by Roy Porter
50 Roy Porter, Doctor of Society (1991), pp. 39f., 79f.
51 For Priestley on education, see J. A. Passmore, Priestley's Writings on Philosophy, Science and Politics (1965), pp. 285–313; H. McLachlan, Warrington Academy, Its History and Influence (1943); Joseph Priestley, An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (1765).
52 John Brown, Thoughts on Civil Liberty, Licentiousness and Faction (1765).
53 Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1771), in John Towill Rutt (ed.), The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley (1817–32), vol. xxii, p. 119. See Peter N. Miller (ed.), Joseph Priestley: Political Writings (1993), p. xix.
54 Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xxii, p. 46.
55 Enlightened men advocated practical education for commerce. Wedgwood thought it ‘a very idle waste of time for any boys intended for trade to learn Latin, as they seldom learnt it to any tolerable degree of perfection, or retained what they learn Besides they did not want it, and the time would be much better bestowed in making themselves perfect in French and accounts: Ann Finer and George Savage (eds), The Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood (1965), p. 244.
56 W. Roberts (ed.), Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More (1834), vol. iii, p. 133.
57 Joseph Priestley, Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education (1778), p. 129.
58 Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (1978), vol. i, p. 371.
59 Watts, The Dissenters, vol. i, p. 467.
60 See, for instance, John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England (1973); H. McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts (1931); Nicholas A. Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (1966).
61 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1966 [1796]), p. 53.
62 V. H. H. Green, ‘Reformers and Reform in the University’ (1986), p. 607.
63 For instances, see Victor Neuberg, The Penny Histories, in Milestones in Children's Literature, and Popular Education in Eighteenth-century England (1971).
64 Ariès, Centuries of Childhood; see the pioneering discussion in Plumb, ‘The New World of the Children in Eighteenth-century England’.
65 See [Anon.], A History of Little Goody Two Shoes (1766); James A. Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery’ (1985). Newbery was a commercial innovator who virtually invented the children's publishing trade. Goody Two-Shoes had gone through sixty-six British editions by 1850: Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort (1996), p. 78.
66 Little Goody Two-Shoes was thoroughly uplifting, combining the themes of female agency in the face of adversity with the pursuit of literacy and virtue and successful social mobility. The orphaned Margery Meanwell and her younger brother Tommy are cast penniless upon the world. Ignored by their relatives, they are helped by a local clergyman who buys them clothes and sends Tommy off to sea. Meanwhile, little Margery teaches herself to read and becomes so adept that she begins teaching other children. She also becomes precociously wise, advising a testy gentleman to rise early and eat sparingly, combating superstitious beliefs and preventing a robbery at the house of her father's old enemy and former landlord, Sir Timothy – thus demonstrating her capacity to return good for evil. In time, her reputation earns her the position of schoolmistress of the local school, where she continues to teach children to read using her alphabet blocks, combining this with preaching obedience to authority and the value of early rising and hard work. She inveighs against cock-throwing, torturing insects and whipping horses and dogs, and she continues to dispense wise advice to villagers and to spread rational problem-solving wherever she goes. In the fullness of time a gentleman falls in love with her and marries her, at which point her brother Tommy serendipitously reappears, having made his fortune in Africa, and endows her with a rich settlement.
67 Richardson's villain, Lovelace, comments how cruelty to women often begins in cruelty to animals: Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1748), vol. iii, letter 75, pp. 347–50.
68 Axtell, The Educational Works of John Locke, p. 225.
69 James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast (1980), p. 7; Pickering, John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-century England, p. 19.
70 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983); Christianity had maintained (witness Peacock's clergyman, the Revd Dr Gaster) that ‘all animals were created solely and exclusively for the use of man’ – lacking a soul, they were not ends in themselves, and Cartesianism had denied them consciousness: Thomas Peacock, Headlong Hall (1816), in David Garnett (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1948), p. 15. See the discussion in chapter 13.
71 David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain (1976); Nicolaas A. Rupke (ed.), Vivisection in Historical Context (1987); Macdonald Daly, ‘Vivisection in Eighteenth-century Britain’ (1989).
72 K. Tester, Animals and Society (1991), p. 96.
73 Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, p. 13; Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1967 [1759–67]), p. 131.
74 James Thomson, ‘Spring’, in The Seasons (1744), p. 19, ll. 386–91.
75 Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, p. 49.
76 John Wiltshire, Samuel Johnson in the Medical World (1991), p. 129.
77 Wiltshire, Samuel Johnson in the Medical World, p. 125.
78 ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’, in Benedict Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Light (1968), pp. 43–5, 112–13.
79 Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham, p. 215.
80 Kramnick, ‘Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’, p. 26. Isaac Watts wrote Against Idleness and Mischief (1715):
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
Anthologized in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-century Verse (1984), p. 74.
81 J. H. Plumb, ‘The New World of the Children in Eighteenth-Century England’ (1975), p. 303.
82 Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–9). See F.J. H. Darton, Children's Books in England, 3rd edn (1982), pp. 145–7.
83 Kramnick, ‘Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’.
84 Kramnick, ‘Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’, p. 37. Kramnick is quoting Day.
85 Kramnick, ‘Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’
86 [Tom Telescope], The Newtonian System of Philosophy (1761); Geoffrey Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason (1984); Pickering, John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-century England; Bette P. Goldstein, Lessons to be Learned (1984); Susan Pedersen, ‘Hannah More Meets Simple Simon’ (1986); Joyce Whalley, Cobwebs to Catch Flies (1975).
87 [Tom Telescope], The Newtonian System of Philosophy purported to be ‘the substance of six lectures read to the Lilliputian Society’: Plumb, ‘The New World of the Children in Eighteenth-century England’, p. 302; Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery’. It was not the first popular science book for children: as early as 1710 there appeared [Anon.], A Short and Easie Method to Give Children an Idea or True Notion of Celestial and Terrestrial Beings (1710).
88 Pickering, John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-century England, p. 41.
89 Kramnick, ‘Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’, p. 227; Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman (1998), p. 318.
90 Kramnick, Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology, pp. 227–8.
91 Warner, No Go the Bogeyman, p. 318.
92 Kramnick, ‘Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’, pp. 228–9; Pickering, John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-century England, p. 146. For the role of women in the anti-slavery movement, see Moira Ferguson, Subject To Others (1992), which explores how women spoke for blacks and slaves.
93 Lamb told Coleridge, ‘what you would have been now, if you had been crammed with geography and natural
history’: Pickering, John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-century England, p. 61.
94 Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (1968).
95 See Ian H. Bell, Literature and Crime in Augustan England (1991).
96 Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters (1995); Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (1998).
97 John Toland, Reasons for Naturalising the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland (1714). On Jews, see Frank Felsenstein, A Paradigm of Otherness (1995); Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England 1714–1830 (1979); and the wider discussion in Ulrich Im Hof, The Enlightenment (1994), p. 245, and Hiram Caton, The Politics of Progress (1988), p. 246.
98 Warner, No Go the Bogeyman, p. 163.
99 The parallel was drawn long before Victorian social commentators began talking of ‘darkest England’, partly because of the discovery of so-called ‘wild boys’ and ‘wild girls’ (people displaying the characteristics and problem features associated with ‘savages’): Newton, ‘The Child of Nature’; Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p. 62.
100 James Cook, Journals (1955–68), vol. ii, p. 322.
101 Felicity A. Nussbaum, ‘Polygamy, Pamela, and the Prerogative of Empire’ (1995), p. 217; Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason (1978), p. 52; Gregory Claeys (ed.), Utopias of the British Enlightenment (1994), p. xi. The functions of imaginary voyages are well discussed in Charles Kerby-Miller, Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries ofMartinus Scriblerus (1988), p. 316. For travels within Europe, see Brian Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers (1999).
102 Edmund Burke, in a letter to W. Robertson, in W. Robertson, Works (1840), quoted in Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (1975), p. 173; see also Peter Marshall and Gwyndyr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind (1982).
103 Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, p. 173.
104 Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas (forthcoming).
105 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1985 [1719]). For a classic interpretation of Robinson Crusoe as representative of the age, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957), pp. 60–90.
106 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1985 [1726]), p. 243, discussed in Laura Brown, Ends of Empire (1993), p. 170; Dennis Todd, ‘The Hairy Maid at the Harpsichord’ (1992).
107 George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934–50), vol. i, p. 308. Jeremy Bentham, Emancipate Your Colonies!, in John Bowring (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham (1995 [1843]), vol. iv, p. 407.
108 On eighteenth-century anthropology, see H. F. Augstein (ed.), Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (1996); J. S. Slotkin, Readings in Early Anthropology (1965).
109 See M. T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1964); H. F. Augstein, James Cowles Prichard's Anthropology (1999).
110 Hugh West, ‘The Limits of Enlightenment Anthropology (1989); Robert Wokler, ‘From l'homme physique to l'homme moral and Back’ (1993), and ‘Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment’ (1995).
111 Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (1972), p. 337; Ivan Hannaford, Race. The History of an Idea in the West (1996).
112 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (1774); Robert Wokler, ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment’ (1988); Martin Bernal, Black Athena (1987), vol. i; Christopher J. Berry, ‘ “Climate” in the Eighteenth Century’ (1974).
113 H. Honour, Chinoiserie (1961); J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment (1997); William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay (1951).
114 Peter Marshall (ed.), The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (1970); Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (1983), ch. 4.
115 See Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Comet of the Enlightenment (1999), pp. 152f. For the Koran, see Rana Kabbani, Europe's Myths of Orient (1986), p. 31; Sarah Searight, The British in the Middle East (1979), p. 82; Ahmad Gunny, Images of Islam in Eighteenth-century Writing (1996).
116 Edward Said, Orientalism (1978).
117 Roy Porter, Gibbon (1988), p. 131; Gunny, Images of Islam in Eighteenth-century Writing.
118 See Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World (1762); Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay, p. 122; V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind (1972), p. 22. Deists like Matthew Tindal held up Confucians as sages who recognized that the essence of religion was morality.
119 Quoted in Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men (1989), p. 169; and see the discussion of James Mill in J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (1966, 1970), pp. 42–62. For the growing Western defamation of Eastern knowledge as childish, see Roberta Bivins, ‘Expectations and Expertise’ (1999).
120 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World (1995), p. 77. Lockeans denied the legitimacy of the argument from conquest.
121 Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress (1934). The phrase ‘noble savage’ is Dryden's. The fiction was satirized in Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society (1982 [1756]).
122 See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966); Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire (1981); Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (1989), vol. iv; Roxann Wheeler, ‘The Complexion of Desire’ (1999); Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility (1996).
123 James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane (1764), bk I, ll. 611–12. See Lonsdale, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-century Verse, p. 520; David Dabydeen (ed.), The Black Presence in English Literature (1985), and Hogarth's Blacks (1985). Johnson was hostile: he stunned ‘some very grave men at Oxford’, Boswell reports, by proposing the toast: ‘Here's to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies’: Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. iii, p. 200.
124 Vincent Carretta (ed.), Unchained Voices (1996), and (ed.), Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1995).
125 See Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833 (1977), p. ix. The first edition of William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1979 [1765–9]), declared ‘that a slave or negro, the instant he lands in England, becomes a freeman’: Carretta, Unchained Voices, p. 5.
126 See Ferguson, Subject to Others, for protests by women.
127 Quoted in Carretta, Unchained Voices, p. 6. Day wrote an anti-slavery poem called The Dying Negro (1773).
128 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1789–91), pt II, pp. 421–30. For Wedgwood's anti-slavery sentiments, see Finer and Savage (eds.), The Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood, p. 310. See also David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (1991); Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833, p. 9.
129 F. J. Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England (1926), p. 51.
130 Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England, p. 51.
131 William Paley, The Complete Works of William Paley (1824), vol. iii, pp. 146ff; Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England, p. 51.
132 Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of Colonel Jacque, Commonly Call'd (1722).
133 David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (1991), pp. 25f.
134 For abolitionism, see J. Walvin, Slavery and British Society, 1776–1848 (1982), and Black and White (1973); J. Walvin and D. Eltis (eds.), Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1981); J. Walvin, M. Craton and D. Wright (eds.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (1976). Black voices to some extent spoke in the enlightened idiom, but they were primarily Christian: Carretta, Unchained Voices.
135 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko or the Royal Slave (1688), p. 30.
136 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (1989), p. 514.
137 T. B. Clark, Omai: The First Polynesian Ambassador to England (1941), pp. 76–89.
138 For Polynesia, see Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific (1992); Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage Into Substance (1984); Neil Rennie Far-fetched Facts (1995).
139 James Cook, quoted in Hof, The Enlightenment, p. 227.
140 Roy Porter
, ‘The Exotic as Erotic’ (1989).
141 Cook, Journals, vol. ii, p. 175.
142 Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress, p. 58.
143 Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress, p. 64; R. D. Altick, The Shows of London (1978), p. 47.
144 Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind; Simon Schaffer, ‘Visions of Empire: Afterword’ (1996); Karlis Racevskis, Postmodernism and the Search for Enlightenment (1993).
16 THE VULGAR
1 Erasmus Darwin, quoted in Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science (1987), p. III.