Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  18 Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981), p. 69.

  19 Classic is William Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Age (1971 [1825]), which deified and demonized the great thinkers he knew. This was the age of the great vogue for literary anecdotes: see John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (1967 [1812].

  20 Thomas Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (1918), in David Garnett (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1948), p. 363:

  He now became troubled with the passion for reforming the world. He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati.

  ‘Action’, thus he soliloquised, ‘is the result of opinion, and to new-model opinion would be to new-model society. Knowledge is power; it is in the hands of a few, who employ it to mislead the many, for their own selfish purposes of aggrandizement and appropriation. What if it were in the hands of a few who should employ it to lead the many? What if it were universal, and the multitude were enlightened?

  The libertarian Shelley deemed poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world: see Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 147.

  21 Raymond Williams, Keywords (1988); Penelope J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (1991), p. 102. Battles were fought over words: Johnson would not admit ‘civilization’ into his Dictionary.

  22 Thomas Peacock, Melincourt (1817), in Garnett, The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, p. 124.

  23 British Critic, no. 18 (July–December 1801), p. i, quoted in Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800 (1988), p. 2. It was the high noon of reviewing: see John Clive, Scotch Reviewers (1957).

  24 Quoted in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (1993), p. 278.

  25 J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (1985), pp. 69, 89.

  26 Frankenstein captures key aspects of the Romantic critique of enlightened values: Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow (1987); Stephen Bann (ed.), Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity (1994).

  27 Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), p. 255. Perhaps he resembled the simian Sir Oran Haut-Ton in Peacock's Melincourt: Garnett, The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, pp. 97f. Presumably she yearned at all costs that her son should not turn into a Dr Frankenstein.

  28 For the ferments across Europe, see Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (1981). Britain, of course, had various ‘firsts’, from freemasonry to the steam engine.

  29 The English Sonderweg thesis receives support from Koselleck's view that the split between raison d‘état and the dreams of intellectuals, in his view so pathogenic on the Continent, was absent from Britain: R. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis (1988), pp. 2f.

  30 Here I concur, as stated earlier, with J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’ (1980), ideas elaborated in Pocock's Barbarism and Religion, vols. i and ii.

  31 France was the nation of L'état, c'est moi. In England the monarch ceased to be seen in that way, and few wanted an enlightenment led by enlightened absolutism. Contrast Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (1998), pp. 32f.

  32 ‘The enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents & Genius, But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass & obedient to Noblemen's Opinions’: G. Keynes (ed.), Blake: Complete Writings (1969), pp. 452–3.

  33 For which, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1965); H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (1969).

  34 For example, Maurice Quinlan, Victorian Prelude (1941); Muriel Jaeger, Before Victoria (1956); Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement (1988).

  35 See J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism (1969).

  36 Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (1977); Sir Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (1969); John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake (1995).

  37 F. R. Leavis (ed.), Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (1962).

  38 Elie Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn (1961), vol. i.

  39 Joseph Priestley, The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion (sn, 1785), in John Towill Rutt (ed.), The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley (1817–32), vol. xv, p. 78.

  40 Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge (1996).

  41 William Hazlitt, Life of Thomas Holcroft (1816), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (1932), vol. iii, pp. 132–3.

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