Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ENLIGHTENMENT

  ‘He has written a stimulating book which will restore the role of Britain in the Enlightenment. What is more, he has written it in a style that is eminently readable, bubbling over with quotes and ideas, in the true spirit of the movement itself. Voltaire would have approved both of the style and the message, and there can be no higher praise than that’ Hugh Gough, Irish Times

  ‘Magisterial… It is in one sense an enlightened text itself, a tribute to progress and to happiness’ Peter Ackroyd, The Times

  ‘First and foremost an intellectual history, with sharp portraits of scores of thinkers and ideas. What is different and refreshing is that Porter sticks them properly back into a mucky, argumentative but optimistic society which seems, in its grand sweep and fine detail, all too recognizable today’ Andrew Marr, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Brilliant… This is a remarkably rich book that carries its length and impressive learning with great style. It is good to have the Enlightenment's liberating virtues so emphatically insisted upon’ Linda Colley, Financial Times

  ‘Porter here provides a convincing master narrative of an unfolding English Enlightenment… Along the way, he paints a vivid panorama of the social underpinnings: the world of print culture, press freedom, religious toleration, educational reform and practical improvement’ Colin Kidd, London Review of Books

  ‘Porter's Enlightenment has been long in the making and has been worth waiting for… after this book, it will be a perverse, highly partisan ideologist who would continue to deny the existence and the strength of the British Enlightenment’ Peter Gay, The Times Literary Supplement

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dr Roy Porter is Professor in the Social History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London. Recent books include Mind Forg'd Manacles: Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Athlone, 1987; Penguin 1990); A Social History of Madness (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience 1650–1850 (Fourth Estate, 1988) and Patient's Progress (Polity, 1989), both co-authored with Dorothy Porter; Health for Sale: Quackery in England 1660–1850 (Manchester University Press); Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late Enlightenment England (Routledge, 1991); London: A Social History (Penguin, 1996; new edition, 2000); The History of Bethlem (Routledge, 1997), co-authored; The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (HarperCollins, 1997); and Gout: The Patrician Malady (Yale University Press, 1998), co-authored. He has also edited, with Jeremy Black, The Penguin Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century History. Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World won a Wolfson Literary Award for History for 2000.

  ENLIGHTENMENT

  Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

  ROY PORTER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  To Natsu, the love of my life

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2000

  Published in Penguin Books 2001

  9

  Copyright © Roy Porter, 2000

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192772-5

  CONTENTS

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1 A BLIND SPOT?

  2 THE BIRTH OF AN IDEOLOGY

  3 CLEARING AWAY THE RUBBISH

  4 PRINT CULTURE

  5 RATIONALIZING RELIGION

  6 THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE

  7 ANATOMIZING HUMAN NATURE

  8 THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS

  9 SECULARIZING

  10 MODERNIZING

  11 HAPPINESS

  12 FROM GOOD SENSE TO SENSIBILITY

  13 NATURE

  14 DID THE MIND HAVE A SEX?

  15 EDUCATION: A PANACEA?

  16 THE VULGAR

  17 THE PURSUIT OF WEALTH

  18 REFORM

  19 PROGRESS

  20 THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA: ‘MODERN PHILOSOPHY’

  21 LASTING LIGHT?

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  (Photographic acknowledgements in brackets, where applicable)

  1. Giovanni Battista Pittoni the Younger, An Allegorical Monument to Sir Isaac Newton, c. 1725, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (photo: Bridgeman Art Library)

  2. Title-page of Opticks, 1704, by Sir Isaac Newton (photo: Science & Society Picture Library)

  3. Illustration of Bidston lighthouse, showing an early example of signal reflectors, from A Treatise on Naval Architecture, 1794, by William Hutchison (photo: Science & Society Picture Library)

  4. Paul Sandby, The Lantern Slide Show, undated (photo: The Fotomas Index)

  5. François Xavier Vispré, John Farr reading Horace's Odes, c. 1765–70, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

  6. Francis Jukes and John Kirby Baldrey after Robert Chilton, Helluones librorum (‘Bookworms’): Astronomer Samuel Vince reading in his rooms at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, by the light of a shaded lamp, his emaciated cat perusing The Ladies' Diary, c. 1784? (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  7. Alexander Carse, Sunday Morning (Bible Reading at the Cottage Door), in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

  8. Valentine Green, An Abridgement of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, Illustrated with notes, critical and moral, extracted from other celebrated authors, 1769 (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  9. Anon., A Female Philosopher in Extasy at Solving a Problem!, 1772 (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  10. Hugh Douglas Hamilton, Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Deny and Fourth Earl of Bristol, with his Grand-daughter Lady Caroline Crichton, in the Gardens of the Villa Borghese, Rome, 1790, reproduced by courtesy of The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

  11. William Hogarth, The Cholmondley Family, 1732, in a private collection (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  12. Arthur Devis, John Bacon and his Family, c. 1742–3, in the collection of the British Federation of Master Printers (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  13. Johann Zoffany, The Woodley Family, c. 1766, in the collection of the Kingston Lacy Estate, Dorset (photo: National Trust Photographic Library/John Hammond)

  14. Anon., English School, detail of Dixton Harvesters, c. 1725, in the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums, Gloucestershire (photo: The
Bridgeman Art Library)

  15. Title-page of pamphlet advertising William James's coach service between London and Bristol, 1758 (photo: The Fotomas Index)

  16. John Sanders, The Girls' Dining Room of the Foundling Hospital, 1773, in the Coram Foundation, London (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  17. William Hogarth, The Idle 'Prentice Executed at Tyburn, 1747

  18. Anon., English School, Curds and Whey Seller in Cheapside, c. 1730, in the Museum of London

  19. Canaletto, Ranelagh Gardens: The Interior of the Rotunda, c. 1751, in a private collection (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  20. Thomas Rowlandson, London: Skaters on the Serpentine, 1784, in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

  21. Pieter Angillis, Covent Garden, c. 1726, in the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  22. Anon., A Masonic Anecdote, description of the exposure of a fraud, ‘Balsamo’, at a lodge in London, 1786, in the British Museum, London (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  23. Henry Bunbury, Four Gentlemen at their Club Seriously Engaged in Smoking, c. 1794 (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  24. Anon., An Apparatus Adapted to the Reflecting Telescope for Shewing the Transit of Venus, undated (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  25. James Gillray, Adam Walker, a Natural Philosopher, performing Scientific Experiments, 1796 (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  26. Inigo Barlow, ‘Electricity’, illustration from A System of Familiar Philosophy in Twelve Lectures, 1799, by Adam Walker (photo: The British Library, London)

  27. John Webber, A Party from H.M.S. Resolution Shooting Sea-Horses, c. 1780, in the National Maritime Museum, London

  28. Francis Chesham, ‘The King of Dahomey's Levée’, illustration from The History of Dahomey, 1793, by Archibald Dalzel (photo: Corbis/Historical Picture Archive)

  29. Inigo Barlow, Asiatic Devices Allusive to the Cosmogony, c. 1790 (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  30. Allan Ramsay, David Hume, 1766, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

  31. Richard Samuel, The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain: Portraits in the characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (Elizabeth Carter, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Anne Sheridan, Catharine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, Elizabeth Montagu and Charlotte Lennox), c. 1779, reproduced by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

  32. Benjamin West, A Portrait of Sir Joseph Banks, c. 1770, in a private collection (photo: Sotheby's Picture Library)

  33. Richard Cosway, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, c. 1770–75, in a private collection (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  34. John Raphael Smith, after Joseph Wright of Derby, Erasmus Darwin, 1797 (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  35. Henry Raeburn, James Hutton, c. 1776, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

  36. Ellen Sharples, Joseph Priestley, c. 1797, in a private collection (photo by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

  37. John Kay, ‘Lord Kames, Hugo Arnott and Lord Monboddo’, eighteenth-century caricature reproduced as an illustration in Kay's Edinburgh Portraits, Vol. 1, 1885, by James Paterson

  38. George Stubbs, ‘The Human Skeleton: Lateral View in Crouching Posture’, from the series A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl, 1795–1806, in the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  39. Johann Zoffany, Dr. William Hunter, Professor of Anatomy, Lecturing at the Royal Academy, c. 1772, in the Royal College of Physicians, London

  40. Thomas Rowlandson after James Dunthorpe, The Hypochondriac Surrounded by Doleful Spectres, 1788 (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  41. William Taylor, after William Smellie, ‘Representations of the manner in which the foetus is nourished in utero, also a view of the membrana decidua discovered by the late Dr. Hunter’, illustration from the Royal Encyclopedia, 1791 (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  42. Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Richard Hoare Holding Her Son, Henry, c. 1763, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, 1982.138

  43. Robert Smirke, A Man Recuperating in Bed at a Receiving-House of the Royal Humane Society, after resuscitation by William Hawes and John Coakley Lettsom from near-drowning, undated (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  44. James Cranke, Jnr, Glassmaking at Warrington, c. 1780, in Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, Cheshire (photo: The Bridgeman Art Library)

  45. Johann Zoffany, John Cuff and an Assistant, 1772, in The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle © 2000, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

  46. Trade card for Richard Siddall, chemist at the Golden Head in Panton Street, showing a pharmacist in his workshop surrounded by the paraphernalia of his trade, undated (photo: The Wellcome Library, London)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My interest in the Enlightenment stems from the time when, as a member of the proverbial class of '68, I had the great good fortune to be taught by Jack Plumb and Quentin Skinner at Christ's College, Cambridge. Jack showed me that the eighteenth century, far from being the stylized high political comedy of manners so commonly presented, was rather a time of turbulence, indeed a great watershed; Quentin for his part whetted my appetite for the challenges of intellectual history. How these marvellous teachers opened my mind would have warmed the hearts of the protagonists of this book.

  Typed by candlelight in 1974 during the miners' strike power cuts, my first ever lectures given to the Cambridge history faculty were on the English Enlightenment – then, for sure (and still now, I suspect) a topic which raised quizzical eyebrows. During the intervening quarter century, my passion for the subject has never flagged, and I have always meant to put my views down on paper.

  Over the years, many scholars have challenged me and helped clarify my thinking. I should particularly like to thank Mikuláš Teich, whose proposal in the late 1970s that we should stage a seminar series on ‘The Enlightenment in National Context’ made my thinking less pitifully parochial. Special thanks also to Sylvana Tomaselli, who has long been a devoted reader of everything I have written on and around this subject and a critic blessed with that candour so dear to enlightened radicals.

  I owe much to the writings of many other scholars who, explicitly or obliquely, have been addressing this topic. John Pocock, Margaret Jacob, J. C. D. Clark and, for Scotland, Nicholas Phillipson must be singled out. In their contrasting ways and with their very disparate opinions, each has insisted there is a problem to be addressed.

  Over the twelve months it took to write, chapters and drafts of this book have been read by Hannah Augstein, Bill Bynum, Luke Davidson, Brian Dolan, Alex Goldbloom, Fiona MacDonald, Michael Neve, Clare Spark, Christine Stevenson, Jane Walsh and Andrew Wear. To them I am deeply grateful for a welter of invaluable comments, criticisms, stimuli and friendly support.

  I spent many happy years at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, recently disbanded by the Wellcome Trust. I am delighted to acknowledge the enormous support given to me by individual members of the staff, notably my secretary Frieda Houser, research assistant Caroline Overy and at the Xerox machine Andy Foley and Stuart Fricker. Additional exemplary research assistance has been provided by Sally Scovell and Sharon Messenger, and retyping of the seemingly endless drafts has been done by the tireless Sheila Lawler, Jan Pinkerton and Tracey Wickham, with help from Gill Doyle and Joanna Kafouris. Jed Lawler has helped a computer illiterate. At Penguin, I am very grateful to Sally Holloway, Cecilia Mackay and Janet Dudley for their expert copy-editing, picture-researching and indexing respectively. I am profoundly grateful to the British Academy for awarding me a fellowship under their research leave scheme for the academic year 1998–9, during which this book, so long stalled, has been completed.

  Thanks to my publisher, Simon Winder,
whose faith in this book has taken the practical form of a flow of helpful comments. I should finally like to pay tribute to Gill Coleridge, my literary agent. Over the last decade she has brought method to the mess of my literary life, in a manner that has simply made all the difference. What more can I say?

  ‘It is a history-book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man's own mind.’

  LAURENCE STERNE, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

  (1759–67)

  ‘I am a true Englishman, formed to discover nothing but to improve anything.’

  WILLIAM GODWIN, cited in Don Locke,

  A Fantasy of Reason (1980)

  ‘So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.’

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Autobiography (1793)

  ‘Within limits, the Enlightenment was what one thinks it was.’