau worship knew no bounds: ‘Were all the books in the world to be destroyed… the second book I should wish to save, after the Bible, would be Rousseau's Emilius…. Every page is big with important truth’. See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), p. 127.

  52 Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Memoirs (1820), vol. i, pp. 220–22.

  53 Edgeworth, Memoirs, vol. i, p. 334; Desmond Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth (1965), p. 86.

  54 See Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’.

  55 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1995), p. 8; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self, p. 69.

  56 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1995 [1818], p. 99.

  57 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 77; see also Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, P. 347.

  58 For the critique of coquettishness, see Wollstone
craft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 6, 74, 137; Gary Kelly, ‘(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom’ (1997).

  59 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 137.

  60 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 6, 214; Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject (1989); Syndy McMillen Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (1994). Locke was much admired. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu told her daughter that ‘Mr Locke… has made a more exact dissection of the Human mind than any Man before him’: John Valdimir Price, ‘The Reading of Philosophical Literature’ (1982), p. 166. Debate rages among feminist scholars: for Locke cast as an anti-feminist, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988).