Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

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by Roy Porter


  61 Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment 1660–1830 (1994), p. 209. Swift was hardly one to talk, given his condescending relationships with, and attitudes towards, his own female friends.

  62 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler (1987); Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, pp. 17, 93; M. Mahl and H. Koon (eds.), The Female Spectator (1977).

  63 Bond, The Tatler, vol. ii, no. 172, p. 444 (Tuesday, 16 May 1710).

  64 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. ii, no. 128, pp. 8–11 (Friday, 27 July 1711); Poulain de la Barre, De l'égalité des deux sexes (1673), for whom, see Cohen, ‘ “What the Women at All Times Would Laugh At” ’ p. 125; and Browne, The Eighteenth-century Feminist Mind, p. 122; see the discussion in Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode (1977), p. 165. For the Spectator on companionate marriage, see nos. 105–8.

  65 Quoted in Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, p. 123.

  66 Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné (1777), vol. ii, letter 30, pp. 73–4; Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (1986), p. 100.

  67 For these issues, see Janet Todd, The Sign ofAngellica (1989). For a denunciation of the ‘divine right’ of husbands, see 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. 112–13: ‘The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.’

  68 Lady Mary Chudleigh, ‘To the Ladies’ (1705), in Lonsdale, Eighteenth-century Women Poets, p. 36.

  69 James L. Axtell, The Educational Works of John Locke (1968). Locke's views are further explored in chapter 15.

  70 Nowhere does Locke ever indicate, for instance, that women merit rights of political participation. It is noteworthy, however, that Locke treated marriage as a purely civil convention rather than a natural arrangement, and his anthropological observations in the Essay concerning Human Understanding included, without overt criticism, societies which sanctioned divorce or polygamy.

  71 Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century, p. 101; Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, p. 104; Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago (1992), p. 158 – ‘Republican virago’ was Burke's slur. See also Macaulay, Letters On Education (1790).

  72 Ian H. Bell, Literature and Crime in Augustan England (1991), p. 103. Similar arguments may be found in Lady Mary Chudleigh's The Ladies’ Defence (1701) and Woman Not Inferior to Man (1739), by ‘Sophia’. Many such works were anonymous. Mary Astell also published anonymously, knowing ‘that when a women appears in Print, she must certainly run the gauntlet’. In her 1702 defence of Locke, Catherine Cockburn explained her anonymity in terms of the belief ‘that the name of a woman would be a prejudice against a work of that nature’: Catharine Cockburn, A Defence of the Essay of Human Understanding Written by Mr Lock (1702). Many writings by males, of course, also appeared anonymously.

  73 Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (1995), pp. 125–6; Bridget Hill, The First English Feminist (1986), pp. 50f.; Rogers, Before Their Time, pp. 28f. Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest (1694), Letters concerning the Love of God (1695), A Serious Proposal to the Ladies: Part II (1697), Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700), Moderation Truly Stated (1704), A Fair Way with the Dissenters and Their Patrons (1704), An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in This Kingdom (1704), The Christian Religion, as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), and Bart'lemy Fair or an Enquiry after Wit (1709).

  74 Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell (1986).

  75 Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 73, 194, 221–8; Ruth Perry has rather implausibly praised Astell for seeing through capitalist modernism: ‘Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism’ (1990).

  76 Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage, preface, quoted in Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (1995), pp. 125–63; Astell, of course, raised the perpetual issue of the congruency between domestic and political relations. As Lady Brute (in Vanbrugh's The Provok'd Wife (1697)) asked: ‘The argument's good between king and people, why not between husband and wife?’

  77 Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest; Hill, The First English Feminist, p. 49; Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-century England, p. 29.

  78 Sarah Scott, A Description of Millennium Hall and the Country Adjacent (1996 [1762]); Gregory Claeys (ed.), Utopias of the British Enlightenment (1994), p. xv. Compare the female community in Clara Reeve's The School for Widows (1791).

  79 Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft.

  80 Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism (1992).

  81 Spacks, Imagining a Self, p. 183; 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.

  82 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 250, 292.

  83 Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1984), p. 816:

  YES, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!

  Woman! too long degraded, scorned, oppressed;

  O born to rule in partial Law's despite,

  Resume thy native empire o'er the breast!

  Note that, while admiring Wollstonecraft's writings, Mrs Barbauld was ‘too correct in conduct to visit her’: Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-century England, p. 218. She had a reputation for starchiness. According to Coleridge, she disapproved of his Ancient Mariner on the grounds that it was implausible and had no moral.

  84 Quoted in Cohen, ‘ “What the Women at All Times Would Laugh At” ’, p. 138.

  85 H. R. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-century Britain (1995), p. 184. See chapter 18 below.

  86 James Mill, Essay On Government (1824), p. 22.

  87 John Bennett, Strictures on Female Education Chiefly as it Relates to the Culture of the Heart, in Four Essays (1787), p. 124.

  88 [Richard Polwhele], The Unsex'd Females (1798), p. 7.

  89 [Polwhele], The Unsex'd Females, pp. 6, 16. Wollstonecraft's death was divine retribution (pp. 29–30):

  I cannot but think, that the Hand of Providence is visible, in her life, her death, and the Memoirs themselves. As she was given up to her ‘heart's lusts’, and let ‘to follow her own imaginations’, that the fallacy of her doctrines, and the effects of an irreligious conduct, might be manifested to the world; and as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable; so her husband was permitted, in writing her Memoirs, to labour under a temporary infatuation, that every incident might be seen without a gloss – every fact exposed without an apology.

  Cited in Todd, The Sign ofAngellica, p. 215.

  90 Todd, The Sign ofAngellica, p. 131. Wit, unless rigorously controlled, ‘is the most dangerous Companion that can lurk in a Female Bosom’, insisted Wetenhall Wilkes in 1744: Spacks, The Adolescent Idea, p. 23.

  91 Hill, The First English Feminist, p. 145; Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, p. 44. The same fate awaited Hester Thrale when she married Giuseppi Piozzi – Elizabeth Montagu became hysterical over the marriage, which ‘has taken such horrible possession of my mind I cannot advert to any other subject’: Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-century England, p. 216: Mrs Thrale had become ‘a disgrace upon her sex’.

  92 Todd, The Sign ofAngellica, p. 131; Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 244.

  93 Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, pp. 238, 257; Mrs Chapone also disapproved of Macaulay, for her politics and erotic adventurism alike.

  94 Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits (1793), vol. i, p. 142:

  It cannot, I think, be truly asserted, that the intellectual powers know no difference of sex. Nature certainly intended a distinct
ion… the feminine intellect has less strength and more acuteness. Consequently in our exercise of it, we show less perseverance and more vivacity.

  95 Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-century England, p. 32. Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806) was the eldest daughter of a clergyman who taught her Latin, Greek and Hebrew; she learned French and taught herself Italian, Spanish and German, with some Portuguese and Arabic. She also studied mathematics, geography, history and astronomy, and wrote music. In 1758, she earned £1,000 for her translation of Epictetus, which Samuel Richardson published by subscription.

  96 Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, p. 231. Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) was reprinted at least sixteen times in the eighteenth century.

  97 Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), p. 97, discussed in Browne, The Eighteenth-century Feminist Mind, p. 117.

  98 Catherine Belsey, ‘Afterword: A Future for Materialist-Feminist Criticism?’ (1991), p. 262. The Enlightenment was also a disaster for ‘black people’ and ‘the non-Western world’.

  99 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), p. 8; see the focused discussion in Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity (1998), p. 42.

  15 EDUCATION: A PANACEA?

  1 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. ii, no. 215, p. 338.

  2 James Keir (ed.), An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Day (1791), p. 104, quoted in B. Simon, The Two Nations and the Educational Structure 1780–1870 (1974 [1960]), p. 25.

  3 ‘Teachers’, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 4th edn (1800), vol. xx, p. 230.

  4 On children, broadly, see J. H. Plumb, ‘The New World of the Children in Eighteenth-century England’ (1975); Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society (1969–73); Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor (1991), and Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (1995). Lawrence Stone has questioned parental affection towards children before the eighteenth century, Linda Pollock has reasserted it: Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977); Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children (1983), and A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries (1987).

  5 M. G. Jones, Hannah More (1952), p. 117.

  6 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1973); Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. See also Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern English History (1994) and Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea (1981) for the earlier absence of modern ideas of adolescence.

  7 J. A. Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (1970), pp. 159f.

  8 John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), in James L. Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke (1968), p. 114. On child-rearing, see D. Beekman, The Mechanical Baby (1979); C. Hardyment, Dream Babies (1983). It would be wrong to exaggerate Locke's originality as a pedagogue: he is part of a great chain of Renaissance educators. His influence, however, is undeniable.

  9 Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957), pp. 239ff. Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 325; see the discussion in D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain (1990), p. 167.

  10 ‘A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind,’ Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out: ‘and Mr Locke very judiciously observes, that if the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children; if their spirits be abased and broken much by too strict an hand over them; they lose all their vigour and industry.’ Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1995 [1790 and 1792]), p. 247. Her reference is to Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, para. 46, in Axtell, The Educational Works of John Locke, p. 148, paras. 2 and 46.

  11 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 253.

  12 Isaac Kramnick, Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’ (1983), pp. 21–2. Kramnick paraphrases and quotes Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education (1899 [1693]), pp. 149 and 156.

  13 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, pp. 242–3: ‘If Children were let alone, they would be no more afraid in the Dark, than in broad Sun-shine’; S. F. Pickering Jr, John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-century England (1981), pp. 43, 60.

  14 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 19.

  15 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 116.

  16 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 117.

  17 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, pp. 116, 123. See also Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957), p. 240.

  18 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 134: ‘if a Man, after his first Eating in the Morning, would presently sollicite Nature, and try, whether he could strain himself so as to obtain a Stool, he might in time, by a constant Application, bring it to be Habitual’.

  19 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 140.

  20 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, pp. 118, 143.

  21 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, pp. 118, 150.

  22 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 146.

  23 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, pp. 208–9.

  24 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 212.

  25 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 152.

  26 Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 117: Locke says that children ‘love to be treated as Rational creatures sooner than is imagined’ (p. 181). On breeding, see George C. Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman (1959).

  27 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, Or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), vol. i, p. 279. ‘Everybody’ means ‘everybody who counts’: Pickering, John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-century England, p. 10.

  28 Isaac Watts, Philosophical Essays on Various Subjects (1733), p. viii; M. J. M. Ezell, John Locke's Images of Childhood’ (198¾).

  29 James Talbot, The Christian Schoolmaster (1707), p. 24.

  30 Pickering, John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-century England, p. 10. Among later admirers of Locke's educational views was the utilitarian law reformer Samuel Romilly. See his Memoirs of the Life of Sir Samuel Romilly (1971 [1840]), vol. i, p. 279.

  31 Lawson and Silver, A Social History of Education in England (1973).

  32 Quoted in Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago (1992), p. 146.

  33 Catharine Macaulay, Letters On Education (1790), p. 27, discussed in Hill, The Republican Virago, p. 158.

  34 Hill, The Republican Virago, p. 159.

  35 Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Memoirs (1820), vol. i, p. 173, cited in Desmond Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth (1965), p. 166; Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1963), p. 55.

  36 Edgeworth, Memoirs, vol. i, pp. 253–4, 268–9. Dick migrated to Carolina and led a dissipated life.

  37 Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth, p. 164; Mitzi Myers, ‘Shot From Canons’ (1995). Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (1972).

  38 Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth, p. 163. Practical Education was, actually, a team effort, with contributions from family and friends, and Maria delegated to put it down on paper – the beginning of a literary partnership, she wrote, ‘which for so many years was the joy and pride of my life’.

  39 Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth, p. 40.

  40 Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth, p. 40.

  41 Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth, p. 50.

  42 Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981), p. 94. A century and a half earlier, John Milton in his Of Education (1644), p. 2, had thought religion the very point of education: ‘The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright.’

  43 Edgeworth, Memoirs, vol. ii, pp. 527, 549.

  44 Michael Newton, ‘The Child of Nature’ (1996).

  45 R. L. Edgeworth
and M. Edgeworth, Practical Education (1798), vol. i, p. 63. This was one of many experiments integral to the authors’ goal of making education an ‘experimental science’ (vol. i, pp. v–vi). For children as objects of (thought) experiments, see Larry Wolff, ‘When I Imagine a Child (1998).

  46 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, vol. i, p. 64.

  47 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Practical Education, vol. i, p. xii.

  48 Clarke, The Ingenious Mr Edgeworth, p. 202.

  49 Thomas Beddoes, appendix to J. E. Stock, Life of Thomas Beddoes MD (1811); Dorothy A. Stansfield, ‘Thomas Beddoes and Education’ (Spring 1979), and Thomas Beddoes MD 1760–1808, Chemist, Physician, Democrat (1984), p. 83.

 

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