Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  For late eighteenth-century politics, see I. R. Christie, Wars and Revolutions (1982), and Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (1984); James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (1963); Philip Anthony Brown, The French Revolution in English History (1965); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1968); Gregory Claeys, ‘The French Revolution Debate and British Political Thought’ (1990); Carl B. Cone, The English Jacobins (1968); Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815 (1979); Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (eds.), Revolution and English Romanticism (1990).

  5 Desmond King-Hele (ed.), The Letters of Erasmus Darwin (1981), p. 200, letter no. 90A, to James Watt (19 January 1790): ‘I feel myself becoming all French both in chemistry and politics’: see Ann Finer and George Savage (eds.), The Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood (1965), p. 319.

  6 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 version), bk VI, 1. 339, in J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and S. Gill (eds.), William Wordsworth, the Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 (1979), p. 205. The fact that Wordsworth's words were written later does not, of course, invalidate their recreation of the aura of '89.

  7 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 version), bk IX, 1. 161, in Wordsworth, Abrams and Gill, William Wordsworth, the Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 320.

  8 As the doyen of Dissenting ministers, Price was originally meant to give the commemorative sermon at the Presbyterian chapel in London's Old Jewry the previous year, the one-hundredth anniversary of the Glorious Revolution. Price did not wish to abolish the monarchy, and he preferred the existing ‘mixed’ form of government to a democracy.

  9 Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789), pp. 49, 50.

  10 Price, Discourse on the Love of Our Country, pp. 50–51.

  11 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), p. 113.

  12 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in L. G. Mitchell (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (1989), vol. viii, p. 207. See also Peter Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution (1991).

  13 Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815 (1979), p. 14.

  14 Theo Barker (ed.), The Long March of Everyman 1750–1960 (1978), p. 62. This comes from papers confiscated during the Treason Trials of 1794.

  15 John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (1972).

  16 Mary 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; Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism (1992).

  17 T.J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, Or What You Will (1794), advertisement to pt IV, p. 238.

  18 Philip Anthony Brown, The French Revolution in English History (1965), p. 157.

  19 For this and the preceding quotations, see Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815, pp. 86–7.

  20 Thomas Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events Which Have Occurred in Manchester during the Last Five Years (1794), pp. 1–2.

  21 ‘The French are plunging into a degree of barbarism,’ declared the liberal Samuel Romilly, ‘which, for such a nation, and in so short a period, surpasses all imagination. All religion is already abolished… We may soon expect to see all books exterminated’: Samuel Romilly, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Samuel Romilly (1971 [1840]), vol. ii, p. 37.

  22 Paine became a bogey. ‘At Redruth in Cornwall, a miner,’ noted the Gentleman's Magazine obituary column in 1795, ‘he was drinking at the Three Compasses in that town, and, in a fit of inebriety, blasphemed the Evangelists, wished perdition to all the kings of the earth, and drank Tom Paine's health; when, on a sudden, his jaw became locked, and he died on the spot in the most excruciating torments’: Gentleman's Magazine, no. 65 (1795), p. 495.

  23 Quoted in Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815, p. 161.

  24 Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Politics of English Jacobinism (1995), which has a fine introduction; Christina Bewley and David Bewley, Gentleman Radical (1998).

  25 Clive Emsley, Policing and Its Context, 1750-1870 (1983), p. 25; H. R. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-century Britain (1995), p. 237.

  26 For this, including the quotations, see Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815, p. 56; on early Coleridge, see Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (1989), p. 51.

  27 See Maurice Colgan, ‘Prophecy Against Reason’ (1985); Roy Foster (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (1991), pp. 134ff. The United Irishmen failed, partly because they were too dependent on French support: Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution (1982).

  28 Robert Southey, Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1984 [1807]), p. 375. For a contemporary assessment of Southey, see William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1971 [1825]), pp. 365–84.

  29 Southey, Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, p. 375.

  30 John Dinwiddy, ‘Conceptions of Revolution in the English Radicalism of the 1790s’ (1990), p. 547.

  31 Marilyn Butler (ed.), Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (1984); Mark Philp, Paine (1989); G. Claeys, Thomas Paine. Social and Political Thought (1989); Jack Fruchtman Jr, Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (1994); John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995).

  32 Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (1945), vol. i, p. xxviii. Jack Fruchtman Jr, Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (1993).

  33 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. ii, p. 486.

  34 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. ii, p. 481.

  35 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader 1800–1900 (1957), p. 69.

  36 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, p. 198. ‘A Friend to the People’, who pseudonymously produced A Review of the Constitution of Great Britain (1791), dismissed the Lords as ‘political monsters’ and ‘mere creatures’ of the Crown. The British people, he insisted, were in worse plight than the subjects of the Sultan: ‘In Turkey, the tyger Despotism springs upon his single victim, and gluts himself with carnage; but in England, the monster, Aristocracy, extending over the devoted million her ten thousand fangs, sucks from every pore of the people, a never ceasing stream of blood’. Quoted in Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832, p. 163.

  37 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, p. 251; see the discussion in Gregory Claeys (ed.), Political Writings of the 1790s (1995), vol. i, p. 64.

  38 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), vol. i, p. 447.

  39 Paine, The Complete Writing of Thomas Paine, vol. i, p. 260.

  40 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, p. 274.

  41 Gregory Claeys, ‘The French Revolution Debate and British Political Thought’ (1990).

  42 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, pp. 357–8.

  no man is capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants; and those wants acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society, as naturally as gravitation acts to a centre. But she [nature] has gone further. She has not only forced man into society, by a diversity of wants, which the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness. There is no period of life when this love of society ceases to act. (vol. I, p. 357.)

  43 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, p. 431.

  44 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, pp. 459–604; Fruchtman, Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature. Fruchtman approaches Paine as a secular preacher.

  45 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, p. 451. Religious toleration was not enough because it was a form of intolerance:

  Toleration is not the opposite of Intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the
right of withholding Liberty of Conscience, and the other of granting it. vol. i, p. 291.

  46 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, p. 464.

  47 Quoted in Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature, p. 1.

  48 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, p. 274.

  49 Joseph Mather, ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’ (1792?), in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-century Verse (1984), p. 790.

  50 Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. i, p. xxxi.

  51 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 665.

  52 Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason (1980); Mark Philp, Godwin's Political Justice (1986). The Cabinet did discuss prosecution, on 25 May 1793, but, at £1 16s. they thought it too expensive to be dangerous.

  53 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 13.

  54 Locke, A Fantasy of Reason; Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (1984).

  55 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 140. See ch. 4, pp. 96–115: ‘The Characters of Men Originate in Their External Circumstances’.

  56 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 32.

  57 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 104.

  58 Such play was made of this that in the third edition Fénelon's valet was consigned to the flames instead: Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 169; Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 168.

  59 It was impossible to punish people into virtue:

  Let us consider the effect that coercion produces upon the mind of him against whom it is employed. It cannot begin with convincing; it is no argument; it begins with producing the sensation of pain, and the sentiment of distaste. It begins with violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, pp. 22–3.

  60 Like Paley and Bentham, Godwin did not see punishment as a rational retaliation. Punishment should not be inflicted

  because there is apprehended to be a certain fitness and propriety in the nature of things, that render suffering, abstractedly from the benefit to result, the suitable concomitant of vice… Punishment ought to be inflicted because public interest demands it.

  Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 648.

  61 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 633.

  62 Godwin wondered: ‘shall we have concerts of music?… Shall we have theatrical exhibitions? This seems to include an absurd and vicious cooperation’: Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 759. Godwin disapproved of cohabitation because it led to ‘thwarting, bickering and unhappiness’, and marriage was ‘a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies’ (p. 762); he stressed: ‘individuality is of the very essence of intellectual excellence’ (p. 775).

  63 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, pp 19, 556.

  64 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 776.

  65 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 777, quoted in Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 8.

  66 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 776.

  67 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 730.

  68 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 769.

  69 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 529: ‘Individuals are everthing, and society, abstracted from the individuals of which it is composed, nothing.’

  70 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 268.

  71 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, pp. 34, 251: ‘we shall have many reforms, but no revolutions’, for ‘Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason’; truth must be advanced by ‘sober and tranquil reason’, by ‘communication and discussion’: Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 102. Once there was enlightenment, ‘the chains fall off themselves’ (Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 33). Hence Godwin's claim: ‘My creed is a short one’; ‘I am in principle a Republican, but in practice a Whig’ (see Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 104).

  72 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, pp. 184–5, quoted in Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 3.

  73 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 221, quoted in Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 4.

  74 Quoted in Hanley and Selden (eds.), Revolution and English Romanticism, p. 151.

  75 There were lots of snarling or ironic variations on ‘modern philosophy’, one being Wordsworth's ‘philosophism’: see Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England (1979), p. 55; for ‘modern philosophy’, see Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress (1934), p. 320. Godwin's commitment to reason led Hazlitt to speak of his ‘Arctic Circle’.

  76 Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, p. 76.

  77 William Hodgson, The Commonwealth of Reason (1795), p. 46. Like other liberals, Hodgson proposed that marriage should be but a civil contract.

  78 ‘That property in land and liberty among men in a state of nature ought to be equal, few, one would be fain to hope, would be foolish to deny’: Thomas Spence, The Real Rights of Man (1793), a lecture delivered at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 8 November 1775 and published in 1796 as The Meridian Sun of Liberty and reprinted in M. Beer (ed.), The Pioneers of Land Reform (1920), pp. 5–16. Spence was imprisoned for a few months in 1794 and again in 1801.

  79 Armytage, Heavens Below, p. 70; Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, p. 189; Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (1984), p. 80.

  80 Spence, The Meridian Sun of Liberty, quoted in Armytage, Heavens Below, p. 70; Gregory Claeys (ed.), Utopias of the British Enlightenment (1994), p. xviii.

  81 Spence, The Meridian Sun of Liberty. For Spence as Harrington reversed, see Roger Sales, English Literature in History: 1780–1830, Pastoral and Politics (1983), p. 26. Like Godwin, Spence saw society as a federation of parishes.

  82 Armytage, Heavens Below, p. 72; Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819, p. 112.

  Spence's dedicatory poem to A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe (1782) used his specialized alphabet, which he termed the Kruzonian Manner:

  And dho mi bwk's in kwer Lingo

  I wil it send tw St. Domingo

  Tw dhe Republik ov dhe ‘Inkaz

  For an egzampl how tw fram Looz

  For hw kan tel but dhe Mileneum

  Ma tak its riz from mi pwr Kraneum

  Quoted in Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822 (1994), p. 86.

  83 Horne Tooke, The Diversions of Purley (1786), vol. ii, p. 51b; D. Rosenberg, ‘ “A New Sort of Logick and Critick” ’ (1991); Bewley and Bewley, Gentleman Radical.

  84 For Tooke, see Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Languge in England, 1780–1860(1983), p. 71; Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, p. 19. For Harris, see Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819, p. 20.

  According to Hazlitt, Tooke examined, ‘with jealous watchfulness, the meaning of words to prevent being entrapped by them’: William Hazlitt, ‘The Late Mr Horne Tooke’ (1825), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (1930–34), vol. xi, p. 54.

  85 Thomas Beddoes, Observations on the Nature of Demonstrative Evidence (1793), p. 151.

  86 See Kevin C. Knox, ‘Lunatick Visions’ (1999). Frend has been discussed in chapter 14 above.

  87 Armytage, Heavens Below, p. 63. For America's reputation post-1776 as a land of freedom, see above, chapter 18. Young Southey had been expelled from Westminster for editing a magazine, the Flagellant, against flogging and other undemocratic practices. He carried around a copy of Goethe's Werther.

  88 ‘On the Prospect of Establishing a Pantisocracy in America’ (1826), in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems (1997), p. 58.

  89 Coleridge's later account stated; ‘I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little world described the path of its revolution in an orbit of its own’: Barbara E. Rooke (ed.), Th
e Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Friend I (1969), vol. iv, p. 223. He explained: ‘The leading Idea of Pantisocracy is to make men necessarily virtuous by removing all Motives to Evil – all possible Temptations’: Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.), Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956–68), vol. i, p. 114, letter 65, to Robert Southey (21 October 1794).

  90 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (1989), p. 72; Armytage, Heavens Below, p. 64.

  91 See the discussion of his early activities in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), pp. 81f.; Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature, p. 66.

  92 Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, p. 79.

  93 Defending his unorthodox opinions to Southey, Coleridge affirmed his attachment not only to Hartley, but implicitly to Priestley and his ‘materialism’: ‘I am a compleat Necessitarian – and understand the subject as well almost as Hartley himself – but I go farther than Hartley and believe the corporeality of thought – namely, that it is motion’: ‘Lecture 1795 on Politics and Religion’ (1795), in Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (eds.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1971), p. lviii.