Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

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by Roy Porter


  94 Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature, p. 44.

  95 Nor will I not thy holy guidance bless,

  And hymn thee, Godwin! with an ardent lay;

  ‘To William Godwin’ (1795), in Coleridge, The Complete Poems, p. 74.

  96 Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature, p. 109.

  97 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (1971), p. 338.

  98 Griggs, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. i, p. 397, letter 238, to George Coleridge (c. 10 March 1798). On Coleridge and Wordsworth, see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (1989); Richard Holmes, Coleridge (1982); Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, and ‘Romanticism in England’ (1988); R.J. White, The Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1938).

  99 Griggs, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. ii, p. 706, letter 387, to Thomas Poole (Monday, 16 March 1801).

  100 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Lay Sermon Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes on the Existing Distresses and Discontents (1817), in R.J. White (ed.), Political Tracts of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley (1953), p. 83.

  101 Griggs, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. ii, p. 709, letter 388, to Thomas Poole (23 March, 1801).

  102 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830), in John Colmer (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1976), vol. x, pp. 66, 68. For Coleridge's philosophy, see Holmes, Coleridge; Harold Orel, English Romantic Poets and the Enlightenment (1973); Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature.

  103 Thomas Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (1818), in David Garnett (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1948), pp. 115, 359–60. Flosky asks: ‘How can we be cheerful when we are surrounded by a reading public, that is growing too wise for its betters?’

  104 Southey, Hazlitt remarked, ‘had missed his way in Utopia and found it at Old Sarum’: David Garnett, introduction to Thomas Peacock, Melincourt (1817), in The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, p. 98.

  105 Michael Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake (1985), p. 125.

  106 Peter Ackroyd, Blake (1995); Jacob Bronowski, William Blake and the Age of Revolution (1972); Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake; David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet against Empire, 3rd edn (1954); Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination (1970).

  107 William Blake, ‘Annotations to Sir Joshue Reynolds’ Discourses' (c. 1808), in G. Keynes (ed.), Blake: Complete Writings (1969), p. 985, discussed in Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (1946), p. 170; Jack Lindsay, William Blake: His Life and Work (1978), p. 60.

  108 William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion’ (written and etched 1804–20), 11. 15–16, in Keynes, The Complete Works of William Blake (1956), p. 636. See discussion in Orel, English Romantic Poets and the Enlightenment, p. 49.

  109 Romantic criticism of ‘mechanism’ became ubiquitous. ‘Were we required,’ wrote Thomas Carlyle, ‘to characterise this age of course by any single epithet, we should be temped to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral age, but above all others, the Mechanical Age’: [T. Carlyle], ‘Signs of the Times’, Edinburgh Review (1829), p. 453.

  110 William Blake, Poems and Fragments from the Note-book (c. 1800–1803) in Blake: Complete Writings (1966), p. 418. Note how Blake's language is about ‘vision’ not ‘light’ in the enlightenment sense. Enlightenment sensationalism limited vision.

  111 ‘I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you,’ he informed his London patron Thomas Butts, ‘that I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly’: Lindsay, William Blake: His Life and Work, p. 147; Bronowski, William Blake and the Age of Revolution, p. 28; for his visions of angels, see Ackroyd, Blake, p. 195.

  112 William Blake, ‘Annotations to Richard Watson's “An Apology to the Bible” ’ (1798). It is of course significant that Blake found himself battling against the spokesmen not for atheism but for rational Christianity. See Iain McCalman, ‘New Jerusalems’ (1997).

  113 Ackroyd, Blake, pp. 72–3.

  114 William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts (22 November 1802), in Blake: Complete Writings, p. 818.

  115 For such anti-enlightenment traditions, see Bernard M. Schilling, Conservative England and the Case against Voltaire (1950); D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (1988); Clement Hawes, Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment (1999); Margaret Forbes, Beattie and His Friends (1904); Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance (1977); Grayson Ditchfield, The Evangelical Revival (1997). For Bowdlerism, see N. Perrin, Dr Bowdler's Legacy (1970). Beattie called Hume's Treatise a ‘vile effusion’: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1969 [1739–40]), p. 19.

  116 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), pp. 129–30.

  117 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in Works (1826), vol. v, p. 185. Burke's ‘apostasy’ is well discussed in John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (1972), p. 168. Burke's intellectual conservatism was mocked by the Dissenter John Aikin, who warned his son that he would nowadays hear many saying: ‘Thank heaven! I am no philosopher; I pretend not to be wiser than those who have gone before me. I do not boast of the discovery of new principles’: John Aikin, Letters from a Father to His Son, 3rd edn (1796), p. 45.

  118 Simon Schaffer, ‘Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy’ (1990), p. 86 and, ‘States of Mind’ (1990), p. 244.

  119 Quoted in Schaffer, ‘Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy’, p. 88, from John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe (1798); see also R. B. Clark, William Gifford: Tory Satirist, Critic, and Editor (1980); Amos Hofman, ‘Opinion, Illusion and the Illusion of Opinion’ (1993).

  120 Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800 (1988), p. 16.

  121 Arthur Young, An Enquiry into the State of the Public Mind (1798), p. 25; Harry T. Dickinson, ‘Popular Loyalism in Britain in the 1790s’ (1990); Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800, p. 7.

  122 The poem appeared in 1798: Charles Edmonds (ed.), Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (1854), p. 115; Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822 (1994); Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800, p. 14.

  123 G. Canning, ‘The Soldier's Friend’ (nd), in L. Sanders (ed.), Selections from the Anti-Jacobin (1904), p. 29; Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, pp. 29–30.

  124 Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 160.

  125 Quoted in A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press c. 1780–1850 (1949), p. 9.

  126 Anti-Jacobin Review, no. 1 (July 1798), p. 2; Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800, p. 28.

  127 Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 110; this was a direct hit at Godwin's notion of self-willed immortality: Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science (1987), p. 86; Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature, p. 70.

  128 Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1999 [1796]), p. 257.

  129 Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), vol. ii, p. 9; Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), p. 108; Locke, A Fantasy of Reason, p. 116. For mockery of ‘modern philosophy’, see Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress, p. 306. Bridgetina had first met the divine words of Godwin's Political Justice on some proof sheets that had been used as wrapping paper for snuff. ‘I read and sneezed, and sneezed and read,’ she tells us, ‘till the germ of philosophy began to fructify my soul. From that moment I became a philosopher, and need not to inform you of the important consequences.’

  130 M. G. Jones, Hannah More (1952), p. 104; Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians (1961), p. 126; Muriel Jaeger, Before Victoria (1967); Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement (1988); Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness (1976).

  131 Hannah More, An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1791), pp. 31–2; Jones, Hannah More, p. 109; R. W. Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order (1969), p. 134.

  132 W. S. Lewis (ed
.), The Correspondence of Horace Walpole (1961), vol. xxxi, p. 329; W. Roberts (ed.), Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More (1834), vol. ii, p. 357.

  133 Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress, p. 239.

  134 She guessed right. In 1797 Thomas Spence produced The Rights of Infants (1797). Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More, vol. iii, p. 100. As shown in chapter 15, More believed it was ‘a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings’: Jones, Hannah More, p. 117.

  See Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (1987), p. 12.

  135 Altick, The English Common Reader 1800–1900, p. 75; Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, p. 180.

  136 Hannah More, Village Politics (1793), and The Riot (1795), pp. 3–4 Quoted in Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, p. 180.

  137 More, Village Politics (1793).

  138 The History of Mr Fantom the New-Fashioned Philosopher (1805) was the story of a prosperous business man with little true education, who longed to cut a figure. He alighted upon a copy of Paine and became carried away by the new philosophy. Trueman explained to Fantom that philosophers did not understand the true cause of human misery: sin.

  139 Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness (1976), p. 19.

  140 Brown, Fathers of the Victorians (1961), p. 1; Jaeger, Before Victoria, p. 14. Religion had been reduced, thought Wilberforce, to a comme il faut: Roland N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-century England (1954), p. 119.

  141 Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce (1838), vol. i, p. 84; Bradley, The Call to Seriousness, p. 94; William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797), p. 12; Hilton, The Age of Atonement.

  142 Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country Contrasted with Real Christianity, p. 12.

  143 William Paley, Natural Theology (1802), p. 490.

  144 William Wilberforce, letter to Ralph Creyke (8 January 1803), in The Correspondence of William Wilberforce (1840), vol. i, pp. 247-53; see discussion in Hilton, The Age of Atonement, p. 4.

  145 Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of This Country Contrasted with Real Christianity, p. 489. Sydney Smith mocked the ‘patent Christianity which has been for some time manufacturing at Clapham’: quoted in Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order, p. 54.

  146 Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (1979), p. 25. For Rousseau's influence, see Duffy, Rousseau in England; for Daniel Malthus, see Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1972), p. 235.

  147 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1966 [1798]), pp. 2–3; M. Turner (ed.), Malthus and His Times (1986).

  148 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, preface, p. iii.

  149 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, pp. 8–9.

  150 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 10.

  151 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 8.

  152 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, pp. 150–52.

  153 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 152.

  154 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 153.

  155 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 174.

  156 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, pp. 174–5.

  157 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 176.

  158 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, pp. 11–12.

  159 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, pp. 12–13.

  160 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, pp. 16–17.

  161 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, pp. 37–8

  162 Charles Hall, The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States (1805). On Hall, see Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy (1951), pp. 50f.; Roy Porter, ‘The Malthusian Moment’ (2000).

  163 Hall, The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States, p. 10, quoted in Smith, The Malthusian Controversy, p. 51.

  164 For Thomas Jarrold, see Smith, The Malthusian Controversy, pp. 56f.

  165 Thomas Jarrold, Anthropologia (1808).

  166 Thomas Jarrold, Dissertations on Man, Philosophical, Physiological and Political (1806), p. 69.

  167 Jarrold, Dissertations on Man, Philosophical, Physiological and Political, p. 73.

  168 Jarrold, Dissertations on Man, Philosophical, Physiological and Political, p. 267.

  169 Jarrold, Dissertations on Man, Philosophical, Physiological and Political, p. 366; Porter, ‘The Malthusian Moment’.

  170 See Frederick Raphael, Byron (1982).

  171 Catherine Macdonald Maclean, Born Under Saturn (1943), pp. 85, 385.

  172 Brown, The French Revolution in English History, p. 49.

  173 Maclean, Born Under Saturn, pp. 23, 334.

  174 William Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819), in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1901–6), vol. iii, p.175; Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England 1789–1832 (1988), p. 142; Maclean, Born Under Saturn, p. 332.

  175 Hazlitt, Political Essays in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, preface, vol. vii, p. 31.

  176 Knox, ‘Lunatick Visions’.

  21 LASTING LIGHT?

  1 W.J. Bate, J. M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (eds.), Samuel Johnson: The Idler and Adventurer (1963), no. 137, p. 491.

  2 James Keir (ed.), An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Day (1791), p. 104.

  3 Letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson (13 November 1815), in Charles Francis Adams (ed.), The Works of John Adams (1850–56), vol. x, p. 174.

  4 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (1988); Karlis Racevskis, Postmodernism and the Search for Enlightenment (1993); Marshal Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1983), pp. 34f.

  5 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity (1998), pp. 7ff.

  6 William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1985 [1793]), p. 281.

  7 Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, p. 529. For a parody of the voice of Reaction against printing, see Daniel Eaton [pseud. ‘Antitype’], The Pernicious Effects of the Art of Printing upon Society, Exposed (1794).

  8 Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (1803), canto IV, p. 152, ll. 283–6.

  9 David Hume, ‘Of the First Principles of Government’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays (1993), p. 24.

  10 Coleridge imagined a ‘clerisy’ comprising a mixture of different sorts of writers, intellectuals and opinion-makers, balancing the clashing forces of permanency and progression. It would ‘secure and improve that civilisation, without which the nation could be neither permanent nor progressive’. For Coleridge it would perform a conservative function, however, whereas the enlightened intelligentsia was reforming and progressive: On the Constitution of Church and State (1830); Richard Holmes, Coleridge (1982), pp. 64f.; R. W. Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order (1969), p. 229.

  11 W. R. Scott, Adam Smith as Student and Professor (1937), pp. 344–5, from the draft for the Wealth of Nations composed in 1769, and excised from the published text of 1776.

  12 Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1971), p. 132. For dissent, see E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (1978), p. 58; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (1999), vol. i, pp. 53ff.

  13 Gerald Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (1979), p. 121.

  14 Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments (1767), p. xx.

  15 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (19
36), pp. 11–12.

  16 Quoted in Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (1984), p. 46. Hazlitt famously dubbed Cobbett ‘a kind of fourth estate’: see Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order, p. 60.

  17 See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).

 

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