research paper 18th century

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Ramesh Mallipeddi, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Journal Details

The editors invite contributions on all aspects of the eighteenth century. Essays employing interdisciplinary perspectives or addressing contemporary theoretical and cultural concerns relating to the eighteenth century are especially encouraged. Articles which are selected for publication are those which make a significant and original contribution to their field. 

Article submissions are first screened for their appropriateness for the journal. Articles which are considered for publication are sent to two reviewers: one reviewer, generally drawn from the author’s home discipline, serves as a specialist in the subject matter at hand while the other, generally drawn from a second discipline, approaches the article from a broader thematic perspective. Based on these initial reviewers’ reports, the article is either rejected, returned for revisions, or passed on to the editorial board for another level of review.  Once in the hands of the editorial board, each article is read by at least one additional reviewer. These editorial board reviewers make publishing recommendations to the editor, who makes the final decision regarding publication.

Manuscripts should not exceed 9,000 words, including notes. Style must conform to The Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition, with footnotes.  Please consult our style guide carefully prior to submission, as failure to conform with the guidelines may result in the editorial office returning your submission.  Our style guide can be found here .  Quotations from foreign texts should appear in the body of the essay followed by translations. Please supply an abstract of 100 or fewer words with your paper. Illustrations are accepted if pertinent to the essay (authors must secure glossy prints or digital files and reproduction rights if the essay is accepted).  It is the journal's policy to require assignment of copyright from all authors.  Authors must obtain written permission for quoting unpublished or published material in excess of fair use.

Electronic submission is strongly encouraged and will aid in a speedy review process. Submissions may be sent to:  [email protected]   

Alternatively, hard copies of article submissions may be mailed to: The Editors Eighteenth-Century Studies Department of English Language and Literatures #397–1873 East Mall (Buchanan Tower) 302 The University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1

Send books for review to:

Kathleen Lubey Reviews Editor, Eighteenth-Century Studies St. John Hall, B15 St. John’s University 8000 Utopia Parkway Queens, NY 11439

[email protected]

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice  page.

Peer Review Policy

Eighteenth-Century Studies  publishes original research on all aspects of thought and culture in the long eighteenth century from across the humanities and social sciences. The editor invites submissions that will make a significant contribution to their field while simultaneously speaking to the journal's interdisciplinary readership. Upon submission, articles are screened by the editor and managing editor for appropriateness for the journal. Those submissions deemed appropriate then go through a double-blind peer review process in which readers are selected from two different disciplinary backgrounds. Readers are asked to assess the article’s argument, structure, methodology, and contribution to the field, as well as to identify the main audiences for the article. Authors can expect to receive one of three decisions within approximately three months of initial submission: accept, revise and resubmit, or reject.

Authors who submit a revision are instructed to include a list of changes they have made in light of earlier feedback, as the article may be sent back to these initial reviewers. Once an article has received positive reports from readers and/or the editor, it is sent to the editorial board for the final decision. This usually takes approximately one month. Authors should consult with the editor before submitting any pieces that fall outside the scope of a standard research essay.

Ramesh Mallipeddi,  University of British Columbia, Vancouver​

Reviews Editor

Kathleen Lubey,  St. John’s University​

Managing Editor

Oliver Bedard,  University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Editorial Board

Faith E. Beasley,  Dartmouth College  (2025) Benita Blessing,  American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies  (ex officio) Margaret E. Ezell,  Texas A&M University  (2025) Kevis Goodman,  University of California, Berkeley  (2026) Thomas Keymer,  University of Toronto  (2026) Jonathan Lamb,  Vanderbilt University  (2025) Peter C. Mancall,  University of Southern California  (2025)

Advisory Board

Mark Boonshoft,  Virginia Military Institute  (2026) Dwight Codr,  University of Connecticut  (2026) Alison Conway,  University of British Columbia  (2026) Marcie Frank,  Concordia University  (2025) Glenda Goodman,  University of Pennsylvania  (2025) Sarah Tindal Kareem,  University of California, Los Angeles  (2026) Nicholas Hudson,  University of British Columbia  (2025) Scott R. MacKenzie,  University of Mississippi  (2025) Ted McCormick,  Concordia University  (2026) Mary Helen McMurran,  University of Western Ontario  (2026) Tobias Menely,  University of California, Davis  (2026) Matthew O’Hara,  University of California, Santa Cruz  (2025) Liza Oliver,  Wellesley College  (2026) Nicholas Paige,  University of California, Berkeley  (2026) Charlotte Sussman,  Duke University  (2025) Coll Thrush,  University of British Columbia  (2025) Charles Walton,  University of Warwick  (2025) Cheng-hua Wang,  Princeton University  (2025) Masano Yamashita,  University of Colorado Boulder  (2025) Chunjie Zhang,  University of California, Davis  (2025)

Reviews should adhere to a 1200-word length for single-title reviews (2400 words for two-title and 3600 for three-title reviews). In addition to evaluating the commissioned book, reviews must communicate that book’s purpose and contributions. Editorial board may request or require revisions at any stage of the publication process to ensure these criteria are met. The final decision to publish rests with the editorial board.

Send books for review to

Please send book review copies to the contact above. Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.

Abstracting & Indexing Databases

• Bibliography of Asian Studies (Online), 1974-1977
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index
• Current Contents
• Web of Science
• Dietrich's Index Philosophicus
• IBZ - Internationale Bibliographie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur
• Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlicher Literatur
• Academic Search Alumni Edition, 7/1/1993-
• Academic Search Complete, 7/1/1993-
• Academic Search Elite, 7/1/1993-
• Academic Search Premier, 7/1/1993-
• America: History and Life, 3/1/1972-
• Art & Architecture Complete, 7/1/1993-
• Art & Architecture Index, 7/1/1993-
• Art & Architecture Source, 4/15/1982-
• Art Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), 4/15/1982-
• Art Index (H.W. Wilson), 4/15/1982-
• ATLA Religion Database (American Theological Library Association), 1989-1990, dropped
• Biography Index: Past and Present (H.W. Wilson), vol.15, 1982-vol.43, no.2, 2010
• Book Review Digest Plus (H.W. Wilson), Jan.1983-
• Current Abstracts, 1/1/2000-
• Gender Studies Database, 2/1/1971-
• Historical Abstracts (Online), 1/1/1972-
• Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/1974-3/1/1983
• Humanities Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), 6/1/1983-
• Humanities Index (Online), 1983/01-
• Humanities Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/1974-3/1/1983
• Humanities International Complete, 7/1/1993-
• Humanities International Index, 7/1/1993-
• Humanities Source, 1/1/1974-
• Humanities Source Ultimate, 1/1/1974-
• MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
• OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson), 6/1/1983-
• Poetry & Short Story Reference Center, 7/1/1993-
• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale)
• SocINDEX, 6/1/1993-
• SocINDEX with Full Text, 6/1/1993-
• TOC Premier (Table of Contents), 1/1/1995-
• Women's Studies International, 2/1/1971-
• Scopus, 2002-ongoing, 2000, 1998, 1983-1985, 1979-1980, 1975-1976, 1972, 1969
• Academic ASAP, 12/1985-
• Book Review Index Plus
• Gale Academic OneFile
• Gale Academic OneFile Select, 09/1989-
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• InfoTrac Custom, 9/1989-
• ArticleFirst, vol.23, no.3, 1990-vol.44, no.4, 2011
• Electronic Collections Online, vol.29, no.1, 1995-vol.44, no.4, 2011
• Periodical Abstracts, v.25, n.1, 1991-v.43, n.3, 2010
• Personal Alert (E-mail)
• Art, Design & Architecture Collection, 10/01/1991-
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• Arts Premium Collection, 10/1/1991-
• International Bibliography of Art, Selective
• Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (Online), Selective
• Music & Performing Arts Collection, 10/01/1991-
• Music Periodicals Database, 10/01/1991-
• Periodicals Index Online
• Professional ProQuest Central, 10/01/1991-
• ProQuest 5000, 10/01/1991-
• ProQuest Central, 10/01/1991-
• Research Library, 10/01/1991-
• The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)

Abstracting & Indexing Sources

• Children's Book Review Index   (Active)  (Print)
• Abstracts of English Studies   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Children's Literature Abstracts   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities   (Ceased)  (Print)
• MLA Abstracts of Articles in Scholarly Journals   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Religion Index One: Periodicals   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Religion Index Two: Multi-Author Works   (Ceased)  (Print)

Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.

0.4 (2022) 0.4 (Five-Year Impact Factor) 0.00058 (Eigenfactor™ Score)

Rank in Category (by Journal Impact Factor): Note:  While journals indexed in AHCI and ESCI are receiving a JIF for the first time in June 2023, they will not receive ranks, quartiles, or percentiles until the release of 2023 data in June 2024.

© Clarivate Analytics 2023

Published quarterly in October, January, April, and July

Readers include: Historians, literary critics, art historians, musicologists, political scientists, and all members of ASECS

Print circulation: 1,461

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American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Canadian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies

Science History Publications/USA

“For more than three decades,  Eighteenth-Century Studies  has supplied a steady succession of provocative, engaging, substantive essays and reviews. It’s where I look first for innovative work in my field.” –Patricia Meyer Spacks,  University of Virginia

“ Eighteenth-Century Studies  consistently contains stimulating articles and reviews from a wide range of fields. The result is a rich tapestry of enlightening and varied scholarship and criticism.” –Damie Stillman,  University of Delaware

“Anyone interested in the eighteenth century from a wider interdisciplinary perspective will find  Eighteenth-Century Studies  to be an invaluable resource.” –Colin Lucas,  University of Chicago

eTOC (Electronic Table of Contents) alerts can be delivered to your inbox when this or any Hopkins Press journal is published via your ProjectMUSE MyMUSE account. Visit the eTOC instructions page for detailed instructions on setting up your MyMUSE account and alerts.   

Also of Interest

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Mari Yoshihara, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

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Literature and Social Class in the Eighteenth Century

Nicholas Hudson is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Oxford University Press, 1988), Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2003), A Political Biography of Samuel Johnson (Pickering & Chatto, 2013), and of many essays on eighteenth-century thought, literature, and culture.

• Published: 17 April 2015
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Marxist interpretations of class conflict between the aristocracy and emergent middle class are unhelpful in describing the political situation in eighteenth-century Britain and its literary works. Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, British society remained under the firm authority of the monarchy, aristocracy, and the landed gentry. Nonetheless, Britain was also being transformed by the Financial Revolution after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In response to this paradoxical situation, a nation ruled by the old elite but increasingly dominated by commerce, authors experimented with socially mixed combinations of tragedy, comedy, the epic, pastoral, and satire. These classical genres generally failed to resolve the contradictions of the social hierarchy. The success of the novel, on the other hand, owed less to its promotion of “middle-class” values, which had not yet taken a distinctive form, than to its inherent flexibility and ability to mediate a complex and changing social order.

Writers and readers of the eighteenth century were shaped by their daily experience of a culture dominated by an almost unquestioned belief in social hierarchy. Our understanding of this hierarchy, and its literary impact has nonetheless been hindered by theoretical obstacles and historical simplifications. A now long line of scholars has argued that the conception of “social class” is highly misleading when applied to a culture that conceived of itself through gradations of “status” or “rank.” 1 The rising economic power of the so-called middle class or bourgeoisie , itself a deeply divided and complex grouping, did not translate into a grab for power, or even a disrespect for traditional ideas of political authority. Traditional Marxist analysis does not make much sense of a situation where the leaders of capitalism tended to support the ancien regime though few aspired to any title above “Sir” or invested in great landed estates. The sons of merchants tended to remain in the family line of business, though their daughters more often married into the gentry (see Gauci 2001 : 70–72, 92–94).

Understanding the role of the literary artist in this complex and changing situation raises even more formidable problems. As noted by Raymond Williams, the period after 1680 showed a marked change in the social origins of authors, with more deriving from the middle ranks and fewer from the aristocracy and upper-gentry (1961: 234). Swift, Gay, Haywood, Richardson, Johnson, and Goldsmith came from very modest backgrounds while other writers such as Pope, Fielding, and Burney claimed roughly genteel status without great wealth or an automatic claim to recognition. Moreover, from the Restoration onwards, successful authors tended to write for a distinctly plebeian group of City-based booksellers who regarded literature as a trade and who sometimes became very rich from the “business of books” (see Raven 2007 : 154–220). Especially following the Glorious Revolution in 1688, writers often subjected the traditional elite to scathing satire, contrasting the decadence and greed of the present aristocracy with traditional ideals of genteel honor and virtue. Nevertheless, writers equally denigrated the avarice and vulgarity of the rising financial elite and seldom suggested that the commercial ranks should take power. Literary representations of the old and new elite, inherited and newly made wealth, are generally characterized by a controlled tension rather than confrontation, generating a series of higher values of morality and national interest while implicitly underwriting the legitimacy of the traditional social hierarchy. In this way, literature played an arguably significant role in mediating the social and political tensions that exploded into revolution in France.

What occurred in Britain was, notwithstanding, a “revolution” of a more gradual kind. Just as political society in the 1790s was in fact profoundly different from that of the 1690s, literary culture had undergone a significant transformation. Traditional genres such as tragedy, the pastoral, and heroic poetry were being displaced by new forms such as the novel and hybrid kinds of drama and verse. This evolution occurred because the older genres simply failed to reflect the emerging realities of a fluid and multifaceted commercial society and a broader, more socially mixed audience. These new forms were indeed defining, through a long process, what would eventually be recognized as “middle-class” social and aesthetic values, though this term was rarely used until the early nineteenth century (see Wahrman 1995 ). To understand this evolving interrelationship between social change and literary form, we need to begin with the confused and volatile situation that existed in the aftermath of the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

The Social and Literary Impact of the Restoration

Although historians debate whether the political upheaval between 1642 and 1660 counts as a “revolution,” there can be no doubt that these events had a profound and lasting on impact on how writers and readers perceived the nation’s social hierarchy. 2 The creation of a republic in 1649 not only eliminated the king but also temporarily raised a stratum of the “middling sort”—including minor gentry, yeomen, domestic traders, shopkeepers, and army officers—into positions of unprecedented power and influence. This upstart regime abolished the House of Lords and subjected the royalist aristocracy and gentry to sequestration, severe fines, and the ruinous exploitation of their land. This was a social upheaval recalled with disgust in popular comedies such as Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662), George Etherege’s The Comicall Revenge, or Love in a Tub (1664), and Thomas D’Urfey’s The Royalist (1682). Although the displacement of the traditional elite from the basis of its economic power was largely corrected after the Restoration, it left lasting and bitter memories. Even the first Earl of Shaftesbury, amidst his challenge to royal authority in 1683, confided to John Evelyn that he wished no return to “Mechanic Tyranny” and would fight to his last breath to preserve the monarchy as the only means to ensure order ( Evelyn 1985 : 304).

The restoration of the old regime in 1660, including the nobility and the bishops, was celebrated with a ceremonial magnificence that impressed even former officials in Oliver Cromwell’s government, such as Samuel Pepys, with a sense of royalist fervor and gratitude for restored order. Dramatists such as the first Earl of Orrery, Sir Robert Howard, and his brother-in-law John Dryden attempted to translate this spectacle into the heroic dramas of the 1660s, epitomized by Dryden’s two-part The Conquest of Granada (1670–1671). In his dedication of The Conquest of Granada to the Duke of York, the future James II, Dryden defended heroic drama as “sacred to Princes and Heroes” (1956–2002, 11:3), reflecting the traditional view that the genres of tragedy and the epic should be about noble characters and designed for elite audiences. Early in his career, Dryden professed to write comedy only grudgingly, arguing in the preface to An Evening’s Love (1668) that as comedy required “much of conversation with the vulgar” it was “in it’s [sic] own nature inferiour to all sorts of Dramatick writing” (1956–2002, 10:202). He came particularly to despise the comedies of his rival Thomas Shadwell who expressed an equal disdain for high heroic drama. Beginning with The Sullen Lovers (1668), Shadwell developed a version of Ben Jonson’s “humours” comedy characterized by the farcical portrayal of even genteel characters, along with a great deal of “vulgar” physical stage business.

Because of the lasting admiration for Dryden’s mock-heroic Mac Flecknoe (written 1676; published 1682), we tend to forget that Shadwell arguably won the debate into the 1680s and even later. Shadwell’s low comedies were highly popular with the genteel audiences that predominated in the theatres, including Charles II. In response to Dryden’s class-based understanding of drama, Shadwell mocked the Poet Laureate as a pedantic upstart and pseudo-poet in the character of “Drybob” (coitus without emission) in The Humourists (1671). This joke was later repeated by Lord Rochester, for even among the restored aristocracy Dryden’s efforts to raise the dignity of the theatre met with disdain and ridicule. The alleged bombast of his heroic plays, along with his supposed pretentiousness, was satirized in The Humourists (1671). This joke was later repeated by Lord Rochester, for even among the restored aristocracy Dryden’s efforts to raise the dignity of the theatre met with disdain and ridicule. The alleged bombast of his heroic plays, along with his supposed pretentiousness, was satirized in The Rehearsal (1671) by a group of writers attached to the extravagantly decadent Duke of Buckingham. Later critics, like Thomas Rymer, believed that The Rehearsal put an end to “huffing” heroic drama in rhymed couplets, as Dryden last attempted in Aureng-Zebe (1675). These critics nonetheless underrated the complexity of Dryden’s evolving views on the relationship between literary art and the social hierarchy. He defended English “mixed” drama against French neoclassical models in An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) and himself wrote tragicomedies in the tradition of Fletcher and Beaumont to the end of his career. His poems, which eventually entered the English canon, including Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel (1681), are masterful experiments of combining high and low genres. When Thomas Rymer, eventually a Whig and supporter of William III, attacked tragicomedy in The Tragedies of the Last Age (1678), Dryden replied in an essay on tragedy appended to his revised version of Troilus and Cressida (1679). Here he defended Shakespeare’s tragedies as natural and affecting despite their notorious mixtures of comedy (1956–2002, 13: 229–248). Dryden’s decision to revise Troilus and Cressida is significant, for he retained this tragedy’s ignoble comic characters Thersites and Pandarus and even intensified its irreverent portrayal of the heroes Achilles and Ajax.

As suggested by the rejection of high-heroic drama, the popularity of Shadwell’s “low” comedy, and Dryden’s widening search for socially mixed literary forms, the restoration of the old political order had failed to restore the hegemony of the old elite over a submissive and deferential commonality. This failure is often belied by the extreme elitism of much drama during the period. During the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1678–1683), a flood of drama, poetry, and periodical writing seemed to confirm a virtual class war between the landed aristocracy and the “City,” identified with both religious dissent and the defense of the people’s rights against arbitrary monarchy. In comedies such as Otway’s The Soldier’s Fortune (1681), Durfey’s Barnaby Whigg (1681), Behn’s The City Heiress (1682), and Crowne’s City Politiques (1683), Tory rakes cuckold Whig merchants, a sexual demonstration of aristocratic prerogative against the threatening discontent of the mercantile City (see Dawson 2005 ). Royalist hatred of avaricious merchants is also dramatized in Dryden’s satire The Medal (1682) and the tragedy he co-wrote with Nathaniel Lee, The Duke of Guise (1682). We need to beware, however, of interpreting these works too literally as anticommercial. First, City audiences evidently also enjoyed the joke of rakes cuckolding merchants and aldermen, as in Edward Ravenscroft’s spectacularly popular The London Cuckolds (1681), a fixture at Lord Mayor’s Day celebrations over the next half century ( Dawson 2005 : 71; Johnson 2006 , 2:332). Moreover, the Restoration was a period of a vigorous growth in trade promoted by the crown, which justified two wars again the Dutch in the cause of protecting English commerce.

Swaggering displays of rank in the English aristocracy in fact disguised its own internal divisions, anxieties, and diminished confidence. The significant expansion of the aristocracy in the seventeenth century through the purchase of titles, notably the newly created “baronet,” had already diluted its prestige (see Stone 1967 ). A large segment of the nobility had either turned against Charles I or cooperated with Cromwell’s regime. These embarrassments help to explain why the aristocracy widely abandoned and even scorned their supposed “vocation” as the nation’s moral exemplars, as set forth in the immensely popular The Gentleman’s Calling (1662) by the royalist Richard Allestree. Much of the business of government shifted toward hard-working officials like Pepys, who enjoyed the spectacle and theatre of the age but bemoaned the decadence and idleness of the restored regime. In reading the most popular rake comedies of the 1670s, such as Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) or Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), we should keep in mind that they were performed in the context of intense controversy in the press about the behavior of the aristocracy and its fashionable imitators further down the ranks. Although these authors evidently appealed to a largely genteel audience that wished to be entertained rather than instructed, they exhibited a disillusioned detachment from their elite characters, as exemplified by Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676), a play much admired later for its frank satire of fashionable absurdity.

Shock at the revelation of the Rye House Plot (1683) to assassinate the king solidified a national desire for order, leading to the smooth accession of James II in 1685. This accession did not, however, remove widespread dissatisfaction with the behavior of the royal family and the aristocracy or abiding discontent with the immorality and profaneness of society and the stage. This discontent made its impact felt in literature after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Social and Literary Change after the Glorious Revolution

Historians have again debated whether the overthrow of James II can be properly called a “revolution,” as this event was engineered by the aristocracy and great gentry. 3 The accession of William III and his wife Mary II nonetheless had a major and long-lasting impact on the social hierarchy and its literary representation. First, the Revolution Settlement forced the government to rely as never before on financing provided by the City, leading to the creation of the Bank of English in 1694 and a “Financial Revolution” that involved the whole ruling order in massive debt and speculation ( Dickson 1967 ). The aristocracy and upper gentry remained firmly in control, as well as surprisingly impervious to interlopers from below (see Cannon 1984 ; Stone and Stone 1984 ). This elite nonetheless presided over a “fiscal-military state” invested as never before in the mercantile and speculative fortunes of the City ( Brewer 1989 ). It is impossible to read accounts of this era by, for example, John Evelyn or Gilbert Burnet without noticing their greatly heightened attention to questions of money and the economic state of the nation. In the popular comedies of Sir John Vanbrugh and William Congreve, inherited title is far less important than sheer wealth. In Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1694), Lord Foppington has bought his title and, though a study in vacuous and absurd luxury, cannot be treated as merely a foppish irritant like Etherege’s Sir Foppling Fuller or Sir Novelty Fashion in Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift (1694). He has real authority, and the rakish activities of the high society around him do not seem glamorous, as in much earlier comedy, but instead degraded and marginal to the real dynamics of power. In Congreve’s The Double Dealer the same year, Lord Touchstone, rather than an avaricious Cit, becomes the cuckold of a conniving interloper, Maskwell, who was raised from obscurity but who now seeks to seize the nobleman’s estate. In The Way of the World (1700), Fainall connives to steal the estate of Lady Wishfort and is thwarted only through the clever legal precautions of Mirabell, a reformed rake who utilizes the skills of a lawyer and accountant.

Second, the Glorious Revolution unleashed a new moral tone that, in reaction to the previous Stuart monarchs, imposed a renewed demand on the landed elite to fulfill its theoretical role as the nation’s exemplars of virtue, manners, and religion. Jeremy Collier launched a scathing critique of the representation of the nobility in contemporary plays in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). A Tory and nonjuror, Collier targeted his attacks on Whig dramatists like Vanbrugh and Congreve, whose alleged sins were in fact inherited from the tradition of Tory dramatists like Dryden, Etherege, and Behn. Now, however, there was little disagreement between the political parties about the need for drama to school the elite into morality. The same demand was also made by the Whigs Sir Richard Blackmore and Gilbert Burnet. In The History of his Own Time (1724–1732), Burnet launched a harsh attack on the aristocracy of the Stuart era, presenting the City as the steady bastion of morality and decency. Vanbrugh, Congreve, and other Whig authors replied to Collier by arguing that modern comedies simply mirrored the real state of a lewd and profane aristocracy, which should recognize their need for reform. Collier nonetheless found wide agreement with his case that drama should not just reflect society but rather represent the elite in ways that were appropriately exemplary and edifying. Literary representation was increasingly acknowledged as having a significant impact on social attitudes. Moreover, the belief that noble or even royal birth carried with it a set of inherent virtues, along with indefeasible prerogatives, could not easily survive the accession of William III, who possessed neither hereditary claims to the throne nor regal graces, even in the eyes of his supporters. The flood of Whig panegyric that followed the Glorious Revolution dressed up William and Mary in the trappings of classical heroism, stressing the king’s courageous actions and moral rectitude rather than his princely blood (see A. Williams 2005 : 93–134). Popular Whig tragedy of the eighteenth century, such as Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane (1702) and Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713), celebrated their heroes’ moral “nobility” rather than the royal pedigree of their villains, Bajazet and Caesar.

The success of Collier’s polemic in changing the representation of rank on the stage was bolstered by a notably higher proportion of newly wealthy and middle-rank people in the theatre (see Dennis 1939–1943 , 2:278). This was an audience more likely to be critical of the traditional elite, as well as receptive to the promotion of virtues that flattered its own claims to respect. Consider, for example, Colley Cibber’s The Provoked Husband (1728), among the most successful and admired comedies of the eighteenth century. The title of Cibber’s play, an adaptation of Vanbrugh’s unfinished A Journey to London (written c. 1715–1717), alludes to the same dramatist’s The Provoked Wife (1697), a major target of Collier’s attack. The Provoked Wife comes close to justifying Lady Brute’s willingness to cuckold her husband Sir John Brute, the very epitome of elite drunkenness, moral degeneracy, and lawless tyranny. In Cibber’s play, on the contrary, the upstanding Lord Townly berates and eventually expels his wife Lady Townly for her nightly excursions to fashionable assemblies and gambling-tables. In this moralistic comedy, even Lady Townly stops short of cuckolding her husband, though her extravagance harms the nobleman’s reputation and depletes his purse. Lord Townly is not, however, the real hero of the play but rather it is the untitled Manly, a virtuous, censorious, and rich landed gentleman who finally marries into the Lord’s family. Although the nobility remains in charge in Cibber’s vision, it is now this upper-middle-rank gentleman who really sets the appropriate moral tone.

Manly’s positive influence is exerted in part through his high reputation with bankers, who value his morality as an assurance of reliable credit. The play thus underwrites the beneficial cooperation between commerce and the landed elite rather than their opposition. It has been noted that the merchant gained a newly dignified role on the early eighteenth-century stage, sharply in contrast with the satire of “Cits” during the Restoration ( McVeagh 1981 : 53–82). In Sir Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722), for example, the merchant Sealand retorts to Sir John Bevil with a ringing defense of the virtues of his commercial class: “give me leave to say, that we Merchants are a Species of Gentry, that have grown into the World this last Century, and are as honourable, and almost as useful, as you landed Folks, that have always thought your selves so much above us” (1971: 359). Similarly, the moral exemplar of George Lillo’s highly successful The London Merchant (1731) is the merchant Thorowgood. But even Sealand thinks that merchants are only “almost as useful” as landed gentleman, and Thorowgood wants his daughter Maria to marry a man of “noble birth and fortune,” as such advantages exhibit a good man’s “virtues in the fairest light” (1965: 14). Later eighteenth-century drama presented a series of meritorious merchants, such as Freeport in George Coleman’s The English Merchant (1767), Stockwell in Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771), and Thomas Oldham in Samuel Foote’ The Nabob (1772). Nevertheless, these characters all have in common a desire not to take power but rather to thwart the designs of self-interested villains in order to promote the virtuous interests of their landed betters. Merchants cede final authority, for the Financial Revolution by no means effaced traditional suspicions concerning the deleterious effects of a life spent pursuing wealth. In his essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” in The Spectator (1712), Addison indicated that the “mean and familiar” surroundings of men of business rendered them incapable of appreciating the refined beauties of art, more properly cultivated by “the Pomp and Magnificence of Courts” (1965, 3:564, 3:578). Suspicions of commercial greed were intensified by the premiership of Sir Robert Walpole from 1721 to 1742. Reflecting the view that Walpole ruled the nation through financial corruption after the South Sea Bubble in 1720, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) dramatized a world in which avarice and peculation had infected all ranks of society, leveling polite society with the inhabitants of Newgate prison.

In the face of this chaos of social order, in which bad men like Walpole rose from modest origins to positions to power, the theoretical ideal in both the nation and its literary imagination remained the virtuous landed gentleman. Drama, poetry, and even the novel continued in general to affirm a fairly traditional role for the landed gentry as the nation’s natural leaders, though authors denounced the licentious class privilege of England’s elite during the Restoration. Revisionist historians who insist only on political and social continuities between the Restoration and the late eighteenth century, dwelling solely on the persistence of a royalist and aristocratic ideology, nonetheless underrate the profound effects of the Financial Revolution and the challenge to inherited authority reaffirmed by the Hanoverian Succession in 1714. 4 If literary artists continued to defend a traditional vision of society as ruled by the landed elite, they needed as well to appeal to an audience raised by the nation’s expanding economy and disillusioned with mere claims of hereditary privilege. These opposite demands for continuity and change placed authors under pressure to adapt traditional genres to new social realities, generating experimentation and the creation of new literary forms.

Generic Change and Experimentation

The established rules of genres inherited from classical tradition placed considerable restraints on what writers could achieve without seeming “low” or absurd. Money and commerce, in particular, were regarded as ignoble subjects suitable to comedy and satire. These subjects could be combined only with great difficulty with the “high” forms associated with the nobility and gentry—tragedy, the epic, and the heroic. The influence of French neoclassical criticism after the Restoration indeed hardened these boundaries and left the English tradition of “mixed” genres in discredit. Thomas Rymer’s attack on tragicomedy, as exemplified by Fletcher and Beaumont, led to the virtual extinction of this mixed form by 1700. Rather than the mere alternation between tragedy and comedy in a double-plot, dramatists sought to meld these genres into unified forms. Congreve tried to achieve such a unity in his comedies, particularly The Double Dealer and The Way of the World , where he obeyed the classical unities and introduced serious forms of villainy into a comic plot. For this combination, Congreve was praised by Dryden as his natural successor, a sign of how far this now-prestigious writer had moved from his previously class-based demotion of comedy beneath tragedy. As we have seen, however, Congreve failed to satisfy Collier’s influential insistence that the aristocracy be dramatized as virtuous exemplars rather than comic buffoons and infidels. Comedy became more serious and moral. But prominent critics such a John Dennis found the humorless sentimentality of comedies like The Conscious Lovers “frivolous, false, and absurd” (1939–1943, 2:274). It was the ludicrous confusion of “high” and “low,” as in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera , that most impressed audiences as socially insightful and dramatically effective.

Meanwhile, the “huffing” tragedy of the Restoration, intended to exalt an aristocratic conflict between love and honor, had been laughed off the stage as pretentious and distinctly unnatural. Contempt for heroic tragedy fueled the success of Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb (1730), soon after expanded into The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). Although new tragedy went into decline with literary critics, the “she-tragedies” of Nicholas Rowe—notably The Fair Penitent (1702) and Jane Shore (1714)—aimed explicitly to make tragedy appealing to a middle-rank audience in the aid of values of domestic virtue. But Samuel Johnson, writing in 1779, noted the failure of Rowe to inspire the Aristotelian effects of fear and pity for characters not endowed with royalty and high rank (2006, 2:205). The dilemma of making tragedy appealing to a broad audience that included both the upper gentry and middle ranks was most successfully resolved by Shakespeare, who underwent a historical revival led by David Garrick, actor and manager of Drury Lane Theatre after the 1740s. Shakespeare was rescued by the belief that the pleasure experienced by a socially mixed theatre audience represented what Johnson called “general nature” (1968 , 1:65), an opinion that the Tory Johnson shared even with Whig enemies like Charles Churchill (see Hudson 2007 : 53–58). According to this perception, Shakespeare bridged the social and political divisions of the age, for he dramatized human realities shared down the ranks from kings to commoners. Complaints against Shakespeare’s mixed drama by Rymer, echoed in England by Dennis, now struck Johnson as “the petty cavils of petty minds” (1968 , 1:66). Nevertheless, even Garrick removed the grave-diggers from Hamlet and the Fool from King Lear .

Heroic poetry suffered from the same difficulties as tragedy. For many readers, it seemed absurd to praise a modern commercial society in a “high” poetic form suitable to kings and aristocrats. For example, the Whig and City-based physician Sir Richard Blackmore attempted to revive an English form of the classical epic beginning with Prince Arthur (1695), part of the campaign he shared with Jeremy Collier to reform the representation of the English nobility and gentry. In A Satyre upon Wit (1700) , Blackmore (1718) also wrote an attack on the “wits” who surrounded the elderly Dryden at Will’s Coffee-House, a circle that now included Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Addison. This satire combined the affectedly high language typical of his epics with bold metaphors drawn from finance and the City. Notoriously, he recommended that the government set up a “Bank of Wit” just as it had established the Bank of England: “Let us erect a Bank of Sterling Sense, / A Bank, whose current Bills may Payment make, / Till new-milled Wit shall from the Mint come back” (1718: 90). In response, the “wits” collaborated in a volume of Commendatory Verses (1700) that assailed Blackmore’s unapologetic connections with the City and his literary debts to financial imagery. As one of the contributors observed: “In vain thou would’st thy Name, dull Pedant, hide, / There’s not a line but smells of thy Cheapside ” ( Brown 1700 : 5). Although he had some early admirers, Blackmore generally became a laughing-stock of pretentious City-based vulgarity and was later satirized among other poets connected with the City by Pope in The Dunciad (1728–1742). The attempt to lionize the world of trade and commerce was similarly attempted by Edward Young in Imperium Pelagi (1729), better known during the century by the title of its pirated Dublin edition, The Merchant: A Naval Ode . Young’s attempt to turn merchants into heroes worthy of a Pindaric ode was mocked by Fielding in The Tragedy of Tragedies and by Herbert Croft in the “Life of Young” he contributed to Johnson’s Lives of the Poets in 1781. “Let burlesque try to go beyond that,” Croft scoffed, referring to Young’s line, “Her merchants Princes, each deck a throne” ( Johnson 2006 , 4:165; Young 1871 , 2:347).

These attacks were not directed against commerce itself but against the laughable incongruity of combining a noble style with a traditionally plebeian subject. To the ears of many readers, Blackmore and Young had unintentionally written mock-heroics. Intentional mock-heroic revealed the dilemma of finding a suitable style for the age that combined traditionally elitist tastes with the reality of commercial expansion. Understood as a mixed form that did both, the mock-heroic actually broadened the social range of poetry. The major English precursors of the mock-heroic, Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe and Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary (1699), are set in the City, opening poetry to satiric commentary on the literary marketplace and topical professional controversy. Alexander Pope ingeniously reset the mock-heroic in the world of the Catholic aristocracy at Hampton Court in The Rape of the Lock (1712–1717), satirizing the preoccupation of these fashionable people with luxurious objects gleaned from the expansion of British trade. Modern critics have nonetheless debated whether Pope’s poem should be understood as a celebration or critique of trade and commercialism (see Landa 1980 ; Crehan 1997 ; Nicholson 2005 ). Pope was the son of a retired merchant, and his exactly contemporaneous poem, Windsor-Forest (1713), was propaganda for a major trading pact attached to the Treaty of Utrecht, just about to be ratified by the Tory government. The literary technique of Windsor-Forest is worth considering, for Pope avoids the absurd discontinuity of the mock-heroic by referring to international trade only through indirect allusions and metonymy. Aiming to show the unexpected harmony of supposed opposites, the Stuart monarchy and the expansion of trade, Pope depicts the oaks of the royal forest leaping into the Thames to form fleets. The Thames, in turn, joins Windsor Palace with London, where the river jointly reflects both the seat of government and St. Mary-le-Bow, symbol of the City: “I see, I see where two fair Cities bend, / Their ample Bow, a new White-Hall ascend!” ( Pope 1963 : 208). Through these indirect means, Pope implied his rejection of the assumption that the old landed elite and the new “moneyed interest” were at odds, an anticommercial doctrine recently espoused in The Examiner by Jonathan Swift, only later a friend.

Windsor-Forest updates another genre inherited from classical tradition, the pastoral. Virgil was the major model for both of the main forms of the pastoral, the eclogue and the georgic. In an age of major economic development on the land, with the increase of enclosure and the development of new farming techniques, the pastoral presented an opportunity for combining a relatively dignified classical genre with the modern economic world. The eclogue was however less amenable to this end, for it envisioned an idealized rural landscape largely without hard work and inhabited by rustics who often seem, as in Pope’s earlier Pastorals (published 1709), very like polished gentlemen and ladies. Like the heroic, however, the eclogue could be used as a poetic style to highlight the jarring disjunction between a noble past and a modern commercial world. Swift’s satires of London, such as “A Description of the Morning” (1709), “A Description of a City Shower” (1710), and “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), deploy pastoral imagery and epithets like “swain” and “nymph” to contrast the vulgarity and degradation of urban life with the innocence and refinement of the classical eclogue. Although Swift mock-pastorals often present figures from the lower ranks with ambiguous repulsion and sympathy, the eclogue was also a major inspiration for a small though briefly fashionable group of poems written by members of England’s largely illiterate mass of workers. This fashion was first inspired by The Thresher’s Labour (1730) by Stephen Duck, a real farm worker whose poem dramatized the hardship and humiliation endured by the rural wage-laborer in language drawn from the eclogue’s leisured Arcadia. In the dark and dirty barns where threshers toil under the supervision of a greedy master, “No Fountains murmur … no Lambkins play, / No Linnets warble, no Fields look gay” ( Duck 1737 : 13). If there once was a pastoral Golden Age where rural life was filled with play, courtship, and community, it had been entirely destroyed by enclosure and trade, the vision of Oliver Goldsmith’s anticommercial polemic The Deserted Village (1770). Goldsmith’s idealized portrait of the rural “swain” before the rise of commerce and urban decadence was however attacked as a pastoral fantasy by George Crabbe in The Village (1783). Although Crabbe praises “honest DUCK” as the only poet who provided a realistic vision of rural England, he did not mean to promote much sympathy for workers. In this poem dedicated to Lord Rutland, the point is rather that the real poor are immoral, squalid, and in need of more responsible supervision by the aristocracy, gentry, and clergy.

These poems also reveal the heightened influence of Virgil’s other contribution to the pastoral tradition, the Georgics , which concern not pastoral leisure but rather productive farm work from the point of view of an expert supervisor. Modern scholars have recently made much of the upsurge of georgic imitation in the eighteenth century, for this branch of the pastoral seemed to provide an opportunity for bridging the classical education of the elite with rising pride in British commerce (see Crawford 1998 ; O’Brien 1999 ; De Bruyn 2005 ). The eighteenth-century georgic was, however, short-lived and seldom faithful to its Virgilian origins. First, the language of the new georgic was characteristically derived from the epic, especially Milton. Beginning with John Philips’s Cyder (1708), georgic imitations including Christopher Smart’s The Hop-Garden (written c. 1742–1743), John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757), and James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764) clothed technical advice on agriculture in the grand blank verse of Paradise Lost . Milton, who enjoyed a major revival after his relative neglect during the Restoration, provided an answerable style because he now seemed to exemplify the modern “Whig” gentleman rather than the urban radical. Biographies of Milton by John Toland and Jonathan Richardson passed over his City birth quickly in favor of his landed heritage and grand tour of Italy. As the Tory Johnson complained, his admirers seemed embarrassed by his stint as a schoolmaster. A second characteristic of the eighteenth-century georgic was its incorporation of significant elements of the eclogue, with that form’s general avoidance of vulgar realism and descriptions of work. Not only does the labor of the “swain” seem gentle, but his toiling body is usually replaced by the autonomous actions of his tools. In Philips’s Cyder , “the arched Knife” (1720: 24) cuts the apple tree rather than the worker. It is the “sharp spade” (1980–1996, 4:51) that digs the ground in Smart’s The Hop-Garden rather than the worker who wields it. Actual labor and the worker fell below the abiding demand that poetry obey the restrictions of classically inspired genres aimed at a genteel and classically literate sensibility.

This had been Duck’s complaint about the eclogue in The Thresher’s Labour . He may have had particularly in mind James Thomson’s immensely admired The Seasons (1726–1730), which had just been completed when Duck wrote his poem. Thomson’s poem, written in Milton blank verse with all its characteristic inversions and Latinisms, avoids the direct description of labor and idealizes the rural “swain” as conventionally happy. The singular success of The Seasons , which continued to be a best-seller during the Romantic era, owed much to Thomson’s elevation of “Nature” as both the hero of his poem and the autonomous agent of economic prosperity. Consider the following passage from “Spring”:

Ye generous BRITONS, venerate the Plow! And o’er your Hills and long withdrawing Vales Let Autumn spread his Treasures to the Sun, Luxuriant and unbounded! As the Sea Far thro’ his azure turbulent Domain Your Empire owns, and from a thousand Shores Wafts all the Pomp of Life into your Ports; So with superior Boon may your rich Soil, Exuberant, Nature’s better Blessings pour O’er every land, the naked Nations cloath, And be th’ exhaustless Granary of a World! Thomson (1981 : 6)

Similar to Philips and Smart, Thomson celebrates the “Plow” rather than the worker as the appropriate object of national veneration. More original, however, is Thomson’s suggestion that the prosperity of Britain and its empire is actually the blessing of “Autumn,” the seas, and “Nature” itself. As in much Romantic poetry, nature virtually effaces that laboring ranks and becomes the autonomous and heroic agent of Britain’s economic prosperity. It is significant that Johnson greatly admired Thomson’s poem though he usually found modern georgics absurd. He observed that Thomson “looks round on Nature and on Life, with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet” (2006, 4:103). Johnson nonetheless ridiculed John Dyer’s attempt to dignify the British wool industry in heroic measures in The Fleece : “The woolcomber and the poet appear to me such discordant natures, that an attempt to bring them together is to couple the serpent with the fowl … the meanness naturally adhering, and the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and manufacture, sink him under insuperable oppression” (2006, 4:125). The Seasons , like Windsor-Forest , beguiled Johnson with its ingenious erasure of the conflict between the “meanness” of modern business and the nobility of classical tradition. The Fleece , on the contrary, left Johnson with the same feeling of absurd disjunction that characterized reactions to Blackmore’s A Satyre upon Wit or Young’s The Merchant. As suggested by the rapid decline of georgic imitations during the last quarter of the century, his judgment was widely shared.

As the above descriptions suggest, the lines between successful innovation, unintentional absurdity, and deliberate satire had become exceedingly ambivalent and porous. Satire was indeed the most natural response to a perplexed social order where the middle ranks rode the tide of commerce while remaining subservient to royal and aristocratic standards of fashion and prestige. Swift’s Gulliver, a City-bred ship’s surgeon, embodies a middle-rank combination of preening self-importance with servility to even a Lilliputian-sized version of royalty and nobility. As described by Dryden in A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), satire in the ancient tradition denoted an “ Olla , or Hotch-potch,” a mélange he understood in terms of its mixture of forms appropriate to various social ranks (1956–2002, 4:80). The same social mobility distinguished the muse of satire in John Brown’s Essay on Satire: Occasion’d by the Death of Mr. Pope (1745) :

She pow’rful goddess, rules the wise and great, Bends ev’n reluctant hermits at her feet: Haunts the proud city, and the lowly shade, And swings alike the scepter, and the spade. (1745: 7)

The two main models of classical satire during the eighteenth century, Horace and Juvenal, both exemplified a kind of enlightened gentility servile to neither titles nor avarice. The patronage of Maecenas did not diminish Horace’s willingness to expose the follies of all the ranks in Rome. He served as the main satiric role model for Pope, who similarly valued his independence and self-sufficiency. Although Juvenal’s social origins were uncertain, he increasingly became a model for the enraged and fearless British patriot. Despite its social flexibility, however, satire could not finally fill the role of bridging the gaps in eighteenth-century society or setting up a unifying model of national identity. During the second half of the century, Swift in particular was often attacked for his lack of patriotism or positive ideals, along with his willingness to dwell on low and vulgar realities.

As we have considered, experiments in mixing or reforming the main classical traditions of drama, poetry, and prose led indeed to some popular and critical acclaimed innovations. It is doubtful, however, that any of the older traditions could be fully adapted to the complex and evolving realities of a nation that, while it still maintained a stabilizing commitment to the old elite, was being transformed permanently by the influx of wealth, the financial empowerment of new groups of people, and a vibrant literary marketplace. The celebrated rise of the novel owed much to these circumstances and to the failure of literary forms linked to a previous kind of social hierarchy.

The Social Significance of the Novel

According to the influential thesis of Ian Watt, “the rise of the novel” accompanied and advanced the simultaneous “rise of the middle class” (1957: 48–49, 61–62). This thesis is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the so-called middling sort incorporated an exceedingly wide and ill-defined range of occupations, incomes, and life-styles from the untitled gentry through to the professions, from great City merchants to moderately prosperous traders and shopkeepers. Second, this wide range of people had few attitudes that were distinctive or unifying, for they usually regarded the fashions and tastes of the aristocracy and great gentry as the standard of social prestige. Even the businessman Daniel Defoe, whose novels are presented by Watt as the first great works of “middle-class” fiction, equated the success of merchants and traders with the acquisition of land, titles, and polite company. The characters of his best-selling novels—Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana—all aspire to obtain the reputation of being gentlemen or ladies, though Defoe retained “Puritan” anxieties about the morality of this ambition, especially among women. Moreover, Defoe’s original success in the 1720s was at least equaled by his rival Eliza Haywood, whose prolific fiction is usually about sexual intrigue in the nobility and upper gentry. Although Watt and others have called her books “romances,” partly because they fanaticize about the aristocracy, Haywood’s audience consisted mostly of readers from the middling ranks. If, as recently argued, this audience sought “an expression of bourgeois self-definition” ( King 2005 : 272), this definition is modeled on the behavior of an imagined elite distant from their working lives and enacting forms of politeness associated with the writings of Lord Shaftesbury.

It was this upwardly mobile sensibility that disconcerted Samuel Richardson, whose sensational Pamela (1740) concerns a servant girl who bravely resists attempted seduction by a rich landed gentleman until he agrees to marry her. Accused by Fielding, Haywood and others of promoting the social ambitions of the serving class, Richardson invented a genteel heritage for his heroine in the sequel of the novel. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton has depicted Richardson’s next novel, Clarissa (1747–1748), as an “allegory” of “class warfare” between “a predatory nobility and a pious bourgeosie” (1982: 4). This assessment is plausible insofar as the villain Lovelace recalls the libertines of the Restoration stage who demonstrate their elite status through a disdain for the Puritan morality associated with the City. Nevertheless, even Christopher Hill regarded the Harlowes’ pursuit of land through marriage as typical of the landed gentry, not the urban middle ranks (1972: 248). Although the Harlowes have not yet achieved noble rank, modern historians have insisted on the close integration, in part through intermarriage, of the untitled gentry with the nobility in an essentially unified governing class after the Glorious Revolution (see Rosenheim 1997 : 13). In the words of Lovelace’s uncle, Lord M., “Let me tell you that many of our coronets would be glad they could derive their descent from no worse stem than theirs” (1985: 1036). That Richardson’s primary concern was not to allegorize social revolution but rather to delineate the behavior of an unquestioned ruling elite is even more obvious in Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754), whose hero is a landed man of ancient family and virtuous authority. Richardson’s last two novels all but expunge the presence of the newly monied, one minor exception being Anthony Harlowe, a younger son who joined the East India Company. A snob though City-bred, Richardson regarded Fielding’s novels as worthy of a man “born in a stable” (1964: 198) for his licentious comedy involving characters drawn from throughout the social hierarchy. Yet Fielding, proud of his own noble connections, flaunts his classical education and genteel wit in the narration of his novels. The disagreements between Richardson and Fielding were less about the authority of the traditional elite than about the form that this authority should take. Richardson wished the aristocracy to set an example of moral propriety. He led a chorus of criticism against Fielding’s indulgence of good-natured libertinism in Tom Jones (1749), though Fielding in turn accused Richardson of promoting upper-rank avarice and selfishness.

The emergent novel cannot be well described, then, as a defense of distinctive “middle-class” values and aspirations. Although Richardson and Fielding are critical of upper-rank immorality and concern about money, the same can be said of The Way of the World, The Provoked Husband, Windsor-Forest, The Seasons, and innumerable plays and poems of the same time. What really made the novel distinctive from poetry and drama was, instead, its freedom from traditional generic constraints and its effortless social range. Although historians of the “romance” dated prose fiction back to the Greeks and even before, this diverse form had no theorists like Aristotle and Horace and no traditional laws hindering its “realistic” portrayal of contemporary society in all its complexity. Fielding famously rejected the laws dictated by “critics” in the essays included in Tom Jones , declaring that “As I am, in reality, the Founder of a new Province of Writing, so I am at liberty to make what Laws I please therein”(1974, 1:77.). The dignity of the novel certainly suffered from its lack of a noble classical pedigree and its commercial appeal to readers who were well down the social hierarchy. Nevertheless, novelists could justify the nobility of their form in the name of the classical genres. Fielding called Joseph Andrews (1742) a “comic Epic-Poem in Prose” (1967: 4) and Clara Reeve denominated the modern romance “an Epic in prose” (1785: 13). Richardson described Clarissa a new kind of Christian tragedy (1985: 1495–1499) and novels drew freely from the conventions of the pastoral and classical satire.

By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the novel had gained sufficient authority as a literary genre to enter fully into the debate about the nature of the modern social hierarchy. Novels became highly sensitive to issues of “class” in a more modern sense—that is, the conflicting claims and rights of the landed elite, the newly wealthy, and people without either status or money. “Jacobin” novels of the 1790s brought new attention to the tyranny of the old elite over its dependents and workers (see Kelly 1976 ). Gothic novels, though not always radical in their political outlook, dramatized a fascinating world of aristocratic lawlessness and chivalry that now seemed to belong to the distant past or the European continent. Equally influential were novels of a more conservative kind that resisted social change or, more accurately, attempted to establish new standards of gentility based on virtue and manners rather than title or wealth. James Raven (1992) has examined the many largely forgotten novels in the 1770s and 1780s that particularly targeted the vulgar and immoral parvenus who began to invade established circles of privilege. During the same era, Frances Burney wrote admired and influential novels preoccupied especially with adjusting the morals of England’s ruling elite. For example, Cecilia (1782) presented a scathing critique of immorality, greed, stupidity, and bad manners pervasive in fashionable London society. Burney also satirized the avarice and vulgarity of the stock-jobber Mr. Briggs, though he is declared untypical of City businessmen “now almost universally rising in elegance and liberality” (1988: 374). The main crisis of this novel, however, concerns the love of an heiress to a rich estate, Cecilia, for Mortimer Delvile, scion of a family diminished in wealth but obsessed with its own noble ancestry. The Delviles’ opposition to their marriage seems arbitrary and outdated because what really counts in the ruling class is not title but rather virtue, intelligence, taste, manners, and concern for the poor. Like Richardson and Fielding, Burney does not openly question the natural authority of the landed elite. Nonetheless, her implication that the ruling class should be defined by these qualities, and not just noble lineage, set standards for a reformed and more inclusive social hierarchy. The moldering gothic castle where the Delviles reside symbolizes an old elite in need of repair, not destruction, by the self-conscious, wealthy, and moral “middle class” that rose to political authority in the nineteenth century.

The implicit argument of this essay has been that “social class” counts very much in the examination of literature between 1660 and 1800, despite the decline of Marxist criticism. A renewed form of literary criticism sensitive to issues of social hierarchy cannot, however, rely on the old concept of “class conflict” between an old aristocracy and a rising bourgeoisie. Rather, eighteenth-century society generally sought stability by maintaining old political structures in the face of economic change and in fearful memory of social upheaval during the Civil War and Interregnum. Literary evolution during this era was highly sensitive to these changes but also to the desire for stability. Harmonizing these opposite forces was not, however, easily accommodated within existing literary genres. Although the eighteenth century was an era of extraordinary experimentation within the traditional genres of drama and poetry, these older models increasingly receded in the face of the commercial tide of the novel. The novel was in turn distinguished less by its “middle-class” attitudes than by its inherent flexibility to explore society without rules dictated by the inherent laws of genre. Generally conservative from its outset, disagreeing about the nature of elite authority rather than its preeminence, the novel seemed uniquely positioned to harmonize rather than exacerbate social difference. Literature had transformed in a complex relationship with social change, a process probably best described by Raymond Williams (1961) as a “long revolution.”

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See Perkin (1969 : 176–217); Laslett (1979 : 12–20); Morris (1979) ; Corfield (1991 : 101–130); Barry (1994 : 1–27); Cannadine (1998 : 24–56).

Dominating this debate have been reactions to Christopher Hill’s voluminous publications on the “English Revolution,” summarized in R. C. Richardson (1998 : 113–146). For a detailed description of the rise and decline of “class” interpretations of the Civil War, see MacLachlan (1996) . For continued defense of the view that the rebellion was led by the “middling sort,” see Manning (1996) .

For summary of this debate see Harris (2006 , 12–15). The “revolutionary” status of 1688 has been most recently defended by Pincus (2009) .

The revisionist interpretation of eighteenth-century social and political history is fully set out in Clark (1985) . For a revisionist reading of eighteenth-century literature, see Erskine-Hill (1996) .

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British Eighteenth-Century Studies Electronic Resources: Primary Sources: Full-text and Facsimile Texts

• General Electronic Resources
• Primary Sources: Full-text and Facsimile Texts
• Primary Sources: Images
• Reference and Secondary Sources
• Yale Special Collections, Selected Subject Guides, and Groups
• Miscellaneous Related Resources

Page Table of Contents

• Newspapers & Periodicals -- Special Topics: American and the British World
• Horace Walpole Online

Literature -- Special Topics: American, French, and German

• 18th-C World Texts

Digitized Texts in Large Online Collections

General primary sources -- british eighteenth-century texts.

Here are key electronic resources that include primary source texts with a relatively broad focus in full-text and/or facsimile from Britain in the long eighteenth century .

British Newspapers and Periodicals

Here are links to electronic resources focused on historical newspapers, periodicals, and journals covering Britain in the long eighteenth century.

See also "General" sources like ECCO, above. 

Ballads, Broadsides, Playbills, and Ephemera

Here are resources that include ballads, broadsides, playbills, and other ephemera from the long eighteenth century in Britain.

See also General primary sources above and separate page in this LibGuide for  Primary Sources: Images

• American Broadsides and Ephemera.
• Nineteenth Century Collections Online
• Victorian popular culture

Economics, Government and Legal Documents, State Papers

Here are links to  primary source documents  focused primarily on the topics of British eighteenth-century  economics, government and state, and legal issues.

• Colonial State Papers
• The making of modern law.
• State papers online

Literature--Drama, Fiction, Poetry

Here are links to electronic resources that focus on Engilsh literary primary source materials that include the long eighteenth century.

• British Literary Manuscripts Online
• Early English Prose Fiction
• Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare
• Eighteenth-Century Fiction
• Literary Manuscripts
• Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period

Sociology, Lived Experience, and Letters

Special topics -- america and the british world, slavery, women, art, grand tour, etc..

Resources listed here cover primary source materials for particular locations, groups, and experiences connected to the long eighteenth century in Britain. See also following box for Newspapers & Periodicals--Special Topics: America and the British World

• America's Historical Imprints
• American Foreign Relations since 1600: a Guide to the Literature
• The American Founding Era.
• Defining gender, 1450-1910
• Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800)
• Early American Imprints, Series I: Supplement from the Library Company of Philadelphia
• Early Encounters in North America
• The Gerritsen collection of Aletta H. Jacobs
• The grand tour
• India, Raj & empire
• London Low Life
• North American Women's Letters and Diaries
• Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice
• Slavery & Anti-Slavery
• World scholar.

Newspapers & Periodicals--Special Topics: America and the British World

• Accessible Archives
• African American Periodicals, 1825-1995
• American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 1
• America's Historical Newspapers
• Caribbean Newspapers, 1718-1876
• ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Hartford Courant (1764-1990)

Papers of Individuals

Here are selected collections of correspondence and papers of particular individuals, both British and American.

• The papers of Benjamin Franklin / sponsored by the American Philosophical Society and Yale University Library ; digital edition by the Packard Humanities Institute.
• The papers of Alexander Hamilton
• The papers of Thomas Jefferson
• The papers of James Madison
• The papers of George Washington

Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill online

Here are links to electronic resources that focus on literary primary source materials that include the long eighteenth century in America and other parts of the world.

• American Drama, 1714-1915
• North American Women's Drama
• African-American Poetry
• American Poetry
• Canadian Poetry
• Caribbean Literature
• The ARTFL project

Eighteenth-century World Texts

• The Early Modern Pamphlets Online
• Deutsche Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts Online
• HathiTrust digital library
• Internet archive
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Eighteenth-Century Studies: Online Resources: Scholarly Websites A-G

• Introduction
• 1. Multidisciplinary
• 2. Early Periodical Literature
• 3. Newspapers
• 4. North American History
• 5. British history
• 6. American literature
• 7. British literature
• 8. U.S. Government documents
• 9. British Government documents
• l1. Slavery and Afro-Americana
• Indexes to Secondary Journal Articles, Books, Theses
• Historical Statistics
• Electronic Books
• Gateway/Portal Websites

Scholarly Websites A-G

• Scholarly Websites H-P
• Scholarly Websites Q-Z
• Contact the Librarian

FREELY AVAILABLE SCHOLARLY WEB SITES, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY. 

History Highway: a 21st Century Guide to Internet Resources Reference and DMC 4 West (CD) D 16.117 .H55 2006

An annotated bibliography of web sites.

A2A: Access to Archives

Contains catalogues describing archives held locally throughout England and dating from the 8th century to the present day.

Art World in Britain 1660-1735

Offers a database of information on art sales of this period, a places database where you can learn where the artworks are located today as well as about significant places related to art of this period, a people database which contains 6000 names of people associated with the world of art at the time, and a sources database for finding transcriptions of sources, bibliographic records and painting titles.

Austen Said: Patterns of Diction in Jane Austen's Major Novels

From University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Allows users to visualize and analyze the language patterns of Austen's most popular works. Word frequencies is a place to begin. View data about unique vocabularies of particular characters in a novel. Or, compare vocabularies used by characters sharing the same age, gender, or character type (such as cad, fool, or heroine).In the novel visualization section view highlighted examples of free indirect discourse, a technique Austen used. Search tool allows user to find select words or phrases in all six of her published novels.

Ballad Operas Online

Ballad operas are "British stage productions from 1728-1760 that combine a comic or sentimental play with musical numbers that re-used 'common tunes'".  Site created at Oxford University, but a collective effort of British and American music scholars.  Sections on theater and dance history, cultural history, political history, stars of ballad operas.  Audio samples link.

BBC History

BBC is the largest broadcasting organization in the world.  This site has an interactive timeline, A-Z index, history for children, features on particularly noteworthy dates, history of personages, as well as links to TV and radio programs.

Beinecke Library, Yale University

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is Yale University's principal repository for literary papers and for early manuscripts and rare books in the fields of literature, theology, history, and the natural sciences. In addition to its general collection of rare books and manuscripts, the library houses the Yale Collection of American Literature, the Yale Collection of German Literature, the Yale Collection of Western Americana, and the Osborn Collection (contains 18th century materials).  Books and manuscripts at Yale have been extensively described since 1926 in the "Yale University Library Gazette," which is available in many libraries.

Bentham Project

The aim of the Bentham Project is to produce a new scholarly edition of the works and correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the influential jurist, philosopher, and social scientist, whom A.J.P. Taylor described as `the most formidable reasoner who ever applied his gifts to the practical questions of administration and politics'.

Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads

The Bodleian Library has unparalleled holdings of over 30,000 ballads in several major collections. Broadside ballads are important source material for: * popular literary history * music history * social history * art history * printing history The Broadside Ballads project, undertaken with funding from the NFF Specialised Research Collections initiative, aims to make the ballads and ballad sheets available to the research community. Broadside ballads were popular songs, sold for a penny or half-penny in the streets of towns and villages around Britain between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. These songs were performed in taverns, homes, or fairs -- wherever a group of people gathered to discuss the day's events or to tell tales of heroes and villains. As one of the cheapest forms of print available, the broadside ballads are also an important source material for the history of printing and literacy. Lavishly illustrated with woodcuts, they provide a visual treat for the reader and offer a source for the study of popular art in Britain.

Book History Research Network

BHRN aims to bring together postgraduates, academics, librarians, and independent researchers working in any area or period of 'the history of the book'.  Register of researchers.  Study days.

Book Owners Online

Book Owners Online (BOO) is the work of the distinguished book historian David Pearson and a technical team that have helped translate his long-respected bibliography “English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century” into a digital platform. The growing database contains entries for just over 1,800 17 th and 18 th century British book owners.  Click on directory of historical book owners in the first paragraph or use a keyword search in the box near top right to search the site.

  Botanicus

Repository of historic botanical literature.  Website created by Missouri Botanical Garden Library.

British and U.K. Studies

This guide is a list of scholarly resources in British and UK Studies. Intended primarily for librarians; it may be useful to scholars in this field.  It is curated and managed by members of the European Studies Section (ESS) of the Association of College & Research Libraries. For additional resources on Northern Ireland, see the Irish Studies guide. Users are free to copy and edit content from this guide for their own purposes.

British Empire

Online exhibition with questions and worksheets on the history of the British Empire.  From the U.K. National Archives.

British History Online

British History Online is the digital library of British historical sources for historians of Britain located worldwide seeking access to texts and information about people, places, and businesses from the medieval through modern periods. Registration is free. Some content is free.  It is being created jointly by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust. Texts from the Centre for Metropolitan History, the Victoria County History Project, Survey of London, and early journals of the Houses of Commons and Lords are also present.  M.S.U. Libraries subscribes to this resource.

British History Sources 1500-1900

Also known as Connected Histories.  This site brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates, as well as the ability to save, connect and share resources within a personal workspace. There are a number of research guides in this website on such topics as: crime and justice, family history, history of London, Imperial and Colonial History, local history, Parliamentary history, poverty and poor relief, religious history, searching for images. Some free info; some requires libraries/individuals to subscribe.

British Association for Local History

Has a section "Useful Links" at top, to find many more sites re local history, for whatever reason they're needed.

British Library: Georgians Revealed

Britain's Georgian Era (marked by the reigns of King George's I-IV) ran from the early eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century. This period was marked by numerous artistic developments: Romantic poetry, unique architecture and design, and flamboyant fashion among others. With this collection from the British Library, visitors can explore a number of items that illustrate the aesthetics of the Georgian Era. Perhaps the highlight of this collection are the paintings.Other items of note include historic maps, sketches of dresses, and sheet music.

British Museum: London 1753

Online tour of the city as it appeared around 1753.  Historic prints and drawings.

British Museum Collection Database

When complete, it will contain a record of every object in the Museum collection. Currently it includes records for the Museum’s collections of objects from Africa; the Americas; central, east, south and southeast Asia; ancient Egypt and Sudan; Europe, ancient Greece and Rome; Oceania; prehistory, and prints, drawings and other works of flat art from all over the world. The information in the records on the database is made available here in its entirety, along with its associated files of controlled terms (the thesauri and authority files such as for materials, techniques and place-names). Only fields giving prices paid and personal addresses have been withheld.

British Printed Images to 1700

Funded by UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, this is a searchable database of thousands of prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain.  Includes also materials on techniques, history of printmaking, descriptions of main printing genres, survey of the historiography of this field to 1700, a directory of publishers and printsellers, and links to other useful sites.

Broadsides Printed in Scotland 1650-1910

Broadsides were single sheet publications that were cheap to produce and easy to distribute. As such, they were quite common during the 1600s-1900s. The popularity of broadsides decreased in the mid-19th century with the increased availability newspapers "penny dreadfuls." Images of the broadsides can be browsed at the Library's Word on the Street website (linked near the bottom of the page). Alternatively, readers can download the datasets (in their entirety or just the text). The website also provides copyright information for the broadsides, noting that items published up to 1854 are known to be free of copyright restrictions, while items printed after 1855 might be restricted.

C18-L: Resources for Eighteenth-Century Studies Across the Disciplines

Selected Readings is an interdisciplinary bibliography of eighteenth-century studies in the West, covering the period 1660-1830, from 1992 onward.

C18th Connect: Eighteenth-Century Scholarship Online

A sister-organization for NINES, 18thConnect gathers together a community of scholars that shapes the world of digital resources. Their main concerns are: Access via plain-text searching for all scholars to open access and proprietary and digital archives including EEBO and ECCO, even if their institutions are unable to afford those resources; Peer-review of the growing number of digital resources and archives for which 18thConnect offers an online finding aid; Reflection on Best Practices with scholars who are negotiating new modes of publication and scholarly production.

Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas

"Between 1441 and 1888, Europeans and their descendants in the Americas enslaved many millions of Africans. Torn from their homeland, men, women, and children were shipped to the Americas and forced into slavery. The transatlantic slave trade was a highly profitable maritime business. Without African slaves, the potential economic value of the Americas could never have been realized. Slaves made possible the taming of the wilderness, construction of cities, excavation of mines, and the establishment of powerful plantation economies. This exhibition examines the transatlantic slave trade and seeks to increase understanding of this maritime epic and its legacies in the modern world." -- The Mariner's Museum, Online Exhibition.  Museum located in Newport News, Virginia.

Charles Peirce Collection of Social and Political Caricatures and Ballads

The Charles Peirce Collection of Social and Political Caricatures and Ballads brings together a range of fabulous prints published in London during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This collection eventually found its way to the American Antiquarian Society.

Chymistry of Isaac Newton

Devoted to study of his interest in alchemy.  From Indiana University-Bloomington.  Both primary and secondary sources.  His work underpins the modern science of chemistry.  Digitized collection of his alchemical manuscripts, with a diplomatic transcriptions showing as closely as possible the original and a normalized transcription, edited to be made more readable.  Browsable and full-text searchable. Glossary of alchemical terms. 

Clements Library

The William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan collects primary source materials in all formats relating to the history of America prior to the mid-twentieth century. The holdings are particularly strong in the intellectual, cultural, and military history of the late colonial period, the Early Republic, and the 19th century, but are very broad and richly interconnected.

Clergy of the Church of England Database

Coram Foundling Hospital Archive

The Foundling Hospital archive contains some half a million documents dating from the 1730s. The archive reveals the details of the lives of the children in its care and the way in which the Hospital operated from its inception in the 18th Century. The records of Coram and the Foundling Hospital, held at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), include entrance registers, medical records, letters from mothers and other documents dating back to Thomas Coram’s campaign to establish the Foundling Hospital.  25% of its 275 years of history are to be digitized in the next 3 years. 

Crace Collection of Maps of London

This is the essential guide through the history of London: some 1200 printed and hand-drawn maps charting the development of the city and its immediate vicinity from around 1570 to 1860. The maps were collected, mainly during the first half of the nineteenth century, by the fashionable Victorian society designer, Frederick Crace. After entering the site look for the link to "See all the items in this exhibition." From the British Library Map Collections.

Current Value of Old Money

Links to tools and online resources to calculate the current value of "old" money.  British orientation. 

DavidHume.org

Gathers together philosophical texts of 18th-c. Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, which are searchable by keyword and phrases and proximity.  Contains Critical Survey of the Literature on Hume and the First Enquiry, a bibliography on Hume, by Millican Merivale.

Digital Locke Project

"A pilot project that makes a start with a scholarly text edition of the manuscripts of the British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) in the form of an XML-encoded database that is used simultaneously for an online version and the printed version of the manuscripts. Locke’s most influential work is An Essay concerning Human Understanding . He produced several drafts of this work in the nearly two decades prior to its publication and he continued producing additions, corrections and other related material after the first edition had appeared in 1689. During its first phase the ‘Digital Locke Project’ concentrates on the manuscripts produced after the first publication of the Essay until Locke’s death in 1704. The database includes a transcription of the manuscripts with text-critical apparatus, historical and philosophical notes, a precise description of all relevant manuscripts, and a reconstruction of the genesis of the texts."

Offers digitized historical maps of Europe.  Browse by date and place. 

Dissenting Academies Project

In 1662, the Parliament of England passed the Act of Uniformity - which required adherence to many rites and ceremonies prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer. One of the rites required was episcopal ordination for all ministers. In response, other Protestant religious communities established a number of dissenting academies, which were "intended to provide Protestant students dissenting from the Church of England with a higher education similar to that at Oxford and Cambridge, from which they were largely excluded." This digital humanities project, created by the Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English, allows visitors to learn more about these academies through an extensive database and encyclopedia of 220 academies that existed between 1660 and 1860. The database also includes thousands of individuals who were involved in the academy as tutors or students.

Early History of Michigan: From the First Settlement to 1815 (1856)

Early Modern Female Book Ownership

This website provides blog posts on individual books owned by women to document early modern female book ownership between 1500 and 1750. From the page linked above, visitors can use the "Finding Aid," which is essentially an index (available online or as a downloadable spreadsheet) that allows researchers to quickly locate posts about particular books by title, date, owner, or the library collection in which it is located. Clicking on any title in the index will take readers to a blog post.

Early Modern Women Database

This database provides links to World Wide Web resources useful for the study of women in early modern Europe and the Americas. It focuses on the period ca. 1500 to ca. 1800. Resources have been selected for their scholarly value by librarians on the arts and humanities team of the University of Maryland Libraries. Materials range from bibliographic databases to full-text resources, images, and sound recordings. Most of the resources linked here are free. Some require a license for access.

ECHO: Exploring & Collecting History Online - Science, Technology and Industry

Echo's research center catalogs, annotates, and reviews web sites on the history of science, technology, and industry. The database includes over 5,000 web sites, and can be browsed by topic, time period, publisher or content.  Lower left of home page allows browsing by historical period.

Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive

From University of Oxford's Alexander Huber.  A peer-reviewed, award-winning digital archive and research project on the poetry of the long 18th-c.  Two parts, digital poetry catalog and research/analysis of the texts.  Texts expand on those of ECCO database.  Features over 3,000 poems by 320 authors.  Continually updated.  See "Take the tour" button in top right to learn the features.

Eighteenth-Century Studies

This collection archives works of the eighteenth century from the perspectives of literary and cultural studies. Novels, plays, memoirs, treatises and poems of the period are kept here (in some cases, influential texts from before 1700 or after 1800 as well), along with modern criticism.

[Eighteenth Century Studies Guide]

A guide to doing research in 18th-century studies produced by University of Michigan, similar to this one.

English Broadside Ballad Archive

About 8,000 English broadside ballads of the entire seventeenth century survive. To capture the genre’s arch of development, EBBA seeks to archive all these printed ballads—with priority given to the black-letter ornamental broadside of the genre’s heyday—as well as all surviving sixteenth-century broadside ballads (about 250) and a representative sampling of broadside ballads of the early eighteenth century.

English Weights and Measures

The system of weights and measures in use in England has been developed over a period of more than a thousand years, and is a defining part of British culture, uniting the English-speaking nations. Detailed information on the following: weights, lengths & areas, volumes, conversion factors to the dreaded metric system, wire gauges, pictures, money, history, links to other relevant sites, temperature scales and collecting weights. 

Eurodocs: Primary Historical Documents from Western Europe

These links connect to Western European (mainly primary) historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. They shed light on key historical happenings within the respective countries (and within the broadest sense of political, economic, social, and cultural history). Covers medieval and Renaissance, Europe as a supranational region, as well as documents of individual countries. From Brigham Young University.

Fagel Collection

The Dutch Fagel family built up one of the most important private libraries in early modern Europe. In the winter of 1794–5 Hendrik Fagel the Younger, ‘Greffier’ or Chief Minister to the States General of the Netherlands, was stranded in England when French revolutionary forces invaded his country. He had his library brought to England.  To raise funds, he determined to sell it.  In February/March 1802 the governors of the Erasmus Smith Schools in Dublin put in a successful bid for the entire collection on behalf of Trinity College, Dublin, where it now resides.  It is a unique collection of thousands of early modern printed books, on biology and natural history, medicine and human anatomy, studies on theology and religion, collected works from authors of classical antiquity, treatises on military affairs and naval warfare, on history and chronology, mathematics and physics, commerce and trade, art and architecture, and on the education of children. There are encyclopaedias and dictionaries, novels and poetry in various languages, and books written by the main protagonists of the Reformation and the famous philosophers of the Enlightenment. Some of the books are beautifully illustrated and hand-coloured, printed in limited editions, and some of them are so scarce they can only be found in a few libraries in Europe. 

Fashion History Timeline

This is open-access source for fashion history knowledge, featuring objects and artworks from over a hundred museums and libraries.  It offers well-researched, accessibly written entries on specific artworks, garments and films for those interested in fashion and dress history. Decade and century overview pages offer visual examples of period styles, a visually rich fashion dictionary defines key terms, and hundreds of examples of dress analysis from antiquity to the present day model the complicated task of discerning whether something is fashionable  or merely everyday dress, as well as the historical implications of that distinction. It features a search-able Source Database of reliable academic publications on fashion and dress history and a much more extensive Zotero database that students and researchers can draw on and contribute to. It is a project of the History of Art dept. at New York University.

Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project

Michigan State University Library and the MSU Museum presents this online collection of the most important and influential 19th and early 20th century American cookbooks.  There are just a few published before 1815 here.

Food in the West: a Timeline, 1700-2001

Learn about major culinary trends, food drink, feasts, and agriculture, from the ancien regime to present.

Food Timeline

To research what people ate, when.  Recipes.  Links to individual ingredients, complete dishes, historically important cookbooks. 

Gardens and People

Has links to articles and other sites in garden history.

Gathering the Jewels: The Website for Welsh Cultural History

Features over 30,000 images of objects, books, letters, aerial photographs and other items from museums, archives and libraries throughout Wales. Approach is by browsing by broad topic.  There is a search box; entering 18th century works.

Gazetteer of British Place Names

From the Association of British Counties. Exhaustive Place Name Index to Great Britain, containing over 50,000 entries. It lists the historic county and the main administrative areas in which each place lies.

Gazettes Online

The gazettes, the official journals of U.K., Scotland, and Northern Ireland, containing both historical and current editions. These provide a mixture of state intelligence, government notices, and trade/business news. London Gazette has official war dispatches, including 1914-20 and 1939-48. It is the world's oldest, continuously published newspaper, published with the authority of the British government, and dating back to 1665.

GEMMS: Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons

SSHRC-funded (U.K. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) project to create an open-access, group-sourced, comprehensive, fully searchable, online bibliographic database of early modern (1530-1715) sermon manuscripts from the British Isles and North America. The database is a finding aid for all types of manuscripts related to sermons, including complete sermons, sermon notes and reports of sermons, held in numerous repositories in the UK, Ireland, the USA and Canada.

Developing access to women's history sources in the British Isles.  The website has a of database with descriptions of women's history collections from museums, libraries and archives in the United Kingdom and a guide to sources that provides access to a wide range of international web resources on women's history. It was developed with funding from the U.K. Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and is currently maintained by the staff of The Women's Library at London Metropolitan University.

Grub Street Project

The goal of the Grub Street Project is to visualize the literary and cultural history of London. This includes mapping the city's print trades, its (imagined) literary representations, and its (real) histories in order to understand their evolution and their influence upon other networks of trade, knowledge, and literature. Data to be integrated with the maps includes: * A Dictionary of London , by Henry Harben (1918) * a bibliography of books published in London from the years 1660 to 1830 * tradesmen and addresses, compiled from various sources including both the bibliographical details of publication information, and Kent's London business directories published annually from 1732 until 1828 * full text of online editions. As data is added to the database, we can begin to imagine early modern networks of communications and interactions, visualize how ideas were transferred, shared, and stolen, and see how the city was represented by its citizens and its visitors. We will be able to see how the dissemination of ideas created networks of trade and commerce; we will also be able to see how the urban landscape was imagined in the eighteenth century. (from the website).

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Enlightenment

The heart of the eighteenth century Enlightenment is the loosely organized activity of prominent French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called “ philosophes ”(e.g., Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu). The philosophes constituted an informal society of men of letters who collaborated on a loosely defined project of Enlightenment exemplified by the project of the Encyclopedia (see below 1.5). However, there are noteworthy centers of Enlightenment outside of France as well. There is a renowned Scottish Enlightenment (key figures are Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid), a German Enlightenment ( die Aufklärung , key figures of which include Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant), and there are also other hubs of Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers scattered throughout Europe and America in the eighteenth century.

What makes for the unity of such tremendously diverse thinkers under the label of “Enlightenment”? For the purposes of this entry, the Enlightenment is conceived broadly. D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence ”, because of the tremendous intellectual and scientific progress of the age, but also because of the expectation of the age that philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes the natural and social sciences) would dramatically improve human life. Guided by D’Alembert’s characterization of his century, the Enlightenment is conceived here as having its primary origin in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but also the set of presuppositions that had served to constrain and guide philosophical inquiry in the earlier times. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world promotes philosophy from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. Taking as the core of the Enlightenment the aspiration for intellectual progress, and the belief in the power of such progress to improve human society and individual lives, this entry includes descriptions of relevant aspects of the thought of earlier thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Bayle, Leibniz, and Spinoza, thinkers whose contributions are indispensable to understanding the eighteenth century as “the century of philosophy par excellence ”.

The Enlightenment is often associated with its political revolutions and ideals, especially the French Revolution of 1789. The energy created and expressed by the intellectual foment of Enlightenment thinkers contributes to the growing wave of social unrest in France in the eighteenth century. The social unrest comes to a head in the violent political upheaval which sweeps away the traditionally and hierarchically structured ancien régime (the monarchy, the privileges of the nobility, the political power of the Catholic Church). The French revolutionaries meant to establish in place of the ancien régime a new reason-based order instituting the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. Though the Enlightenment, as a diverse intellectual and social movement, has no definite end, the devolution of the French Revolution into the Terror in the 1790s, corresponding, as it roughly does, with the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of opposed movements, such as Romanticism, can serve as a convenient marker of the end of the Enlightenment, conceived as an historical period.

For Enlightenment thinkers themselves, however, the Enlightenment is not an historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development, unbound to time or place. Immanuel Kant defines “enlightenment” in his famous contribution to debate on the question in an essay entitled “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Expressing convictions shared among Enlightenment thinkers of widely divergent doctrines, Kant identifies enlightenment with the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act. Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of one’s own reason and experience. Enlightenment philosophy tends to stand in tension with established religion, insofar as the release from self-incurred immaturity in this age, daring to think for oneself, awakening one’s intellectual powers, generally requires opposing the role of established religion in directing thought and action. The faith of the Enlightenment – if one may call it that – is that the process of enlightenment, of becoming progressively self-directed in thought and action through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers, leads ultimately to a better, more fulfilled human existence.

This entry describes the main tendencies of Enlightenment thought in the following main sections: (1) The True: Science, Epistemology, and Metaphysics in the Enlightenment; (2) The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in the Enlightenment; (3) The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment.

1.1 Rationalism and the Enlightenment

1.2 empiricism and the enlightenment, 1.3 skepticism in the enlightenment, 1.4 science of man and subjectivism in the enlightenment, 1.5 emerging sciences and the encyclopedia, 2.1 political theory, 2.2 ethical theory, 2.3 religion and the enlightenment, 3.1 french classicism and german rationalism, 3.2 empiricism and subjectivism, 3.3 late enlightenment aesthetics, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the true: science, epistemology and metaphysics in the enlightenment.

In this era dedicated to human progress, the advancement of the natural sciences is regarded as the main exemplification of, and fuel for, such progress. Isaac Newton’s epochal accomplishment in his Principia Mathematica (1687), which, very briefly described, consists in the comprehension of a diversity of physical phenomena – in particular the motions of heavenly bodies, together with the motions of sublunary bodies – in few relatively simple, universally applicable, mathematical laws, was a great stimulus to the intellectual activity of the eighteenth century and served as a model and inspiration for the researches of a number of Enlightenment thinkers. Newton’s system strongly encourages the Enlightenment conception of nature as an orderly domain governed by strict mathematical-dynamical laws and the conception of ourselves as capable of knowing those laws and of plumbing the secrets of nature through the exercise of our unaided faculties. – The conception of nature, and of how we know it, changes significantly with the rise of modern science. It belongs centrally to the agenda of Enlightenment philosophy to contribute to the new knowledge of nature, and to provide a metaphysical framework within which to place and interpret this new knowledge.

René Descartes’ rationalist system of philosophy is one of the pillars on which Enlightenment thought rests. Descartes (1596–1650) undertakes to establish the sciences upon a secure metaphysical foundation. The famous method of doubt Descartes employs for this purpose exemplifies (in part through exaggerating) an attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment. According to Descartes, the investigator in foundational philosophical research ought to doubt all propositions that can be doubted. The investigator determines whether a proposition is dubitable by attempting to construct a possible scenario under which it is false. In the domain of fundamental scientific (philosophical) research, no other authority but one’s own conviction is to be trusted, and not one’s own conviction either, until it is subjected to rigorous skeptical questioning. With his method, Descartes casts doubt upon the senses as authoritative source of knowledge. He finds that God and the immaterial soul are both better known, on the basis of innate ideas, than objects of the senses. Through his famous doctrine of the dualism of mind and body, that mind and body are two distinct substances, each with its own essence, the material world (allegedly) known through the senses becomes denominated as an “external” world, insofar as it is external to the ideas with which one immediately communes in one’s consciousness. Descartes’ investigation thus establishes one of the central epistemological problems, not only of the Enlightenment, but also of modernity: the problem of objectivity in our empirical knowledge. If our evidence for the truth of propositions about extra-mental material reality is always restricted to mental content, content before the mind, how can we ever be certain that the extra-mental reality is not other than we represent it as being? Descartes’ solution depends on our having secured prior and certain knowledge of God. In fact, Descartes argues that all human knowledge (not only knowledge of the material world through the senses) depends on metaphysical knowledge of God.

Despite Descartes’ grounding of all scientific knowledge in metaphysical knowledge of God, his system contributes significantly to the advance of natural science in the period. He attacks the long-standing assumptions of the scholastic-aristotelians whose intellectual dominance stood in the way of the development of the new science; he developed a conception of matter that enabled mechanical explanation of physical phenomena; and he developed some of the fundamental mathematical resources – in particular, a way to employ algebraic equations to solve geometrical problems – that enabled the physical domain to be explained with precise, simple mathematical formulae. Furthermore, his grounding of physics, and all knowledge, in a relatively simple and elegant rationalist metaphysics provides a model of a rigorous and complete secular system of knowledge. Though major Enlightenment thinkers (for example Voltaire in his Letters on the English Nation , 1734) embrace Newton’s physical system in preference to Descartes’, Newton’s system itself depends on Descartes’ earlier work, a dependence to which Newton himself attests.

Cartesian philosophy also ignites various controversies in the latter decades of the seventeenth century that provide the context of intellectual tumult out of which the Enlightenment springs. Among these controversies are the following: Are mind and body really two distinct sorts of substances, and if so, what is the nature of each, and how are they related to each other, both in the human being (which presumably “has” both a mind and a body) and in a unified world system? If matter is inert (as Descartes claims), what can be the source of motion and the nature of causality in the physical world? And of course the various epistemological problems: the problem of objectivity, the role of God in securing our knowledge, the doctrine of innate ideas, and others.

Baruch Spinoza’s systematic rationalist metaphysics, which he develops in his Ethics (1677) in part in response to problems in the Cartesian system, is also an important basis for Enlightenment thought. Spinoza develops, in contrast to Cartesian dualism, an ontological monism according to which there is only one substance, God or nature, with two attributes, corresponding to mind and body. Spinoza’s denial, on the basis of strict philosophical reasoning, of the existence of a transcendent supreme being, his identification of God with nature, gives strong impetus to the strands of atheism and naturalism that thread through Enlightenment philosophy. Spinoza’s rationalist principles also lead him to assert a strict determinism and to deny any role to final causes or teleology in explanation. (See Israel 2001.)

The rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz (1646–1716) is also foundational for the Enlightenment, particularly the German Enlightenment ( die Aufklärung ), one prominent expression of which is the Leibnizian rationalist system of Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Leibniz articulates, and places at the head of metaphysics, the great rationalist principle, the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything that exists has a sufficient reason for its existence. This principle exemplifies the characteristic conviction of the Enlightenment that the universe is thoroughly rationally intelligible. The question arises of how this principle itself can be known or grounded. Wolff attempts to derive it from the logical principle of non-contradiction (in his First Philosophy or Ontology , 1730). Criticism of this alleged derivation gives rise to the general question of how formal principles of logic can possibly serve to ground substantive knowledge of reality. Whereas Leibniz exerts his influence through scattered writings on various topics, some of which elaborate plans for a systematic metaphysics which are never executed by Leibniz himself, Wolff exerts his influence on the German Enlightenment through his development of a rationalist system of knowledge in which he attempts to demonstrate all the propositions of science from first principles, known a priori.

Wolff’s rationalist metaphysics is characteristic of the Enlightenment by virtue of the pretensions of human reason within it, not by reason’s success in establishing its claims. Much the same could be said of the great rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century. Through their articulation of the ideal of scientia, of a complete science of reality, composed of propositions derived demonstratively from a priori first principles, these philosophers exert great influence on the Enlightenment. But they fail, rather spectacularly, to realize this ideal. To the contrary, what they bequeath to the eighteenth century is metaphysics, in the words of Kant, as “a battlefield of endless controversies.” However, the controversies themselves – regarding the nature of God, mind, matter, substance, cause, et cetera, and the relations of each of these to the others – provide tremendous fuel to Enlightenment thought.

Despite the confidence in and enthusiasm for human reason in the Enlightenment – it is sometimes called “the Age of Reason” – the rise of empiricism, both in the practice of science and in the theory of knowledge, is characteristic of the period. The enthusiasm for reason in the Enlightenment is primarily not for the faculty of reason as an independent source of knowledge, which is embattled in the period, but rather for the human cognitive faculties generally; the Age of Reason contrasts with an age of religious faith, not with an age of sense experience. Though the great seventeenth century rationalist metaphysical systems of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz exert tremendous influence on philosophy in the Enlightenment; moreover, and though the eighteenth-century Enlightenment has a rationalist strain (perhaps best exemplified by the system of Christian Wolff), nevertheless, that the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert is dedicated to three empiricists (Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton), signals the ascendency of empiricism in the period.

If the founder of the rationalist strain of the Enlightenment is Descartes, then the founder of the empiricist strain is Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Though Bacon’s work belongs to the Renaissance, the revolution he undertook to effect in the sciences inspires and influences Enlightenment thinkers. The Enlightenment, as the age in which experimental natural science matures and comes into its own, admires Bacon as “the father of experimental philosophy.” Bacon’s revolution (enacted in, among other works, The New Organon , 1620) involves conceiving the new science as (1) founded on empirical observation and experimentation; (2) arrived at through the method of induction; and (3) as ultimately aiming at, and as confirmed by, enhanced practical capacities (hence the Baconian motto, “knowledge is power”).

Of these elements of Bacon’s revolution, the point about method deserves special emphasis. Isaac Newton’s work, which stands as the great exemplar of the accomplishments of natural science for the eighteenth century, is, like Bacon’s, based on the inductive method. Whereas rationalist of the seventeenth century tend to conceive of scientific knowledge of nature as consisting in a system in which statements expressing the observable phenomena of nature are deduced from first principles, known a priori, Newton’s method begins with the observed phenomena of nature and reduces its multiplicity to unity by induction, that is, by finding mathematical laws or principles from which the observed phenomena can be derived or explained. The evident success of Newton’s “bottom-up” procedure contrasts sharply with the seemingly endless and fruitless conflicts among philosophers regarding the meaning and validity of first principles of reason, and this contrast naturally favors the rise of the Newtonian (or Baconian) method of acquiring knowledge of nature in the eighteenth century.

The tendency of natural science toward progressive independence from metaphysics in the eighteenth century is correlated with this point about method. The rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proceeds through its separation from the presuppositions, doctrines and methodology of theology; natural science in the eighteenth century proceeds to separate itself from metaphysics as well. Newton proves the capacity of natural science to succeed independently of a priori, clear and certain first principles. The characteristic Enlightenment suspicion of all allegedly authoritative claims the validity of which is obscure, which is directed first of all against religious dogmas, extends to the claims of metaphysics as well. While there are significant Enlightenment thinkers who are metaphysicians – again, one thinks of Christian Wolff – the general thrust of Enlightenment thought is anti-metaphysical.

John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is another foundational text of the Enlightenment. A main source of its influence is the epistemological rigor that it displays, which is at least implicitly anti-metaphysical. Locke undertakes in this work to examine the human understanding in order to determine the limits of human knowledge; he thereby institutes a prominent pattern of Enlightenment epistemology. Locke finds the source of all our ideas, the ideas out of which human knowledge is constructed, in the senses and argues influentially against the rationalists’ doctrine of innate ideas. Locke’s sensationalism exerts great influence in the French Enlightenment, primarily through being taken up and radicalized by the philosophe , Abbé de Condillac. In the Treatise on Sensations (1754), Condillac attempts to explain how all human knowledge arises out of sense experience. Locke’s epistemology, as developed by Condillac and others, contributes greatly to the emerging science of psychology in the period.

Locke and Descartes both pursue a method in epistemology that brings with it the epistemological problem of objectivity. Both examine our knowledge by way of examining the ideas we encounter directly in our consciousness. This method comes to be called “the way of ideas”. Though neither for Locke nor for Descartes do all of our ideas represent their objects by way of resembling them (e.g., our idea of God does not represent God by virtue of resembling God), our alleged knowledge of our environment through the senses does depend largely on ideas that allegedly resemble external material objects. The way of ideas implies the epistemological problem of how we can know that these ideas do in fact resemble their objects. How can we be sure that these objects do not appear one way before the mind and exist in another way (or not at all) in reality outside the mind? George Berkeley, an empiricist philosopher influenced by John Locke, avoids the problem by asserting the metaphysics of idealism: the (apparently material) objects of perception are nothing but ideas before the mind. However, Berkeley’s idealism is less influential in, and characteristic of, the Enlightenment, than the opposing positions of materialism and Cartesian dualism. Thomas Reid, a prominent member of the Scottish Enlightenment, attacks the way of ideas and argues that the immediate objects of our (sense) perception are the common (material) objects in our environment, not ideas in our mind. Reid mounts his defense of naïve realism as a defense of common sense over against the doctrines of the philosophers. The defense of common sense, and the related idea that the results of philosophy ought to be of use to common people, are characteristic ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly pronounced in the Scottish Enlightenment.

Skepticism enjoys a remarkably strong place in Enlightenment philosophy, given that confidence in our intellectual capacities to achieve systematic knowledge of nature is a leading characteristic of the age. This oddity is at least softened by the point that much skepticism in the Enlightenment is merely methodological, a tool meant to serve science, rather than a position embraced on its own account. The instrumental role for skepticism is exemplified prominently in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), in which Descartes employs radical skeptical doubt to attack prejudices derived from learning and from sense experience and to search out principles known with certainty which may serve as a secure foundation for a new system of knowledge. Given the negative, critical, suspicious attitude of the Enlightenment towards doctrines traditionally regarded as well founded, it is not surprising that Enlightenment thinkers employ skeptical tropes (drawn from the ancient skeptical tradition) to attack traditional dogmas in science, metaphysics and religion.

However, skepticism is not merely a methodological tool in the hands of Enlightenment thinkers. The skeptical cast of mind is one prominent manifestation of the Enlightenment spirit. The influence of Pierre Bayle, another founding figure of the Enlightenment, testifies to this. Bayle was a French Protestant, who, like many European philosophers of his time, was forced to live and work in politically liberal and tolerant Holland in order to avoid censorship and prison. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), a strange and wonderful book, exerts great influence on the age. The form of the book is intimidating: a biographical dictionary, with long scholarly entries on obscure figures in the history of culture, interrupted by long scholarly footnotes, which are in turn interrupted by further footnotes. Rarely has a work with such intimidating scholarly pretentions exerted such radical and liberating influence in the culture. It exerts this influence through its skeptical questioning of religious, metaphysical, and scientific dogmas. Bayle’s eclecticism and his tendency to follow arguments without pre-arranging their conclusions make it difficult to categorize his thought. It is the attitude of inquiry that Bayle displays, rather than any doctrine he espouses, that mark his as distinctively Enlightenment thought. He is fearless and presumptuous in questioning all manner of dogma. His attitude of inquiry resembles both that of Descartes’ meditator and that of the person undergoing enlightenment as Kant defines it, the attitude of coming to think for oneself, of daring to know. This epistemological attitude, as manifest in distrust of authority and reliance on one’s own capacity to judge, expresses the Enlightenment values of individualism and self-determination.

This skeptical/critical attitude underlies a significant tension in the age. While it is common to conceive of the Enlightenment as supplanting the authority of tradition and religious dogma with the authority of reason, in fact the Enlightenment is characterized by a crisis of authority regarding any belief. This is perhaps best illustrated with reference to David Hume’s skepticism, as developed in Book One of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and in his later Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (1748). While one might take Hume’s skepticism to imply that he is an outlier with respect to the Enlightenment, it is more convincing to see Hume’s skepticism as a flowering of a crisis regarding authority in belief that is internal to the Enlightenment. Hume articulates a variety of skepticisms. His “skepticism with regard to the senses” is structured by the epistemological problem bound up with the way of ideas, described above. Hume also articulates skepticism with regard to reason in an argument that is anticipated by Bayle. Hume begins this argument by noting that, though rules or principles in demonstrative sciences are certain or infallible, given the fallibility of our faculties, our applications of such rules or principles in demonstrative inferences yield conclusions that cannot be regarded as certain or infallible. On reflection, our conviction in the conclusions of demonstrative reasoning must be qualified by an assessment of the likelihood that we made a mistake in our reasoning. Thus, Hume writes, “all knowledge degenerates into probability” ( Treatise , I.iv.i). Hume argues further that, given this degeneration, for any judgment, our assessment of the likelihood that we made a mistake, and the corresponding diminution of certainty in the conclusion, is another judgment about which we ought make a further assessment, which leads to a further diminution of certainty in our original conclusion, leading “at last [to] a total extinction of belief and evidence”. Hume also famously questions the justification of inductive reasoning and causal reasoning. According to Hume’s argument, since in causal reasoning we take our past observations to serve as evidence for judgments regarding what will happen in relevantly similar circumstances in the future, causal reasoning depends on the assumption that the future course of nature will resemble the past; and there is no non-circular justification of this essential assumption. Hume concludes that we have no rational justification for our causal or inductive judgments. Hume’s skeptical arguments regarding causal reasoning are more radical than his skeptical questioning of reason as such, insofar as they call into question even experience itself as a ground for knowledge and implicitly challenge the credentials of Newtonian science itself, the very pride of the Enlightenment. The question implicitly raised by Hume’s powerful skeptical arguments is whether any epistemological authority at all can withstand critical scrutiny. The Enlightenment begins by unleashing skepticism in attacking limited, circumscribed targets, but once the skeptical genie is out of the bottle, it becomes difficult to maintain conviction in any authority. Thus, the despairing attitude that Hume famously expresses in the conclusion to Book One of the Treatise , as the consequence of his epistemological inquiry, while it clashes with the self-confident and optimistic attitude we associate with the Enlightenment, in fact reflects an essential possibility in a distinctive Enlightenment problematic regarding authority in belief.

Though Hume finds himself struggling with skepticism in the conclusion of Book One of the Treatise , the project of the work as he outlines it is not to advance a skeptical viewpoint, but to establish a science of the mind. Hume is one of many Enlightenment thinkers who aspire to be the “Newton of the mind”; he aspires to establish the basic laws that govern the elements of the human mind in its operations. Alexander Pope’s famous couplet in An Essay on Man (1733) (“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man”) expresses well the intense interest humanity gains in itself within the context of the Enlightenment, as a partial substitute for its traditional interest in God and the transcendent domain. Just as the sun replaces the earth as the center of our cosmos in Copernicus’ cosmological system, so humanity itself replaces God at the center of humanity’s consciousness in the Enlightenment. Given the Enlightenment’s passion for science, the self-directed attention naturally takes the form of the rise of the scientific study of humanity in the period.

The enthusiasm for the scientific study of humanity in the period incorporates a tension or paradox concerning the place of humanity in the cosmos, as the cosmos is re-conceived in the context of Enlightenment philosophy and science. Newton’s success early in the Enlightenment of subsuming the phenomena of nature under universal laws of motion, expressed in simple mathematical formulae, encourages the conception of nature as a very complicated machine, whose parts are material and whose motions and properties are fully accounted for by deterministic causal laws. But if our conception of nature is of an exclusively material domain governed by deterministic, mechanical laws, and if we at the same time deny the place of the supernatural in the cosmos, then how does humanity itself fit into the cosmos? On the one hand, the achievements of the natural sciences in general are the great pride of the Enlightenment, manifesting the excellence of distinctively human capacities. The pride and self-assertiveness of humanity in the Enlightenment expresses itself, among other ways, in humanity’s making the study of itself its central concern. On the other hand, the study of humanity in the Enlightenment typically yields a portrait of us that is the opposite of flattering or elevating. Instead of being represented as occupying a privileged place in nature, as made in the image of God, humanity is represented typically in the Enlightenment as a fully natural creature, devoid of free will, of an immortal soul, and of a non-natural faculty of intelligence or reason. The very title of J.O. de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1748), for example, seems designed to deflate humanity’s self-conception, and in this respect it is characteristic of the Enlightenment “science of man”. It is true of a number of works of the Enlightenment, perhaps especially works in the more radical French Enlightenment – notable here are Helvétius’s Of the Spirit (1758) and Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770) – that they at once express the remarkable self-assertiveness of humanity characteristic of the Enlightenment in their scientific aspirations while at the same time painting a portrait of humanity that dramatically deflates its traditional self-image as occupying a privileged position in nature.

The methodology of epistemology in the period reflects a similar tension. Given the epistemological role of Descartes’ famous “ cogito, ergo sum ” in his system of knowledge, one might see Descartes’ epistemology as already marking the transition from an epistemology privileging knowledge of God to one that privileges self-knowledge instead. However, in Descartes’ epistemology, it remains true that knowledge of God serves as the necessary foundation for all human knowledge. Hume’s Treatise displays such a re-orientation less ambiguously. As noted, Hume means his work to comprise a science of the mind or of man. In the Introduction, Hume describes the science of man as effectively a foundation for all the sciences since all sciences “lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties.” In other words, since all science is human knowledge, scientific knowledge of humanity is the foundation of the sciences. Hume’s placing the science of man at the foundation of all the sciences both exemplifies the privilege afforded to “mankind’s study of man” within the Enlightenment and provides an interpretation of it. But Hume’s methodological privileging of humanity in the system of sciences contrasts sharply with what he says in the body of his science about humanity. In Hume’s science of man, reason as a faculty of knowledge is skeptically attacked and marginalized; reason is attributed to other animals as well; belief is shown to be grounded in custom and habit; and free will is denied. So, even as knowledge of humanity supplants knowledge of God as the keystone of the system of knowledge, the scientific perspective on humanity starkly challenges humankind’s self-conception as occupying a privileged position in the order of nature.

Immanuel Kant explicitly enacts a revolution in epistemology modeled on the Copernican in astronomy. As characteristic of Enlightenment epistemology, Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, second edition 1787) undertakes both to determine the limits of our knowledge, and at the same time to provide a foundation of scientific knowledge of nature, and he attempts to do this by examining our human faculties of knowledge critically. Even as he draws strict limits to rational knowledge, he attempts to defend reason as a faculty of knowledge, as playing a necessary role in natural science, in the face of skeptical challenges that reason faces in the period. According to Kant, scientific knowledge of nature is not merely knowledge of what in fact happens in nature, but knowledge of the causal laws of nature according to which what in fact happens must happen. But how is knowledge of necessary causal connection in nature possible? Hume’s investigation of the idea of cause had made clear that we cannot know causal necessity through experience; experience teaches us at most what in fact happens, not what must happen. In addition, Kant’s own earlier critique of principles of rationalism had convinced him that the principles of (“general”) logic also cannot justify knowledge of real necessary connections (in nature); the formal principle of non-contradiction can ground at best the deduction of one proposition from another, but not the claim that one property or event must follow from another in the course of nature. The generalized epistemological problem Kant addresses in the Critique of Pure Reason is: how is science possible (including natural science, mathematics, metaphysics), given that all such knowledge must be (or include) knowledge of real, substantive (not merely logical or formal) necessities. Put in the terms Kant defines, the problem is: how is synthetic, a priori knowledge possible?

According to Kant’s Copernican Revolution in epistemology addressed to this problem, objects must conform themselves to human knowledge rather than knowledge to objects. Certain cognitive forms lie ready in the human mind – prominent examples are the pure concepts of substance and cause and the forms of intuition, space and time; given sensible representations must conform themselves to these forms in order for human experience (as empirical knowledge of nature) to be possible at all. We can acquire scientific knowledge of nature because we constitute it a priori according to certain cognitive forms; for example, we can know nature as a causally ordered domain because we originally synthesize a priori the given manifold of sensibility according to the category of causality, which has its source in the human mind.

Kant saves rational knowledge of nature by limiting rational knowledge to nature. According to Kant’s argument, we can have rational knowledge only of the domain of possible experience, not of supersensible objects such as God and the soul. Moreover Kant’s solution brings with it a kind of idealism: given the mind’s role in constituting objects of experience, we know objects only as appearances , only as they appear according to our faculties, not as they are in themselves. This is the subjectivism of Kant’s epistemology. Kant’s epistemology exemplifies Enlightenment thought by replacing the theocentric conception of knowledge of the rationalist tradition with an anthropocentric conception.

However, Kant means his system to make room for humanity’s practical and religious aspirations toward the transcendent as well. According to Kant’s idealism, the realm of nature is limited to a realm of appearances, and we can intelligibly think supersensible objects such as God, freedom and the soul, though we cannot know them. Through the postulation of a realm of unknowable noumena (things in themselves) over against the realm of nature as a realm of appearances, Kant manages to make place for practical concepts that are central to our understanding of ourselves even while grounding our scientific knowledge of nature as a domain governed by deterministic causal laws. Though Kant’s idealism is highly controversial from its initial publication, a main point in its favor, according to Kant himself, is that it reconciles, in a single coherent tension, the main tension between the Enlightenment’s conception of nature, as ordered according to deterministic causal laws, and the Enlightenment’s conception of ourselves, as morally free, as having dignity, and as perfectible.

The commitment to careful observation and description of phenomena as the starting point of science, and then the success at explaining and accounting for observed phenomena through the method of induction, naturally leads to the development of new sciences for new domains in the Enlightenment. Many of the human and social sciences have their origins in the eighteenth century (e.g., history, anthropology, aesthetics, psychology, economics, even sociology), though most are only formally established as autonomous disciplines later. The emergence of new sciences is aided by the development of new scientific tools, such as models for probabilistic reasoning, a kind of reasoning that gains new respect and application in the period. Despite the multiplication of sciences in the period, the ideal remains to comprehend the diversity of our scientific knowledge as a unified system of science; however, this ideal of unity is generally taken as regulative, as an ideal to emerge in the ever-receding end-state of science, rather than as enforced from the beginning by regimenting science under a priori principles.

As exemplifying these and other tendencies of the Enlightenment, one work deserves special mention: the Encyclopedia , edited by Denis Diderot and Jean La Rond d’Alembert. The Encyclopedia (subtitled: “ systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts ”) was published in 28 volumes (17 of text, 11 of plates) over 21 years (1751–1772), and consists of over 70,000 articles, contributed by over 140 contributors, among them many of the luminaries of the French Enlightenment. The work aims to provide a compendium of existing human knowledge to be transmitted to subsequent generations, a transmission intended to contribute to the progress and dissemination of human knowledge and to a positive transformation of human society. The orientation of the Encyclopedia is decidedly secular and implicitly anti-authoritarian. Accordingly, the French state of the ancien régime censors the project, and it is completed only through the persistence of Diderot. The collaborative nature of the project, especially in the context of state opposition, contributes significantly to the formation of a shared sense of purpose among the wide variety of intellectuals who belong to the French Enlightenment. The knowledge contained in the Encyclopedia is self-consciously social both in its production – insofar as it is immediately the product of what the title page calls “a society of men of letters” – and in its address – insofar as it is primarily meant as an instrument for the education and improvement of society. It is a striking feature of the Encyclopedia , and one by virtue of which it exemplifies the Baconian conception of science characteristic of the period, that its entries cover the whole range and scope of knowledge, from the most abstract theoretical to the most practical, mechanical and technical.

2. The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is most identified with its political accomplishments. The era is marked by three political revolutions, which together lay the basis for modern, republican, constitutional democracies: The English Revolution (1688), the American Revolution (1775–83), and the French Revolution (1789–99). The success at explaining and understanding the natural world encourages the Enlightenment project of re-making the social/political world, in accord with the models we allegedly find in our reason. Enlightenment philosophers find that the existing social and political orders do not withstand critical scrutiny. Existing political and social authority is shrouded in religious myth and mystery and founded on obscure traditions. The criticism of existing institutions is supplemented with the positive work of constructing in theory the model of institutions as they ought to be. We owe to this period the basic model of government founded upon the consent of the governed; the articulation of the political ideals of freedom and equality and the theory of their institutional realization; the articulation of a list of basic individual human rights to be respected and realized by any legitimate political system; the articulation and promotion of toleration of religious diversity as a virtue to be respected in a well ordered society; the conception of the basic political powers as organized in a system of checks and balances; and other now-familiar features of western democracies. However, for all the enduring accomplishments of Enlightenment political philosophy, it is not clear that human reason proves powerful enough to put a concrete, positive authoritative ideal in place of the objects of its criticism. As in the epistemological domain, reason shows its power more convincingly in criticizing authorities than in establishing them. Here too the question of the limits of reason is one of the main philosophical legacies of the period. These limits are arguably vividly illustrated by the course of the French Revolution. The explicit ideals of the French Revolution are the Enlightenment ideals of individual freedom and equality; but, as the revolutionaries attempt to devise rational, secular institutions to put in place of those they have violently overthrown, eventually they have recourse to violence and terror in order to control and govern the people. The devolution of the French Revolution into the Reign of Terror is perceived by many as proving the emptiness and hypocrisy of Enlightenment reason, and is one of the main factors which account for the end of the Enlightenment as an historical period.

The political revolutions of the Enlightenment, especially the French and the American, were informed and guided to a significant extent by prior political philosophy in the period. Though Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1651), defends the absolute power of the political sovereign, and is to that extent opposed to the revolutionaries and reformers in England, this work is a founding work of Enlightenment political theory. Hobbes’ work originates the modern social contract theory, which incorporates Enlightenment conceptions of the relation of the individual to the state. According to the general social contract model, political authority is grounded in an agreement (often understood as ideal, rather than real) among individuals, each of whom aims in this agreement to advance his rational self-interest by establishing a common political authority over all. Thus, according to the general contract model (though this is more clear in later contract theorists such as Locke and Rousseau than in Hobbes himself), political authority is grounded not in conquest, natural or divinely instituted hierarchy, or in obscure myths and traditions, but rather in the rational consent of the governed. In initiating this model, Hobbes takes a naturalistic, scientific approach to the question of how political society ought to be organized (against the background of a clear-eyed, unsentimental conception of human nature), and thus decisively influences the Enlightenment process of secularization and rationalization in political and social philosophy.

Baruch Spinoza also greatly contributes to the development of Enlightenment political philosophy in its early years. The metaphysical doctrines of the Ethics (1677) lay the groundwork for his influence on the age. Spinoza’s arguments against Cartesian dualism and in favor of substance monism, the claim in particular that there can only be one substance, God or nature, was taken to have radical implications in the domains of politics, ethics and religion throughout the period. Spinoza’s employment of philosophical reason leads to the denial of the existence of a transcendent, creator, providential, law-giving God; this establishes the opposition between the teachings of philosophy, on the one hand, and the traditional orienting practical beliefs (moral, religious, political) of the people, on the other hand, an opposition that is one important aspect of the culture of the Enlightenment. In his main political work, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1677), Spinoza, building on his rationalist naturalism, opposes superstition, argues for toleration and the subordination of religion to the state, and pronounces in favor of qualified democracy. Liberalism is perhaps the most characteristic political philosophy of the Enlightenment, and Spinoza, in this text primarily, is one of its originators.

However, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) is the classical source of modern liberal political theory. In his First Treatise of Government , Locke attacks Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), which epitomizes the sort of political theory the Enlightenment opposes. Filmer defends the right of kings to exercise absolute authority over their subjects on the basis of the claim that they inherit the authority God vested in Adam at creation. Though Locke’s assertion of the natural freedom and equality of human beings in the Second Treatise is starkly and explicitly opposed to Filmer’s view, it is striking that the cosmology underlying Locke’s assertions is closer to Filmer’s than to Spinoza’s. According to Locke, in order to understand the nature and source of legitimate political authority, we have to understand our relations in the state of nature. Drawing upon the natural law tradition, Locke argues that it is evident to our natural reason that we are all absolutely subject to our Lord and Creator, but that, in relation to each other, we exist naturally in a state of equality “wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another” ( Second Treatise , §4). We also exist naturally in a condition of freedom, insofar as we may do with ourselves and our possessions as we please, within the constraints of the fundamental law of nature. The law of nature “teaches all mankind … that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (§6). That we are governed in our natural condition by such a substantive moral law, legislated by God and known to us through our natural reason, implies that the state of nature is not Hobbes’ war of all against all. However, since there is lacking any human authority over all to judge of disputes and enforce the law, it is a condition marred by “inconveniencies”, in which possession of natural freedom, equality and possessions is insecure. According to Locke, we rationally quit this natural condition by contracting together to set over ourselves a political authority, charged with promulgating and enforcing a single, clear set of laws, for the sake of guaranteeing our natural rights, liberties and possessions. The civil, political law, founded ultimately upon the consent of the governed, does not cancel the natural law, according to Locke, but merely serves to draw that law closer. “[T]he law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men” (§135). Consequently, when established political power violates that law, the people are justified in overthrowing it. Locke’s argument for the right to revolt against a government that opposes the purposes for which legitimate government is taken by some to justify the political revolution in the context of which he writes (the English revolution) and, almost a hundred years later, by others to justify the American revolution as well.

Though Locke’s liberalism has been tremendously influential, his political theory is founded on doctrines of natural law and religion that are not nearly as evident as Locke assumes. Locke’s reliance on the natural law tradition is typical of Enlightenment political and moral theory. According to the natural law tradition, as the Enlightenment makes use of it, we can know through the use of our unaided reason that we all – all human beings, universally – stand in particular moral relations to each other. The claim that we can apprehend through our unaided reason a universal moral order exactly because moral qualities and relations (in particular human freedom and equality) belong to the nature of things, is attractive in the Enlightenment for obvious reasons. However, as noted above, the scientific apprehension of nature in the period does not support, and in fact opposes, the claim that the alleged moral qualities and relations (or, indeed, that any moral qualities and relations) are natural . According to a common Enlightenment assumption, as humankind clarifies the laws of nature through the advance of natural science and philosophy, the true moral and political order will be revealed with it. This view is expressed explicitly by the philosophe Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1795 and which, perhaps better than any other work, lays out the paradigmatically Enlightenment view of history of the human race as a continual progress to perfection). But, in fact, advance in knowledge of the laws of nature in the science of the period does not help with discernment of a natural political or moral order. This asserted relationship between natural scientific knowledge and the political and moral order is under great stress already in the Enlightenment. With respect to Lockean liberalism, though his assertion of the moral and political claims (natural freedom, equality, et cetera) continues to have considerable force for us, the grounding of these claims in a religious cosmology does not. The question of how to ground our claims to natural freedom and equality is one of the main philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment.

The rise and development of liberalism in Enlightenment political thought has many relations with the rise of the mercantile class (the bourgeoisie) and the development of what comes to be called “civil society”, the society characterized by work and trade in pursuit of private property. Locke’s Second Treatise contributes greatly to the project of articulating a political philosophy to serve the interests and values of this ascending class. Locke claims that the end or purpose of political society is the preservation and protection of property (though he defines property broadly to include not only external property but life and liberties as well). According to Locke’s famous account, persons acquire rightful ownership in external things that are originally given to us all by God as a common inheritance, independently of the state and prior to its involvement, insofar as we “mix our labor with them”. The civil freedom that Locke defines, as something protected by the force of political laws, comes increasingly to be interpreted as the freedom to trade, to exchange without the interference of governmental regulation. Within the context of the Enlightenment, economic freedom is a salient interpretation of the individual freedom highly valued in the period. Adam Smith, a prominent member of the Scottish Enlightenment, describes in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) some of the laws of civil society, as a sphere distinct from political society as such, and thus contributes significantly to the founding of political economy (later called merely “economics”). His is one of many voices in the Enlightenment advocating for free trade and for minimal government regulation of markets. The trading house floor, in which people of various nationalities, languages, cultures, religions come together and trade, each in pursuit of his own self-interest, but, through this pursuit, supplying the wants of their respective nations and increasing its wealth, represents for some Enlightenment thinkers the benign, peaceful, universal rational order that they wish to see replace the violent, confessional strife that characterized the then-recent past of Europe.

However, the liberal conception of the government as properly protecting economic freedom of citizens and private property comes into conflict in the Enlightenment with the value of democracy. James Madison confronts this tension in the context of arguing for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution (in his Federalist #10). Madison argues that popular government (pure democracy) is subject to the evil of factions; in a pure democracy, a majority bound together by a private interest, relative to the whole, has the capacity to impose its particular will on the whole. The example most on Madison’s mind is that those without property (the many) may seek to bring about governmental re-distribution of the property of the propertied class (the few), perhaps in the name of that other Enlightenment ideal, equality. If, as in Locke’s theory, the government’s protection of an individual’s freedom is encompassed within the general end of protecting a person’s property, then, as Madison argues, the proper form of the government cannot be pure democracy, and the will of the people must be officially determined in some other way than by directly polling the people.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political theory, as presented in his On the Social Contract (1762), presents a contrast to the Lockean liberal model. Though commitment to the political ideals of freedom and equality constitutes a common ground for Enlightenment political philosophy, it is not clear not only how these values have a home in nature as Enlightenment science re-conceives it, but also how concretely to interpret each of these ideals and how properly to balance them against each other. Contrary to Madison, Rousseau argues that direct (pure) democracy is the only form of government in which human freedom can be realized. Human freedom, according to Rousseau’s interpretation, is possible only through governance according to what he calls “the general will,” which is the will of the body politic, formed through the original contract, concretely determined in an assembly in which all citizens participate. Rousseau’s account intends to avert the evils of factions by structural elements of the original contract. The contract consists in the self-alienation by each associate of all rights and possessions to the body politic. Because each alienates all, each is an equal member of the body politic, and the terms and conditions are the same for all. The emergence of factions is avoided insofar as the good of each citizen is, and is understood to be, equally (because wholly) dependent on the general will. Legislation supports this identification with the general will by preserving the original equality established in the contract, prominently through maintaining a measure of economic equality. Rousseau’s account of the ideal relation of the individual citizen to the state differs from Locke’s; in Rousseau’s account, the individual must be actively engaged in political life in order to maintain the identification of his supremely authoritative will with the general will, whereas in Locke the emphasis is on the limits of governmental authority with respect to the expressions of the individual will. Though Locke’s liberal model is more representative of the Enlightenment in general, Rousseau’s political theory, which in some respects presents a revived classical model modified within the context of Enlightenment values, in effect poses many of the enduring questions regarding the meaning and interpretation of political freedom and equality within the modern state.

Both Madison and Rousseau, like most political thinkers of the period, are influenced by Baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), which is one of the founding texts of modern political theory. Though Montesquieu’s treatise belongs to the tradition of liberalism in political theory, given his scientific approach to social, legal and political systems, his influence extends beyond this tradition. Montesquieu argues that the system of legislation for a people varies appropriately with the particular circumstances of the people. He provides specific analysis of how climate, fertility of the soil, population size, et cetera, affect legislation. He famously distinguishes three main forms of governments: republics (which can either be democratic or aristocratic), monarchies and despotisms. He describes leading characteristics of each. His argument that functional democracies require the population to possess civic virtue in high measure, a virtue that consists in valuing public good above private interest, influences later Enlightenment theorists, including both Rousseau and Madison. He describes the threat of factions to which Madison and Rousseau respond in different (indeed opposite) ways. He provides the basic structure and justification for the balance of political powers that Madison later incorporates into the U.S. Constitution.

It is striking how unenlightened many of the Enlightenment’s celebrated thinkers are concerning issues of race and of gender (regarding race, see Race and Enlightenment: A Reader , edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze). For all the public concern with the allegedly universal “rights of man” in the Enlightenment, the rights of women and of non-white people are generally overlooked in the period. (Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a noteworthy exception.) When Enlightenment thinkers do turn their attention to the social standing of women or of non-white people, they tend to spout unreasoned prejudice. Moreover, while the philosophies of the Enlightenment generally aspire or pretend to universal truth, unattached to particular time, place or culture, Enlightenment writings are rife with rank ethno- and Eurocentrism, often explicit.

In the face of such tensions within the Enlightenment, one response is to affirm the power of the Enlightenment to improve humanity and society long beyond the end of the eighteenth century, indeed, down to the present day and into the future. This response embraces the Enlightenment and interprets more recent emancipation movements and achievement of recognition of the rights and dignity of traditionally oppressed and marginalized groups as expressions of Enlightenment ideals and aspirations. Critics of the Enlightenment respond differently to such tensions. Critics see them as symptoms of disorder, ideology, perversity, futility or falsehood that afflict the very core of the Enlightenment itself. (See James Schmidt’s “What Enlightenment Project?” for discussion of critics of the Enlightenment.) Famously, Adorno and Horkheimer interpret Nazi death camps as the result of “the dialectic of the Enlightenment”, as what historically becomes of the supremacy of instrumental reason asserted in the Enlightenment. As another example, we may point to some post-modern feminists, who argue, in opposition to the liberal feminists who embrace broadly Enlightenment ideals and conceptions, that the essentialism and universalism associated with Enlightenment ideals are both false and intrinsically hostile to the aspirations to self-realization of women and of other traditionally oppressed groups. (See Strickland and the essays in Akkerman and Stuurman.) This entry is not the place to delineate strains of opposition to the Enlightenment, but it is worth noting that post-Enlightenment social and political struggles to achieve equality or recognition for traditionally marginalized or oppressed groups are sometimes self-consciously grounded in the Enlightenment and sometimes marked by explicit opposition to the Enlightenment’s conceptions or presuppositions.

Many of the leading issues and positions of contemporary philosophical ethics take shape within the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment in the West, ethical reflection begins from and orients itself around religious doctrines concerning God and the afterlife. The highest good of humanity, and, accordingly, the content and grounding of moral duties, are conceived in immediately religious terms. During the Enlightenment, this changes, certainly within philosophy, but to some significant degree, within the population of western society at large. As the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and dissemination of education advance in this period, happiness in this life, rather than union with God in the next, becomes the highest end for more and more people. Also, the violent religious wars that bloody Europe in the early modern period motivate the development of secular, this-worldly ethics, insofar as they indicate the failure of religious doctrines concerning God and the afterlife to establish a stable foundation for ethics. In the Enlightenment, philosophical thinkers confront the problem of developing ethical systems on a secular, broadly naturalistic basis for the first time since the rise of Christianity eclipsed the great classical ethical systems. However, the changes in our understanding of nature and cosmology, effected by modern natural science, make recourse to the systems of Plato and Aristotle problematic. The Platonic identification of the good with the real and the Aristotelian teleological understanding of natural things are both difficult to square with the Enlightenment conception of nature. The general philosophical problem emerges in the Enlightenment of how to understand the source and grounding of ethical duties, and how to conceive the highest good for human beings, within a secular, broadly naturalistic context, and within the context of a transformed understanding of the natural world.

In ethical thought, as in political theory, Hobbes’ thought is an important provocation in the Enlightenment. Hobbes understands what is good, as the end of human action, to be “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire,” and evil to be “the object of his hate, and aversion,” “there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves” ( Leviathan , chapter 6). Hobbes’ conception of human beings as fundamentally motivated by their perception of what is in their own best interest implies the challenge, important for Enlightenment moral philosophy, to construct moral duties of justice and benevolence out of such limited materials. The basis of human action that Hobbes posits is immediately intelligible and even shared with other animals to some extent; a set of moral duties constructed on this basis would also be intelligible, de-mystified, and fit within the larger scheme of nature. Bernard Mandeville is sometimes grouped with Hobbes in the Enlightenment, especially by critics of them both, because he too, in his popular Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), sees people as fundamentally motivated by their perceived self-interest, and then undertakes to tell a story about how moral virtue, which involves conquering one’s own appetite and serving the interests of others, can be understood to arise on this basis.

Samuel Clarke, an influential rationalist British thinker early in the Enlightenment, undertakes to show in his Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706), against Hobbes, that the absolute difference between moral good and moral evil lies in the immediately discernible nature of things, independently of any compacts or positive legislation by God or human beings. Clarke writes that “in men’s dealing … one with another, it is undeniably more fit, absolutely and in the nature of the thing itself, that all men should endeavor to promote the universal good and welfare of all; than that all men should be continually contriving the ruin and destruction of all”. Likewise for the rest of what morality enjoins upon us. According to Clarke, that some actions (those we call morally good or required) are “fit to be done” and others not fit is grounded upon the immediately evident relations in which things stand to each other in nature, just as “the proportions of lines or numbers” are evident to the rational perception of a reasonable being. Similarly, Christian Wolff’s rationalist practical philosophy also grounds moral duties in an objective rational order. However, the objective quality on which moral requirements are grounded for Wolff is not the “fitness” of things to be done but rather their perfection. Wolff counts as a founder of the Aufklärung in part because of his attempted derivation of ethical duties from an order of perfection in things, discernable through reason, independently of divine commands.

Rationalist ethics so conceived faces the following obstacles in the Enlightenment. First, as implied above, it becomes increasingly implausible that the objective, mind-independent order is really as rationalist ethicists claim it to be. Second, even if the objective realm were ordered as the rationalist claims, it remains unclear how this order gives rise (on its own, as it were) to obligations binding on our wills. David Hume famously exposes the fallacy of deriving a prescriptive statement (that one ought to perform some action) from a description of how things stand in relation to each other in nature. Prima facie, there is a gap between the rationalist’s objective order and a set of prescriptions binding on our wills; if a supreme legislator must be re-introduced in order to make the conformity of our actions to that objective order binding on our wills, then the alleged existence of the objective moral order does not do the work the account asks of it in the first place.

Alongside the rationalist strand of ethical philosophy in the Enlightenment, there is also a very significant empiricist strand. Empirical accounts of moral virtue in the period are distinguished, both by grounding moral virtue on an empirical study of human nature, and by grounding cognition of moral duties and moral motivation in human sensibility, rather than in reason. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, author of the influential work Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), is a founding figure of the empiricist strand. Shaftesbury, like Clarke, is provoked by Hobbes’ egoism to provide a non-egoistic account of moral virtue. Shaftesbury conceives the core notion of the goodness of things teleologically: something is good if it contributes to the well-being or furtherance of the system of which it is a part. Individual animals are members of species, and therefore they are good as such insofar as they contribute to the well-being of the species of which they are a part. Thus, the good of things, including human beings, for Shaftesbury as for Clarke, is an objective quality that is knowable through reason. However, though we can know what is good through reason, Shaftesbury maintains that reason alone is not sufficient to motivate human action. Shaftesbury articulates the structure of a distinctively human moral sensibility. Moral sensibility depends on the faculty of reflection. When we reflect on first-order passions such as gratitude, kindness and pity, we find ourselves approving or liking them and disapproving or disliking their opposites. By virtue of our receptivity to such feelings, we are capable of virtue and have a sense of right and wrong. In this way, Shaftesbury defines the moral sense that plays a significant role in the theories of subsequent Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume.

In the rationalist tradition, the conflict within the breast of the person between the requirements of morality and self-interest is canonically a conflict between the person’s reason and her passions. Shaftesbury’s identification of a moral sentiment in the nature of humanity renders this a conflict within sensibility itself, a conflict between different sentiments, between a self-interested sentiment and an unegoistic sentiment. Though both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, no less than Clarke, oppose Hobbes’s egoism, it is nonetheless true that the doctrine of moral sensibility softens moral demands, so to speak. Doing what is morally right or morally good is intrinsically bound up with a distinctive kind of pleasure on their accounts. It is significant that both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the two founders of modern moral sense theory, articulate their ethical theory in conjunction with an aesthetic theory. Arguably the pleasure we feel in the apprehension of something beautiful is disinterested pleasure . Our susceptibility to aesthetic pleasure can be taken to reveal that we apprehend and respond to objective (or, anyway, universal) values, not only or necessarily on the basis of reason, but through our natural sensibility instead. Thus, aesthetics, as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson independently develop an account of it, gives encouragement to their doctrines of moral sensibility. But an account of moral virtue, unlike aesthetics, requires an account of moral motivation . As noted above, both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson want to do justice to the idea that proper moral motivation is not the pursuit of pleasure, even disinterested pleasure, but rather an immediate response to the perception of moral value. The problem of giving a satisfying account of moral motivation is a difficult one for empiricist moral philosophers in the Enlightenment.

While for Shaftesbury, at the beginning of the moral sense tradition, moral sense tracks a mind-independent order of value, David Hume, motivated in part by a more radical empiricism, is happy to let the objective order go. We have no access through reason to an independent order of value which moral sense would track. For Hume, morality is founded completely on our sentiments. Hume is often regarded as the main originator of so-called “ethical subjectivism”, according to which moral judgments or evaluations (regarding actions or character) do not make claims about independent facts but merely express the subject’s feelings or attitudes with respect to actions or character. Such subjectivism is relieved of the difficult task of explaining how the objective order of values belongs to the natural world as it is being reconceived by natural science in the period; however, it faces the challenge of explaining how error and disagreement in moral judgments and evaluations are possible. Hume’s account of the standards of moral judgment follows that of Hutcheson in relying centrally on the “natural” responses of an ideal observer or spectator.

Hume’s ethics is exemplary of philosophical ethics in the Enlightenment by virtue of its belonging to the attempt to provide a new, empirically grounded science of human nature, free of theological presuppositions. As noted above, the attempts by the members of the French Enlightenment to present a new understanding of human nature are strongly influenced by Locke’s “sensationalism”, which, radicalized by Condillac, amounts to the attempt to base all contents and faculties of the human mind on the senses. Typically, the French philosophes draw more radical or iconoclastic implications from the new “science of man” than English or Scottish Enlightenment figures. Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) is typical here. In De l’ésprit (1758), Helvétius follows the Lockean sensationalism of Condillac and pairs it with the claim that human beings are motivated in their actions only by the natural desire to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their pain. De l’ésprit , though widely read, gives rise to strong negative reactions in the time, both by political and religious authorities (the Sorbonne, the Pope and the Parlement of Paris all condemn the book) and by prominent fellow philosophes , in great part because Helvétius’s psychology seems to critics to render moral imperatives and values without basis, despite his best attempts to derive them. Helvétius attempts to ground the moral equality of all human beings by portraying all human beings, whatever their standing in the social hierarchy, whatever their special talents and gifts, as equally products of the nature we share plus the variable influences of education and social environment. But, to critics, Helvétius’s account portrays all human beings as equal only by virtue of portraying all as equally worthless (insofar as the claim to equality is grounded on all being equally determined by external factors). However, Helvétius’s ideas, in De l’ésprit as well as in its posthumously published sequel De l’homme (1772), exert a great deal of influence, especially his case for the role of pleasure and pain in human motivation and the role of education and social incentives in shaping individuals into contributors to the social good. Helvétius is sometimes regarded as the father of modern utilitarianism through his articulation of the greatest happiness principle and through his influence on Bentham.

Helvétius is typical in the respect that he is radical in the revisions he proposes, not in common moral judgments or customs of the time, but rather regarding the philosophical grounding of those judgments and customs. But there are some philosophers in the Enlightenment who are radical in the revisions they propose regarding the content of ethical judgments themselves. The Marquis de Sade is merely the most notorious example, among a set of Enlightenment figures (including also the Marquis de Argens and Diderot himself in some of his writings) who, within the context of the new naturalism and its emphasis on the pursuit of pleasure, celebrate the avid pursuit of sexual pleasure and explicitly challenge the sexual mores, as well as the wider morality, of their time. The more or less fictionalized, philosophically self-conscious “libertine” is one significant expression of Enlightenment ethical thought.

If the French Enlightenment tends to advance this-worldly happiness as the highest good for human beings more insistently than the Enlightenment elsewhere, then Rousseau’s voice is, in this as in other respects, a discordant voice in that context. Rousseau advances the cultivation and realization of human freedom as the highest end for human beings and thereby gives expression to another side of Enlightenment ethics. As Rousseau describes it, the capacity for individual self-determination puts us in a problematic relation to our natural desires and inclinations and to the realm of nature generally, insofar as that realm is constituted by mechanistic causation. Though Rousseau places a great deal of emphasis on human freedom, and makes significant contributions to our understanding of ourselves as free, he does not address very seriously the problem of the place of human freedom in the cosmos as it is conceived within the context of Enlightenment naturalism.

However, Rousseau’s writings help Kant to the articulation of a practical philosophy that addresses many of the tensions in the Enlightenment. Kant follows Rousseau, and disagrees with empiricism in ethics in the period, in emphasizing human freedom, rather than human happiness, as the central orienting concept of practical philosophy. Though Kant presents the moral principle as a principle of practical reason, his ethics also disagrees significantly with rationalist ethics in the period. According to Kant, rationalists such as Wolff, insofar as they take moral prescriptions to follow from an end given to the will (in Wolff’s case, the end of perfection), do not understand us as autonomous in our moral activity. Through interpreting the faculty of the will itself as practical reason, Kant understands the moral principle as internally legislated, thus as not only compatible with freedom, but as equivalent to the principle of a free will, as a principle of autonomy. As noted above, rationalists in ethics in the period are challenged to explain how the objective moral order which reason in us allegedly discerns gives rise to valid prescriptions binding on our wills (the gap between is and ought ). For Kant, the moral order is not independent of our will, but rather represents the formal constraints of willing as such. Kant’s account thus both avoids the is-ought gap and interprets moral willing as expressive of our freedom.

Moreover, by virtue of his interpretation of the moral principle as the principle of pure practical reason, Kant is able to redeem the ordinary sense of moral requirements as over-riding, as potentially opposed to the claims of one’s happiness, and thus as different in kind from the deliverances of prudential reasoning. This ordinary sense of moral requirements is not easily accommodated within the context of Enlightenment empiricism and naturalism. Kant’s stark dichotomy between a person’s practical reason and her sensible nature is strongly criticized, both by the subsequent Romantic generation and in the contemporary context; but this dichotomy is bound up with an important benefit of Kant’s view – much promoted by Kant himself – within the context of the Enlightenment. Elaborated in the context of Kant’s idealism as a contrast between the “realm of freedom” and the “realm of nature”, the dichotomy enables Kant’s proposed solution to the conflict between freedom and nature that besets Enlightenment thought. As noted above, Kant argues that the application of the causal principle is restricted to the realm of nature, thus making room for freedom, compatibly with the causal determination of natural events required by scientific knowledge. Additionally, Kant attempts to show that morality “leads ineluctably to” religious belief (in the supersensible objects of God and of the immortal soul) while being essentially not founded on religious belief, thus again vindicating the ordinary understanding of morality while still furthering Enlightenment values and commitments.

Though the Enlightenment is sometimes represented as the enemy of religion, it is more accurate to see it as critically directed against various (arguably contingent) features of religion, such as superstition, enthusiasm, fanaticism and supernaturalism. Indeed the effort to discern and advocate for a religion purified of such features – a “rational” or “natural” religion – is more typical of the Enlightenment than opposition to religion as such. Even Voltaire, who is perhaps the most persistent, powerful, vocal Enlightenment critic of religion, directs his polemic mostly against the Catholic Church in France – “ l’infâme ” in his famous sign-off in his letters, “ Écrasez l’infâme ” (“Crush the infamous”) refers to the Church, not to religion as such. However, controversy regarding the truth-value or reasonableness of religious belief in general, Christian belief in particular, and controversy regarding the proper place of religion in society, occupies a particularly central place in the Enlightenment. It’s as if the terrible, violent confessional strife in the early modern period in Europe, the bloody drawn-out wars between the Christian sects, was removed to the intellectual arena in the Enlightenment and became a set of more general philosophical controversies.

Alongside the rise of the new science, the rise of Protestantism in western Christianity also plays an important role in generating the Enlightenment. The original Protestants assert a sort of individual liberty with respect to questions of faith against the paternalistic authority of the Church. The “liberty of conscience”, so important to Enlightenment thinkers in general, and asserted against all manner of paternalistic authorities (including Protestant), descends from this Protestant assertion. The original Protestant assertion initiates a crisis of authority regarding religious belief, a crisis of authority that, expanded and generalized and even, to some extent, secularized, becomes a central characteristic of the Enlightenment spirit. The original Protestant assertion against the Catholic Church bases itself upon the authority of scripture. However, in the Enlightenment, the authority of scripture is strongly challenged, especially when taken literally. Developing natural science renders acceptance of a literal version of the Bible increasingly untenable. But authors such as Spinoza (in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ) present ways of interpreting scripture according to its spirit, rather than its letter, in order to preserve its authority and truth, thus contributing to the Enlightenment controversy of whether some rationally purified version of the religion handed down in the culture belongs to the true philosophical representation of the world or not; and, if so, what its content is.

It is convenient to discuss religion in the Enlightenment by presenting four characteristic forms of Enlightenment religion in turn: deism, religion of the heart, fideism and atheism.

Deism . Deism is the form of religion most associated with the Enlightenment. According to deism, we can know by the natural light of reason that the universe is created and governed by a supreme intelligence; however, although this supreme being has a plan for creation from the beginning, the being does not interfere with creation; the deist typically rejects miracles and reliance on special revelation as a source of religious doctrine and belief, in favor of the natural light of reason. Thus, a deist typically rejects the divinity of Christ, as repugnant to reason; the deist typically demotes the figure of Jesus from agent of miraculous redemption to extraordinary moral teacher. Deism is the form of religion fitted to the new discoveries in natural science, according to which the cosmos displays an intricate machine-like order; the deists suppose that the supposition of God is necessary as the source or author of this order. Though not a deist himself, Isaac Newton provides fuel for deism with his argument in his Opticks (1704) that we must infer from the order and beauty in the world to the existence of an intelligent supreme being as the cause of this order and beauty. Samuel Clarke, perhaps the most important proponent and popularizer of Newtonian philosophy in the early eighteenth century, supplies some of the more developed arguments for the position that the correct exercise of unaided human reason leads inevitably to the well-grounded belief in God. He argues that the Newtonian physical system implies the existence of a transcendent cause, the creator God. In his first set of Boyle lectures, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705), Clarke presents the metaphysical or “argument a priori ” for God’s existence. This argument concludes from the rationalist principle that whatever exists must have a sufficient reason or cause of its existence to the existence of a transcendent, necessary being who stands as the cause of the chain of natural causes and effects. Clarke also supports the empirical argument from design, the argument that concludes from the evidence of order in nature to the existence of an intelligent author of that order. In his second set of Boyle lectures, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706), Clarke argues as well that the moral order revealed to us by our natural reason requires the existence of a divine legislator and an afterlife, in which the supreme being rewards virtue and punishes vice. In his Boyle lectures, Clarke argues directly against the deist philosophy and maintains that what he regards as the one true religion, Christianity, is known as such on the basis of miracles and special revelation; still, Clarke’s arguments on the topic of natural religion are some of the best and most widely-known arguments in the period for the general deist position that natural philosophy in a broad sense grounds central doctrines of a universal religion.

Enlightenment deism first arises in England. In On the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Locke aims to establish the compatibility of reason and the teachings of Christianity. Though Locke himself is (like Newton, like Clarke) not a deist, the major English deists who follow (John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious [1696]); Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Freethinking [1713]; Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation [1730]) are influenced by Locke’s work. Voltaire carries deism across the channel to France and advocates for it there over his long literary career. Toward the end-stage, the farcical stage, of the French Revolution, Robespierre institutes a form of deism, the so-called “Cult of the Supreme Being”, as the official religion of the French state. Deism plays a role in the founding of the American republic as well. Many of the founding fathers (Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Paine) author statements or tracts that are sympathetic to deism; and their deistic sympathies influence the place given (or not given) to religion in the new American state that they found.

Religion of the Heart . Opposition to deism derives sometimes from the perception of it as coldly rationalistic. The God of the deists, arrived at through a priori or empirical argument and referred to as the Prime Mover or Original Architect, is often perceived as distant and unconcerned with the daily struggles of human existence, and thus as not answering the human needs from which religion springs in the first place. Some important thinkers of the Enlightenment – notably Shaftesbury and Rousseau – present religion as founded on natural human sentiments, rather than on the operations of the intellect. Rousseau has his Savoyard Vicar declare, in his Profession of Faith in Emile (1762), that the idea of worshiping a beneficent deity arose in him initially as he reflected on his own situation in nature and his “heart began to glow with a sense of gratitude towards the author of our being”. The Savoyard Vicar continues: “I adore the supreme power, and melt into tenderness at his goodness. I have no need to be taught artificial forms of worship; the dictates of nature are sufficient. Is it not a natural consequence of self-love to honor those who protect us, and to love such as do us good?” This “natural” religion – opposed to the “artificial” religions enforced in the institutions – is often classed as a form of deism. But it deserves separate mention, because of its grounding in natural human sentiments, rather than in reason or in metaphysical or natural scientific problems of cosmology.

Fideism . Deism or natural religion of various sorts tends to rely on the claim that reason or human experience supports the hypothesis that there is a supreme being who created or authored the world. In one of the most important philosophical texts on natural religion to appear during the Enlightenment, David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), this supposition is criticized relentlessly, incisively and in detail. Naturally, the critical, questioning attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment in general is directed against the arguments on which natural religion is based. In Part Nine of the Dialogues, Samuel Clarke’s “argument a priori” (as defended by the character Demea) is dispatched fairly quickly, but with a battery of arguments. But Hume is mainly concerned in the Dialogues with the other major pillar of natural religion in the Enlightenment, the “empirical” argument, the teleological argument or the argument from design. Cleanthes, the character who advances the design argument in the dialogue, proceeds from the rule for empirical reasoning that like effects prove like causes. He reasons that, given the resemblance between nature, which displays in many respects a “curious adaptation of means to ends”, and a man-made machine, we must infer the cause of nature to be an intelligence like ours, though greater in proportion as nature surpasses in perfection the products of human intelligence. Philo, the skeptical voice in the Dialogues , presses Cleanthes’ argument on many fronts. He points out that the argument is only as strong as the similarity between nature or parts of nature and man-made machines, and further, that a close scrutiny reveals that analogy to be weak. Moreover, according to the principle of the argument, the stronger the evidence for an author (or authors) of nature, the more like us that author (or authors) should be taken to be. Consequently, according to Philo, the argument does not support the conclusion that God exists, taking God to be unitary, infinite, perfect, et cetera. Also, although the existence of evil and disorder in nature may serve actually to strengthen the case for the argument, given the disorder in human creations as well, the notion that God authors evil and disorder is disturbing. If one denies that there is disorder and evil in nature, however implausibly, the effect is to emphasize again the dissimilarity between nature and human products and thus weaken the central basis of the argument. With these and other considerations, Philo puts the proponent of the empirical argument in a difficult dialectical position. But Cleanthes is not moved. He holds the inference from the phenomenon of the curious adaptation of means to ends in nature to the existence of an intelligent and beneficent author to be so natural as to be impervious to the philosophical cavils raised by Philo. And, in the ambiguous conclusion of the work, Philo seems to agree. Though Hume himself seems to have been an atheist, one natural way to take the upshot of his Dialogues is that religious belief is so “natural” to us that rational criticism cannot unseat it. The ambiguous upshot of the work can be taken to be the impotence of rational criticism in the face of religious belief, rather than the illegitimacy of religious belief in the face of rational criticism. This tends toward fideism, the view according to which religious faith maintains its truth over against philosophical reasoning, which opposes but cannot defeat it. Fideism is most often associated with thinkers whose beliefs run contrary to the trends of the Enlightenment (Blaise Pascal, Johann-Georg Hamann, Søren Kierkegaard), but the skeptical strain in the Enlightenment, from Pierre Bayle through David Hume, expresses itself not only in atheism, but also in fideism.

Atheism . Atheism is more present in the French Enlightenment than elsewhere. In the writings of Denis Diderot, atheism is partly supported by an expansive, dynamic conception of nature. According to the viewpoint developed by Diderot, we ought to search for the principles of natural order within natural processes themselves, not in a supernatural being. Even if we don’t yet know the internal principles for the ordering and development of natural forms, the appeal to a transcendent author of such things is reminiscent, to Diderot’s ear, of the appeal to Aristotelian “substantial forms” that was expressly rejected at the beginning of modern science as explaining nothing. The appeal to a transcendent author does not extend our understanding, but merely marks and fixes the limits of it. Atheism (combined with materialism) in the French Enlightenment is perhaps most identified with the Baron d’Holbach, whose System of Nature (1770) generated a great deal of controversy at the time for urging the case for atheism explicitly and emphatically. D’Holbach’s system of nature is strongly influenced by Diderot’s writings, though it displays less subtlety and dialectical sophistication. Though most Enlightenment thinkers hold that morality requires religion, in the sense that morality requires belief in a transcendent law-giver and in an after-life, d’Holbach (influenced in this respect by Spinoza, among others) makes the case for an ethical naturalism, an ethics that is free of any reference to a supernatural grounding or aspiration. Like Helvétius before him, d’Holbach presents an ethics in which virtue consists in enlightened self-interest. The metaphysical background of the ethics he presents is deterministic materialism. The Prussian enlightened despot, Frederick the Great, famously criticizes d’Holbach’s book for exemplifying the incoherence that troubles the Enlightenment generally: while d’Holbach provides passionate moral critiques of existing religious and social and political institutions and practices, his own materialist, determinist conception of nature allows no place for moral “oughts” and prescriptions and values.

3. The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment

Modern systematic philosophical aesthetics not only first emerges in the context of the Enlightenment, but also flowers brilliantly there. As Ernst Cassirer notes, the eighteenth century not only thinks of itself as the “century of philosophy”, but also as “the age of criticism,” where criticism is centrally (though not only) art and literary criticism (Cassirer 1932, 255). Philosophical aesthetics flourishes in the period because of its strong affinities with the tendencies of the age. Alexander Baumgarten, the German philosopher in the school of Christian Wolff, founds systematic aesthetics in the period, in part through giving it its name. “Aesthetics” is derived from the Greek word for “senses”, because for Baumgarten a science of the beautiful would be a science of the sensible, a science of sensible cognition. The Enlightenment in general re-discovers the value of the senses, not only in cognition, but in human lives in general, and so, given the intimate connection between beauty and human sensibility, the Enlightenment is naturally particularly interested in aesthetics. Also, the Enlightenment includes a general recovery and affirmation of the value of pleasure in human lives, against the tradition of Christian asceticism, and the flourishing of the arts, of the criticism of the arts and of the philosophical theorizing about beauty, promotes and is promoted by this recovery and affirmation. The Enlightenment also enthusiastically embraces the discovery and disclosure of rational order in nature, as manifest most clearly in the development of the new science. It seems to many theorists in the Enlightenment that the faculty of taste, the faculty by which we discern beauty, reveals to us some part of this order, a distinctive harmony, unities amidst variety. Thus, in the phenomenon of aesthetic pleasure, human sensibility discloses to us rational order, thus binding together two enthusiasms of the Enlightenment.

In the early Enlightenment, especially in France, the emphasis is upon the discernment of an objective rational order, rather than upon the subject’s sensual aesthetic pleasure. Though Descartes’ philosophical system does not include a theory of taste or of beauty, his mathematical model of the physical universe inspires the aesthetics of French classicism. French classicism begins from the classical maxim that the beautiful is the true. Nicolas Boileau writes in his influential didactic poem, The Art of Poetry (1674), in which he lays down rules for good versification within different genres, that “Nothing is beautiful but the true, the true alone is lovable.” In the period the true is conceived of as an objective rational order. According to the classical conception of art that dominates in the period, art imitates nature, though not nature as given in disordered experience, but the ideal nature, the ideal in which we can discern and enjoy “unity in multiplicity.” In French classicism, aesthetics is very much under the influence of, and indeed modeled on, systematic, rigorous theoretical science of nature. Just as in Descartes’ model of science, where knowledge of all particulars depends on prior knowledge of the principle from which the particulars are deduced, so also in the aesthetics of French classicism, the demand is for systematization under a single, universal principle. The subjection of artistic phenomena to universal rules and principles is expressed, for example, in the title of Charles Batteaux’s main work, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746), as well as in Boileau’s rules for good versification.

In Germany in the eighteenth century, Christian Wolff’s systematic rationalist metaphysics forms the basis for much of the reflection on aesthetics, though sometimes as a set of doctrines to be argued against. Wolff affirms the classical dictum that beauty is truth; beauty is truth perceived through the feeling of pleasure. Wolff understands beauty to consist in the perfection in things, which he understands in turn to consist in a harmony or order of a manifold. We judge something beautiful through a feeling of pleasure when we sense in it this harmony or perfection. Beauty is, for Wolff, the sensitive cognition of perfection. Thus, for Wolff, beauty corresponds to objective features of the world, but judgments of beauty are relative to us also, insofar as they are based on the human faculty of sensibility.

Though philosophical rationalism forms the basis of aesthetics in the early Enlightenment in France and Germany, thinkers in the empiricist tradition in England and Scotland introduce many of the salient themes of Enlightenment aesthetics. In particular, with the rise of empiricism and subjectivism in this domain, attention shifts to the ground and nature of the subject’s experience of beauty, the subject’s aesthetic response. Lord Shaftesbury, though not himself an empiricist or subjectivist in aesthetics, makes significant contributions to this development. Shaftesbury re-iterates the classical equation, “all beauty is truth,” but the truth that beauty is for Shaftesbury is not an objective rational order that could also be known conceptually. Though beauty is, for Shaftesbury, a kind of harmony that is independent of the human mind, under the influence of Plotinus, he understands the human being’s immediate intuition of the beautiful as a kind of participation in the original harmony. Shaftesbury focuses attention on the nature of the subject’s response to beauty, as elevating the person, also morally. He maintains that aesthetic response consists in a disinterested unegoistic pleasure; the discovery of this capacity for disinterested pleasure in harmony shows the way for the development of his ethics that has a similar grounding. And, in fact, in seeing aesthetic response as elevating oneself above self-interested pursuits, through cultivating one’s receptivity to disinterested pleasure, Shaftesbury ties tightly together aesthetics and ethics, morality and beauty, and in that respect also contributes to a trend of the period. Also, in placing the emphasis on the subject’s response to beauty, rather than on the objective characteristics of the beautiful, Shaftesbury makes aesthetics belong to the general Enlightenment interest in human nature. Thinkers of the period find in our receptivity to beauty a key both to understanding both distinctively human nature and its perfection.

Francis Hutcheson follows Shaftesbury in his emphasis on the subject’s aesthetic response, on the distinctive sort of pleasure that the beautiful elicits in us. Partly because the Neo-Platonic influence, so pronounced in Shaftesbury’s aesthetics, is washed out of Hutcheson’s, to be replaced by a more thorough-going empiricism, Hutcheson understands this distinctive aesthetic pleasure as more akin to a secondary quality. Thus, Hutcheson’s aesthetic work raises the prominent question whether “beauty” refers to something objective at all or whether beauty is “nothing more” than a human idea or experience. As in the domain of Enlightenment ethics, so with Enlightenment aesthetics too, the step from Shaftesbury to Hutcheson marks a step toward subjectivism. Hutcheson writes in one of his Two Treatises , his Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (1725) that “the word ‘beauty’ is taken for the idea raised in us , and a sense of beauty for our power of receiving this idea ” (Section I, Article IX). However, though Hutcheson understands beauty to be an idea in us, he takes this idea to be “excited” or “occasioned” in us by distinctive objective qualities, in particular by objects that display “ uniformity amidst variety ” (ibid., Section II, Article III). In the very title of Hutcheson’s work above, we see the importance of the classical ideas of (rational) order and harmony in Hutcheson’s aesthetic theory, even as he sets the tenor for much Enlightenment discussion of aesthetics through placing the emphasis on the subjective idea and aesthetic response.

David Hume’s famous essay on “the standard of taste” raises and addresses the epistemological problem raised by subjectivism in aesthetics. If beauty is an idea in us, rather than a feature of objects independent of us, then how do we understand the possibility of correctness and incorrectness – how do we understand the possibility of standards of judgment – in this domain? The problem is posed more clearly for Hume because he intensifies Hutcheson’s subjectivism. He writes in the Treatise that “pleasure and pain….are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence” ( Treatise , Book II, part I, section viii). But if a judgment of taste is based on, or expresses, subjective sentiments, how can it be incorrect? In his response to this question, Hume accounts for the expectation of agreement in judgments of taste by appealing to the fact that we share a common human nature, and he accounts for ‘objectivity’ or expertise in judgments of taste, within the context of his subjectivism, by appealing to the normative responses of well-placed observers. Both of these points (the commonality of human nature and the securing of ‘objectivity’ in judgments based on sentiments by appeal to the normative responses of appropriately placed observers) are typical of the period more generally, and especially of the strong empiricist strain in the Enlightenment. Hume develops the empiricist line in aesthetics to the point where little remains of the classical emphasis on the order or harmony or truth that is, according to the French classicists, apprehended and appreciated in our aesthetic responses to the beautiful, and thus, according to the classicists, the ground of aesthetic responses.

Immanuel Kant faces squarely the problem of the normativity of judgments of taste. Influenced by Hutcheson and the British empiricist tradition in general, Kant understands judgments of taste to be founded on a distinctive sort of feeling, a disinterested pleasure. In taking judgments of taste to be subjective (they are founded on the subject’s feeling of pleasure) and non-cognitive (such judgments do not subsume representations under concepts and thus do not ascribe properties to objects), Kant breaks with the German rationalist school. However Kant continues to maintain that judgments of beauty are like cognitive judgments in making a legitimate claim to universal agreement – in contrast to judgments of the agreeable. The question is how to vindicate the legitimacy of this demand. Kant argues that the distinctive pleasure underlying judgments of taste is the experience of the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and the understanding, a harmony that arises through their “free play” in the process of cognizing objects on the basis of given sensible intuition. The harmony is “free” in an experience of beauty in the sense that it is not forced by rules of the understanding, as is the agreement among the faculties in acts of cognition. The order and harmony that we experience in the face of the beautiful is subjective, according to Kant; but it is at the same time universal and normative, by virtue of its relation to the conditions of human cognition.

The emphasis Kant places on the role of the activity of the imagination in aesthetic pleasure and discernment typifies a trend in Enlightenment thought. Whereas early in the Enlightenment, in French classicism, and to some extent in Christian Wolff and other figures of German rationalism, the emphasis is on the more-or-less static rational order and proportion and on rigid universal rules or laws of reason, the trend during the development of Enlightenment aesthetics is toward emphasis on the play of the imagination and its fecundity in generating associations.

Denis Diderot is an important and influential author on aesthetics. He wrote the entry “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful” for the Encyclopedia (1752). Like Lessing in Germany, Diderot not only philosophized about art and beauty, but also wrote plays and influential art criticism. Diderot is strongly influenced in his writings on aesthetics by the empiricism in England and Scotland, but his writing is not limited to that standpoint. Diderot repeats the classical dictum that art should imitate nature, but, whereas, for French classicists, the nature that art should imitate is ideal nature – a static, universal rational order – for Diderot, nature is dynamic and productive. For Diderot, the nature the artist ought to imitate is the real nature we experience, warts and all (as it were). The particularism and realism of Diderot’s aesthetics is based on a critique of the standpoint of French classicism (see Cassirer 1935, p. 295f.). This critique exposes the artistic rules represented by French classicists as universal rules of reason as nothing more than conventions marking what is considered proper within a certain tradition. In other words, the prescriptions within the French classical tradition are artificial , not natural , and constitute fetters to artistic genius. Diderot takes liberation from such fetters to come from turning to the task of observing and imitating actual nature . Diderot’s emphasis on the primeval productive power and abundance of nature in his aesthetic writings contributes to the trend toward focus on artistic creation and expression (as opposed to artistic appreciation and discernment) that is a characteristic of the late Enlightenment and the transition to Romanticism.

Lessing’s aesthetic writings play an important role in elevating the aesthetic category of expressiveness. In his famous Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Lessing argues, by comparing the famous Greek statue with the representation of Laocoön’s suffering in Virgil’s poetry, that the aims of poetry and of the visual arts are not identical; he argues that the aim of poetry is not beauty, but expression. In elevating the aesthetic category of expressiveness, Lessing challenges the notion that all art is imitation of nature. His argument also challenges the notion that all the various arts can be deduced from a single principle. Lessing’s argument in Laocoön supports the contrary thesis that the distinct arts have distinct aims and methods, and that each should be understood on its own terms, not in terms of an abstract general principle from which all arts are to be deduced. For some, especially for critics of the Enlightenment, in this point Lessing is already beyond the Enlightenment. Certainly it is true that the emphasis on the individual or particular, over against the universal, which one finds in other late Enlightenment thinkers, is in tension with Enlightenment tenets. Herder (following Hamann to some extent) argues that each individual art object has to be understood in its own terms, as a totality complete unto itself. With Herder’s stark emphasis on individuality in aesthetics, over against universality, the supplanting of the Enlightenment with Romanticism and Historicism is well advanced. But, according to the point of view taken in this entry, the conception of the Enlightenment according to which it is distinguished by its prioritization of the order of abstract, universal laws and principles, over against concrete particulars and the differences amongst them, is too narrow; it fails to account for much of the characteristic richness in the thought of the period. Indeed aesthetics itself, as a discipline, which, as noted, is founded in the Enlightenment by the German rationalist, Alexander Baumgarten, owes its existence to the tendency in the Enlightenment to search for and discover distinct laws for distinct kinds of phenomena (as opposed to insisting that all phenomena be made intelligible through the same set of general laws and principles). Baumgarten founds aesthetics as a ‘science’ through the attempt to establish the sensible domain as cognizable in a way different from that which prevails in metaphysics. Aesthetics in Germany in the eighteenth century, from Wolff to Herder, both typifies many of the trends of the Enlightenment and marks the field where the Enlightenment yields to competing worldviews.

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• –––, 1704. Opticks or Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colors of Light , New York: Dover Publications, 1952.
• Pope, A., 1733. An Essay on Man , ed. by M. Mack, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951.
• Rousseau, J. J., 1762. Emile, or On Education , tr. by A. Bloom, New York: Basic Books, 1979.
• –––, 1762. On the Social Contract , tr. by M. Cranston, New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.
• Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, (Anthony Ashely Cooper), 1711. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times , ed. by L. E. Klein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Smith, A., 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
• Spinoza, B., 1677. Ethics , Volume 1 of The Collected Writings of Spinoza , tr. by E. Curley, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
• –––, 1677. Theological-Political Treatise , tr. by S. Shirley, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001.
• Tindal, M., 1730. Christianity as Old as Creation , New York: Garland Press, 1978.
• Toland, J., 1696. Christianity Not Mysterious , London: printed for Sam Buckley.
• Voltaire (Francois-Marie d’Arouet), 1734. Philosophical Letters (Letters on the English Nation, Letters on England) , ed. by L. Trancock, New York: Penguin, 2002.
• –––, 1752. Philosophical Dictionary , ed. by T. Besterman, London: Penguin, 2002.
• Wolff, C., 1712. Logic, or Rational Thoughts on the Powers of the Human Understanding with their use and application in the Knowledge and Search for Truth (German Logic), London: Printed for L. Hawes, W. Clarke, and R. Collins, 1770.
• –––, 1728. Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General , tr. by R. J. Blackwell, Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1963.
• –––, 1730. Philosophia prima sive ontologia methodo scientifica pertractata qua omnis cognitionis humanae principia continentur ( First Philosophy or Ontology) , Frankfurt, 1730.
• Wollstonecraft, M., 1792. Vindication of the Rights of Woman , edited by Mariam Kramnick, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1975.

Secondary Literature

• Akkerman, Tjitske and Stuurman, Siep, 1998. Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History: From the Middle Ages to the Present , New York: Routledge.
• Adorno, Theodor W, and Max Horkheimer, 1947. Dialectic of Enlightenment , tr. by Edmund Jephcott and edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
• Becker, Carl L., 2003 (originally 1932). The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers , second edition, with a forward by Johnson Kent Wright, New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Berlin, Isaiah, 1997. The Proper Study of Mankind , edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
• –––, 1999, The Roots of Romanticism , edited by Henry Hardy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Cassirer, Ernst, 1932. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment , tr. Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove, Boston: Beacon, 1955.
• Crocker, Lester, 1959. An Age of Cisis: Man and World in eighteenth century French Thought , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• –––, 1963. Nature and Culture : Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Dupré, Louis, 2004. The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi (ed.), 1997. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader , Cambridge, MA: Blackewell.
• –––, 2002. “Answering the Question, What Remains of the Enlightenment?”, Human Studies , 23(3): 281–288.
• Fleischacker, Samuel, 2013. What is Enlightenment? (Kant’s Questions) , New York: Routledge.
• Garrett, Aaron (ed.), 2014. The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy , New York: Routledge.
• Gay, Peter, 1966–69. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation , New York: Knopf.
• Hirschman, Albert O., 1991. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Israel, Jonathan, 2001. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 , Oxford University Press.
• Kivy, Peter, 1973. “Introduction” to Francis Hutcheson: An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design , The Hague: Martinus, Nijhoff.
• Kramnick, Isaac, 1995. “Introduction” to The Portable Enlightenment Reader , New York: Penguin.
• Popkin, R. H., 1979. The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Schmidt, James (ed.), 1996. What is Enlightenment ? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• –––, 2000. “What Enlightenment Project?”, Political Theory , 28(6): 734–757.
• Strickland, Susan, 1994. “Feminism, Postmodernism and Difference”, in Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology , edited by Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford, New York: Routledge, 265–274.
• Zuckert, Rachel, 2014. “Aesthetics” in Garrett (ed.), Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy , London: Routledge.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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aesthetics: British, in the 18th century | aesthetics: French, in the 18th century | aesthetics: German, in the 18th century | Bacon, Francis | Bayle, Pierre | Burke, Edmund | Clarke, Samuel | Collins, Anthony | Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de | Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de: in the history of feminism | cosmopolitanism | Descartes, René | emotion: 17th and 18th century theories of | ethics: natural law tradition | German Philosophy: in the 18th century, prior to Kant | Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron) d’ | Hume, David | Kant, Immanuel | Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology | Locke, John | Mendelssohn, Moses | Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de | Newton, Isaac | Reid, Thomas | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of] | toleration | Vico, Giambattista | Voltaire | Wolff, Christian

Acknowledgments

Mark Alznauer, Margaret Atherton, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Alan Nelson, Julius Sensat and Rachel Zuckert provided helpful comments on an earlier draft, which lead to substantial revisions.

Copyright © 2017 by William Bristow < bristow @ uwm . edu >

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Watercolor painting in britain, 1750–1850.

View of the Villa Lante on the Janiculum in Rome

John Robert Cozens

Lindisfarne Castle, Holy Island, Northumberland

Thomas Girtin

Craig Goch, Moel Hebog, North Wales

Cornelius Varley

View of Kensington Gardens, London

John Linnell

Rouen, View from Bon-Secours

Richard Parkes Bonington

View of University Park looking towards New College, Oxford

William Turner of Oxford

Elizabeth E. Barker Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

And never yet did Insurrection want Such water-colours, to impaint his cause .

— Shakespeare , Henry IV, Part I (1596), act 5, scene 1, line 80

Definition Watercolor is named for its primary component. It consists of a pigment dissolved in water and bound by a colloid agent (usually a gum, such as gum arabic); it is applied with a brush onto a supporting surface such as vellum, fabric, or—more typically—dampened paper. The resulting mark (after the water has evaporated) is transparent, allowing light to reflect from the supporting surface, to luminous effect. Watercolor is often combined with gouache (or “bodycolor”), an opaque water-based paint containing a white element derived from chalk, lead, or zinc oxide.

Materials The rise of watercolor painting as a serious artistic endeavor progressed hand-in-hand with the improvement and commercial development of its materials.

Paints Initially, artists ground their own colors from natural pigments, or else bought paint in liquid form. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, however, artists could purchase small, hard cakes of soluble watercolor (invented by William Reeves in 1780). To produce the paint, an artist dipped a cake in water and rubbed it onto a suitable receptacle, such as an oyster shell or porcelain saucer. Beginning in the 1830s, artists could buy moist watercolors in porcelain pans. An even greater advance arrived in 1846, when Winsor & Newton introduced moist watercolors in metal tubes (following the example of tubed oil paint, first sold in 1841). The machine-ground pigments pioneered by British manufacturers produced fine, homogeneous watercolors that set the international standard.

In 1834, Winsor & Newton introduced their patented zinc oxide pigment “Chinese White”; this superfine—and therefore smoothly applied—permanent color greatly improved the qualities of gouache. In the first half of the nineteenth century, J. M. W. Turner instituted the practice of applying diluted white gouache as a wash. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Pre-Raphaelite painters used white gouache as a ground upon which to paint in a precise, miniature-like style.

Paintboxes By the middle of the eighteenth century, British artists regularly sketched outdoors. In watercolor, they found a medium well-suited to their needs, capable of capturing fleeting effects of light and weather, and requiring readily portable materials. At first, artists made their own carrying cases: one treatise on watercolor painting published in 1731 provides instructions for making a pocket-sized ivory case with compartments for thirty-two colors, brushes, a porte-crayon (a drawing instrument that holds pieces of chalk), and compasses. Turner made something equally effective by sticking cakes of watercolor into a leather carrying case (modified from its original use as an almanac cover). Later, artists’ colormen sold ready-made boxes. The most luxurious—constructed of mahogany, and fitted with brass hardware and embossed-leather linings—provided porcelain mixing pans, wash bowls, storage tins for chalks or charcoal, trays for brushes and porte-crayons, and scrapers, blocks of ink, and colors. Less expensive alternatives met the demands of increasing numbers of amateur artists . The pocket-sized “Shilling color box” in japanned tin offered pan colors and compartments for mixing, along with separate tin water vessels that clipped to the edge. Commercially available from the 1830s, it became a Victorian bestseller (more than 11 million units sold from 1853 to 1870).

Brushes and Other Tools The fine hair of the Asiatic marten (or Russian sable)—which comes readily to a point in the mouth, holds a large amount of color, and flexes against the surface of the paper—provided watercolor painters with a pliant, firm, and durable material for applying color. Handles for such “sable” watercolor brushes were first made from quills, and later, metal-ferruled wooden shafts. Additional tools became common to watercolor painters during the nineteenth century, when “reductive” painting techniques flourished: scrapers, sandpaper, penknives, brush handles, or fingernails were used to remove dry or wet color from the surface of the paper to create highlights; sponges, brushes, bread crumbs, or bits of paper were used to blot watercolor washes and soften their intensity.

Paper The production of wove paper in the late eighteenth century laid the groundwork for future technical advances in watercolor painting. Whereas earlier papers retained the parallel laid lines of their paper-making molds, thereby causing wet watercolor washes to pool, wove papers exhibited virtually no impressions of their fine, wire-mesh molds, allowing painters to apply smooth, precise washes of watercolor without interruption.

Wove paper appeared in a published book as early as 1767, and was immediately sought out by artists. By the 1780s, James Whatman had developed a wove paper ready-sized with gelatin for use with watercolors. (Sizing a sheet with animal glue, gum, or egg provides a protective coating that reduces damage caused by wetting, rewetting, and reworking.) Over the course of the nineteenth century, a staggering array of watercolor papers of various sizes, textures, and surfaces emerged to meet the expanding techniques of the medium. By 1850, the leading manufacturer Whatman offered papers with three distinct surfaces, from least to most textured: “HP” (“hot pressed”), suited to detailed subjects; “Not” (“not hot pressed”), suited to less precise work; and “Rough” (“cold-pressed” or “unpressed”), suited to sketchy effects. A fourth option, “Griffin Antiquarian,” produced in conjunction with Winsor & Newton, offered a very large sheet of extraordinary strength. The trend for extremely tough surfaces that could withstand great amounts of scrubbing, rinsing, and scraping continued through the nineteenth century, culminating in J. Barcham Green & Son’s “O.W.” paper, a gelatin sized pure linen board developed by the painter John William North in 1895, and certified by the Royal Water-Colour Society.

To prevent thinner papers from cockling when dampened by the application of watercolors, artists typically stretched them taut. Initially, they pasted or pinned the edges of a dampened sheet to an ordinary drawing board; later (beginning in the nineteenth century), they clamped it to a commercially manufactured stretching board. One type consisted of a mahogany frame attached to a backboard. Its popularity is understandable: such stretching frames lent works-in-progress something of the aspect of a picture framed for exhibition.

History The technique of water-based painting dates to ancient times, and belongs to the history of many cultures in the world. In the West, European artists used watercolor to decorate illuminated manuscripts and to color maps in the Middle Ages, and to make studies from nature and portrait miniatures during the Renaissance ( 50.69.2 ; 35.89.4 ).

Today, the medium is most commonly associated with Britain during the period extending roughly from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century—the so-called Golden Age of watercolor. The tradition began with near-monochromatic examples: topographical drawings executed in graphite or ink, and tinted with a restricted range of colored washes by artists such as William Taverner (1703–1772), Paul Sandby (baptized 1731–1809), Thomas Hearne (1744–1817), Michael “Angelo” Rooker (1746–1801), and Thomas Malton (1748–1804). A different type of monochromatic landscape drawing, in which a design made in dark ink was washed (in its entirety) with a single hue, was developed by the influential drawing master Alexander Cozens (1717–1786) and continued by Joseph Wright, called “Wright of Derby” (1734–1797).

While some artists, such as Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827), continued to produce “tinted drawings” well into the nineteenth century, other artists began to challenge the conventions of firm outlines and pale hues in favor of more painterly effects, achieved using fluent washes of strong color. For some—such as Jonathan Skelton (active 1735–59), Francis Towne (1739–1816), William Pars (1742–1782), Thomas Jones (1742–1803), John “Warwick” Smith (1749–1831), and most importantly, John Robert Cozens (1752–1797) ( 67.68 ), son of Alexander Cozens mentioned above—a period of study in Italy prompted that change. Others, such as J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) ( 06.1051.1 ), took inspiration from the works of other artists (most notably, J. R. Cozens), and from the example of oil painting.

The new “Romantic” watercolor style developed around 1800 employed freer brushwork—often applied to rough-textured papers—and sought to capture fleeting atmospheric effects. John Constable (1776–1837) used watercolor to record the appearance of cloud-filled skies at specific times of day and in various weather conditions, and then used these aides mémoires in composing his oil paintings. Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828), a British artist active in France, developed a virtuoso watercolor style marked by its brilliant palette. David Wilkie (1785–1841), William James Müller (1812–1845), and John Fredrick Lewis (1805–1876) shared that taste, and employed it in the service of exotic subjects encountered on journeys to “Oriental” lands—Egypt, Turkey, and the Middle East.

This trend toward stylistic brevity might also be traced through the scientific instrument painter and amateur watercolorist Cornelius Varley (1781–1873) ( 1973.83 )—brother of the painter and influential teacher John Varley (1778–1842)—who created remarkably powerful scenes with simple applications of broad washes. The celebrated painter and printmaker John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) could wield his brush boldly, in landscapes whose watercolor hues became increasingly brilliant. His distinguished contemporary David Cox (1783–1859), one the greatest British landscape painters, who studied briefly with Varley, used rough-textured papers to achieve bold effects, while Cox’s friend Peter De Wint (1784–1849) favored broad strokes of warm-toned watercolor.

Samuel Prout (1783–1852) used bright color to enliven his exquisite renderings of architectural subjects. William Turner (1789–1862) (called “Turner of Oxford” to distinguish him from his better-known contemporary) created precise, carefully composed landscapes of great subtlety ( 2000.242 ). John Linnell (1792–1882) ( 2000.238 ), like Turner of Oxford, studied with John Varley; Linnell also befriended (and commissioned work from) William Blake (1757–1827). Linnell’s artistic trajectory, like that of his son-in-law, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), moved from a visionary early style to a mature naturalism to a high Victorian interest in bright color and striking atmospheric effects.

Societies During the period considered here (from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century), various informal sketching clubs and several professional societies structured the experience of watercolor painters and their audiences in Britain. Such groups—whose membership often overlapped, and whose histories, not surprisingly, were frequently entwined—allowed artists (professional and amateur) to share technical information and stimulated stylistic advances; they further served to promote the medium’s status relative to oil painting in an expanding, and increasingly competitive, market for art.

Beginning in about 1794, Dr. Thomas Monro (a physician specializing in mental illness, as well as an amateur artist and collector) held an evening “Academy” at his London home, where young artists (Turner, Girtin, Paul Sandby Munn, Louis Francia, and later, Cotman, the Varleys, William Henry Hunt, and Linnell) gathered to copy and color works from his collection, such as those by his patient, J. R. Cozens. In 1799, the “Brothers” sketching club held its first monthly meeting, at which members (including Girtin, Francia, Robert Ker Porter, George Samuel, John Charles Denham, Thomas Giles Worthington, Thomas Richard Underwood, Cotman, Augustus Wall Callcott, Munn, Joshua Cristall, and John Varley) treated a common subject.

The first years of annual public exhibitions in London offered watercolor painters various places to exhibit their work: with the Society of Artists of Great Britain (from 1760 to 1791); with the Free Society of Artists (from 1760 to 1783); and with the Royal Academy (after 1768). The conditions of display, however, were less than ideal. If not “skied” at the top of floor-to-ceiling displays, or overpowered by larger, brighter neighboring oils, they were relegated to dimly lit, crowded anterooms. The peripheral location of watercolor displays vis-à-vis the central exhibition space matched the lesser academic status accorded the medium by comparison to oil painting.

Not surprisingly, watercolor painters sought a more favorable forum. In 1804, a group of leading practitioners—William Frederick Wells, Samuel Shelley, William Henry Pyne, Robert Hills, Nicholas Pocock, Francis Nicholson, the Varleys, John Claude Nattes, and William Sawrey Gilpin—founded the Society of Painters in Water-Colours. Other members joined soon afterward—George Barret, Joshua Cristall, John Glover, William Havell, James Holworthy, Stephen Francis Rigaud—and the group (generally called the “Old Water-Colour Society”) held its first annual exhibition in 1805. Following a decree by Queen Victoria in 1881, the society’s name is now proceeded by the designation “Royal.”

In 1807, a group of painters excluded from this group—and therefore from its exhibitions—formed a rival institution, the New Society of Painters in Miniature and Water-Colours, or the Associated Artists in Water-Colours (renamed, in 1810, the Associated Painters in Water-Colours). Its members included William Westall, John Laporte, Samuel Owen, Hugh William Williams, Cox, and Blake; nonmember exhibitors included Francia, De Wint, Frederick Nash, Cotman, Luke Clennell, and Prout. By 1812, however, financial insolvency had brought an end to this group.

Further internal wrangling among the members of the “Old” Society led to the formation of the New Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1831 by Joseph Powell, W. Cohen, James Fuge, Thomas Maisey, Giles Firman Phillips, George Sidney Shepherd, William B. S. Taylor, and Thomas Charles Wageman. It would evolve into the group now known as the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours.

Barker, Elizabeth E. “Watercolor Painting in Britain, 1750–1850.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bwtr/hd_bwtr.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Hardie, Martin. Water-Colour Painting in Britain . 3 vols. London: , 1966–68.

Wilton, Andrew, and Anne Lyles. The Great Age of British Watercolours, 1750–1880 . Exhibition catalogue. Munich: Prestel, 1993.

Additional Essays by Elizabeth E. Barker

• Barker, Elizabeth E.. “ The Printed Image in the West: Mezzotint .” (October 2003)
• Barker, Elizabeth E.. “ Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) .” (October 2004)
• Barker, Elizabeth E.. “ John Constable (1776–1837) .” (October 2004)
• Barker, Elizabeth E.. “ William Blake (1757–1827) .” (October 2004)

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Adventures in Eighteenth-century Papermaking

By Hannah L Wills, on 21 July 2017

By Hannah Wills

Earlier this summer, I gave a talk with some of the other engagers at our ‘Materials & Objects’ event at the UCL Art Museum. In preparing for the event, we were all challenged to think about the objects, materials, and physical ‘stuff’ that we work with on a daily basis. As I’ve written about before , my research focuses on the notebooks and diaries of a late eighteenth-century physician and natural philosopher, Charles Blagden (1748-1820), who served as secretary to the Royal Society. One of the things I’m interested in is how Blagden used his notebooks and diaries to keep track of his day-to-day activities, as well as the business of one of London’s major learned societies. Record keeping and note taking was a central part of Blagden’s life, and it’s owing to his impressive record keeping habit that there’s one material I handle in my research more than any other: eighteenth-century paper.

A selection of Blagden’s many notebooks, held at the Wellcome Library. (Image credit: Charles Blagden, L0068242 Lectures on chemistry , Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images, MSS 1219 – MSS1227. CC BY 4.0 )

When I began preparing my talk for ‘Materials & Objects’, I started to think about how I might bring paper, a relatively mundane material, to life. My initial reading on the craft of papermaking told me that despite it being a 2000-year old process, making paper by hand has changed relatively little between then and now. [i] Out of curiosity, I decided to do an experiment, and to see if I could replicate some of the processes of eighteenth-century papermaking at home, in my kitchen.

The first stage in the papermaking process is to select the material from which the paper is going to be made. In the eighteenth century, this would typically have been cotton and linen rags. Towards the end of the century, shortages of rags, in part caused by an increased use of paper for printing, meant that makers began to experiment with other materials. In 1801, the very first book printed on recycled paper was published in London—that is, paper that had been printed on once before already. [ii]

Having selected the material, the next step is to break it down, making it into a pulp. When papermaking was first introduced in Europe in the twelfth century, rags were wetted, pressed into balls, and then left to ferment. After this, the rags were macerated in large water-powered stamping mills. [iii] In the eighteenth century, a beating engine, or a Hollander, was used to tear up the material, creating a wet pulp by circulating rags around a large tub with a cylinder fitted with cutting bars (see below). [iv] For my purposes, I found a kitchen blender worked well to break up scraps of used paper from my recycling bin at home, ready to make into new blank sheets.

(Left) Eighteenth-century illustration of a beating engine, from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 5, Paris, 1767. (Right) A kitchen blender achieves roughly the same effect, breaking up old used paper soaked in water to create a pulp. (Image credits: Left “ Papermaking. Plate VIII ” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Abigail Wendler Bainbridge. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2013. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Right Hannah Wills)

Having been broken down, the liquid pulp mixture is then transferred to a container. In the eighteenth century, someone known as the ‘vatman’ would have stood over this container and dipped a mould into the solution at a near-perpendicular angle. Turning the mould face upwards in the solution before lifting it out horizontally, the vatman would have pulled out the mould to find an even covering of macerated fibres assembled across its surface. It is these fibres that would later form the finished sheet of paper. [v]

An eighteenth-century vatman dipping the mould into the vat. (Image credit: Detail “ Papermaking. Plate X ” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 )

The moulds used in papermaking determine several features of the finished sheets of paper, including shape, texture and appearance. The type of mould first used in European papermaking was known as a ‘laid’ mould. This mould typically featured wires laced horizontally into vertical wooden ribs, meaning that when the mould was pulled out of the vat, the pulp would lie heavier on either size of the wooden ribs, giving vertical dark patches and the characteristic markings of ‘laid’ paper. [vi]

A laid mould, with vertical wooden ribs and horizontal wires. A design and marker’s name are visible sewn into the mould, and will leave what is known as the ‘watermark’ on individual sheets of paper. (Image credit: Laid mold and deckle , Denmark – Robert C. Williams Paper Museum, CC0 1.0 )

Characteristic ‘link and chain’ pattern found on laid paper, left by the ribs and wires. This piece is a modern imitation of antique laid paper. (Image credit: Hannah Wills)

In mid-eighteenth century Britain, a new type of mould became widely used, developed by the Whatman papermakers based in Kent. This mould was known as a ‘wove’ mould, and had a much smoother surface, consisting of a fine brass screening that was woven like cloth. These moulds imparted a more uniform and fabric-like texture to individual sheets. [vii]

A wove mould, featuring two large watermark designs. Between the watermarks the smooth surface of the woven screening is visible, which leaves the paper with a fabric-like textured appearance, without the prominent horizontal and vertical lines of laid paper. (Image credit: Wove mould made by J. Brewer, London, England – Robert C. Williams Paper Museum, CC0 1.0 )

For my own papermaking, I chose to dip a piece of fine sieve-like material into my makeshift vat, aiming to replicate partially the texture and appearance of a ‘wove’ mould. The implement I chose for this was a small kitchen pan splatter guard, made up of fine mesh that when pulled out of the vat would hold a layer of fibres on its surface.

My chosen mould, a kitchen pan splatter guard, made from fine sieve-like material. (Image credit: Hannah Wills)

Dipping the mould into the vat and removing slowly, fibres are left on the surface of the mould. (Image credit: Hannah Wills)

After the mould was pulled from the vat, the eighteenth-century vatman would pass it on to a coucher who would remove the sheet from the mould, before pressing it between felts to remove the water. [viii]

On the left, the vatman pulls the mould from the vat, before passing it to the coucher on the right hand side of the image, who removes the sheet from the mould before pressing a number of sheets at the same time in a large press. (Image credit: “ Papermaking. Plate X ” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 )

In order to remove my sheet of paper from the mould, I placed another sieve-material implement over the top of the fibres and pressed down with a sponge. With a tea towel placed underneath, this worked to remove much of the water without the need for a proper press. Pulling the top piece of sieve away from the bottom, I was left with a drier surface of fibres, which could be carefully lifted off the mould, and set aside to dry.

(Left) Pressing the sheet of fibres between two splatter guards. (Right) After the top guard is removed, the pressed sheet of paper is revealed. The circular shape is due to the shape of the mould. (Image credits: Both Hannah Wills)

At this point in the eighteenth-century process, sheets were ‘sized’—dipped into a gelatinous substance made from animal hides that made the sheet stronger and water resistant. [ix] After my sheets had been left to one side to dry for a few hours, I decided to experiment by writing on them. I had not applied size to any of my sheets, so found that when I wrote on them the ink spread out, giving a sort of blotting paper effect.

(Left) After pressing, the sheets are dipped into large tub containing size. This step is important if the paper is to have a slightly waterproof quality that enables it to be written on without the ink spreading. (Right) Writing with ink on untreated sheets results in the ink spreading out across the paper. (Image credits: Left “ Papermaking. Plate XI ” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 . Right Hannah Wills)

After having size applied, sheets in an eighteenth-century papermill would have undergone a number of finishing stages. These included polishing and surfacing, processes that gave the paper a more uniform appearance. [x] With my own sheets of paper, I found passing a warm iron over the surface achieved a similar effect, removing some of the creases and wrinkles that had appeared during drying.

My finished sheet of paper, trimmed down into a small square ready for use. (Image credit: Hannah Wills)

It is after these final finishing and drying processes that sheets of paper are ready to be packaged up and sent to the stationer’s.

Replicating historic crafts and processes is not new within the discipline of history. One of my favourite examples is a paper that was published in 1995, in which the historian Heinz Otto Sibum recreated the experiments of the scientist James Prescott Joule (1818-1889) in determining the mechanical equivalent of heat . By trying to recreate the experiment from Joule’s notes, Sibum revealed that Joule made frequent use of the bodily skills he developed while working in the brewing industry, such as the ability to measure temperatures remarkably accurately by using only his elbow. [xi] Often, attempting to replicate an experiment or craft will reveal just how much it relies upon implicit bodily skills, or tacit knowledge, the kinds of ‘knacks’ that are not written down but are simply known to those who perform an activity regularly.

In attempting to replicate the craft of eighteenth-century papermaking, I really only approximated the process, making substitutions for equipment and improvising a number of techniques, particularly when it came to removing my delicate wet sheets of paper from the mould. I think the biggest lesson I learnt was to have a greater appreciation of the material, and just how many skills and processes went into crafting each sheet of paper in the eighteenth century. Characteristics of individual sheets such as colour, texture and markings had not caught my attention in the archives previously, but I now find them fascinating for what they can reveal about the nature of the fibres used, the construction of the paper mould, and the processes followed by each individual papermaker.

References:

[i] Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Dover, 1978), 178.

[ii] Ibid., 309-33.

[iii] Ibid., 153-55.

[iv] Theresa Fairbanks and Scott Wilcox, Papermaking and the Art of Watercolour in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Paul Sandby and the Whatman Paper Mills (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2006), 68.

[v] Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft , 177.

[vi] Ibid., 114-23.

[vii] Ibid., 125-27. See also Fairbanks and Wilcox, Papermaking and the Art of Watercolour in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Paul Sandby and the Whatman Paper Mills .

[viii] Papermaking and the Art of Watercolour in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Paul Sandby and the Whatman Paper Mills , 71.

[ix] Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft , 194.

[x] Ibid., 196-99.

[xi] Heinz Otto Sibum, “Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 26, no. 1 (1995): 73-106.

Filed under Hannah Wills , Materials & Objects , Research

Tags: Art Museum , history , Literature , PhD , research

One Response to “Adventures in Eighteenth-century Papermaking”

Instructive – and fun! (Measuring temperature with my elbow… something to work on! )

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18th or Eighteenth? How to Write Centuries in Formal Writing

• 2-minute read
• 6th May 2022

If you’re writing a research paper , marketing copy, or other professional document, you’ll want to know how to write dates and centuries correctly. Should you use numbers or words? Is it necessary to hyphenate or capitalize centuries? And, finally, just when did the 18th century take place? Read on for more!

Numbers Versus Words

There is no hard-and-fast rule about when to use numbers and when to use words in writing centuries, as long as you are clear and consistent. A guideline that is often adopted is that centuries after the tenth are represented using numerals (e.g., “16th century”), whereas earlier centuries are spelled out in words (e.g., “seventh century”); this is the rule that is followed by this blog post. If you’re using a style guide , however, it’s always worth checking its specifications.

When to Hyphenate Centuries

When centuries are used as adjective phrases preceding the nouns they modify, they are hyphenated:

It’s a 21st-century problem.

The ninth-century church is situated in the heart of the village.

However, when a century is used as a noun phrase , you should not use a hyphen:

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The 20th century was an era of technological innovation.

Napoleon invaded Russia in the 19th century .

This is consistent with genera hyphenation rules .

When to Capitalize Centuries

There’s a simple answer to this question: never! While you may come across the capitalization of centuries in writing (e.g., “12th Century”), it’s never correct, as “century” is simply a measure of time and not a proper noun .

How to Number Centuries

This is a slightly more confusing issue. Many people assume that the 18th century, for example, lasted from 1800 to 1899; the clue’s in the name, right? Wrong! The first century started in the year 1 A.D. and lasted until the year 100, so therefore, the second century lasted from 101 to 200. Therefore, the 18th century consists of the 1700s rather than the 1800s.

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The Resurgence of Poland: a Struggle for Independence

This essay is about Poland’s struggle and eventual achievement of independence. It discusses how Poland lost its sovereignty in the late 18th century due to partitions by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and highlights the persistent nationalist movements throughout the 19th century. The essay explains how World War I created an opportunity for Poland to regain independence, leading to the proclamation of sovereignty on November 11, 1918. It also covers the subsequent challenges Poland faced, including wars and political instability, and the final establishment of modern independence in 1989 after the fall of communism. The narrative underscores the resilience and determination of the Polish people in their quest for national sovereignty.

How it works

Poland’s path to independence is a tale of resilience and determination, marked by a series of partitions and a long struggle for sovereignty. The country first lost its independence in the late 18th century when it was partitioned by its powerful neighbors—Russia, Prussia, and Austria. These partitions, occurring in 1772, 1793, and 1795, effectively erased Poland from the map of Europe. For over a century, Poland existed only in the hearts and minds of its people, who never ceased to dream of regaining their nationhood.

The 19th century was a period of intense nationalist fervor across Europe, and Poland was no exception. Despite being under foreign rule, the Polish spirit of independence was kept alive through various uprisings and cultural movements. The November Uprising of 1830-31 and the January Uprising of 1863-64 were significant but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to throw off the yoke of oppression. These rebellions, though crushed, played a crucial role in maintaining a sense of Polish identity and nationalism.

The turn of the 20th century brought new opportunities and challenges. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 created a geopolitical upheaval that Poland’s patriots saw as a potential gateway to independence. With the major powers of Europe engaged in a brutal conflict, the stability of the occupying empires was in jeopardy. Polish leaders, such as Józef Pi?sudski, saw the war as a chance to achieve their long-held goal of an independent Poland. Pi?sudski, who initially sided with the Central Powers, later positioned himself to take advantage of the shifting political landscape to further Poland’s independence cause.

As World War I drew to a close, the political map of Europe was set for a dramatic change. The collapse of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires created a power vacuum that allowed for the re-emergence of several nations. Poland seized this moment. On November 11, 1918, just as the armistice ending World War I was signed, Poland proclaimed its independence. This date is now celebrated annually as Poland’s Independence Day. Józef Pi?sudski, who had been released from German captivity, returned to Warsaw and took control, becoming the Chief of State and a key figure in the re-establishment of the Polish state.

The road to a stable and secure independence, however, was fraught with challenges. The newly reborn Poland faced immediate threats from its neighbors and had to defend its borders in a series of conflicts, most notably the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. The Treaty of Riga, signed in 1921, ended the war with Soviet Russia and secured Poland’s eastern borders, but the country remained wary of future aggression from its powerful neighbor.

Domestically, Poland faced the daunting task of rebuilding a nation from the fragments left by years of partition and war. The interwar period was marked by significant efforts to unify the disparate territories and populations that had been under different administrations for over a century. Despite economic hardships and political instability, Poland made notable progress in building a cohesive state and fostering a sense of national unity.

The respite was tragically short-lived. In 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east, leading to another period of occupation and devastation during World War II. The war ended with Poland under Soviet influence, and it wasn’t until the fall of communism in 1989 that Poland could once again truly claim its independence.

Poland’s modern independence, achieved in 1989, marked the end of a long and arduous struggle. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed Poland to emerge as a sovereign state in the new European order. Since then, Poland has established itself as a democratic nation and a member of the European Union, continuing to build on its rich history and resilient spirit.

In summary, Poland’s journey to independence is a testament to the enduring strength and determination of its people. From the partitions of the 18th century through the tumult of the 20th century, the dream of a free and independent Poland was never abandoned. The rebirth of Poland on November 11, 1918, stands as a symbol of hope and resilience, reflecting the unwavering pursuit of national sovereignty and identity.

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How tea may have saved lives in 18th century England

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Drinking tea can have several health benefits. There is seemingly a brew for everything from sleep to inflammation to digestion. In 18th century England, however, drinking tea may have saved a person’s life, and it likely had very little to do with leaves and herbs. 

For CU Boulder economics professor Francisca Antman, it’s all about the water. Specifically, boiling the water and eliminating bacteria that could cause illnesses like dysentery, more commonly known during the Industrial Revolution as “bloody flux.” 

It’s not a new idea—the connection between boiling water for tea and a decline in deaths across England. A quantitative method of testing it, however, is. 

Antman analyzed data from more than 400 parishes around England, looking at mortality rates before and after tea became popular and affordable throughout the country. 

She spoke with CU Boulder Today about her research and its modern-day impact on conversations about clean water, health and human behavior. 

These data are centuries old. Why look so far back? 

The nice thing about this setting is that it occurs before we know the importance of clean water. The evidence suggests that tea became affordable to nearly everyone in England in the late 1780s, during the Industrial Revolution.

Population density is rising, cities are really growing, people are being packed tighter and tighter. That should actually be a period where we see a lot of increasing mortality. But we end up seeing this surprising decline in mortality that can be explained by the introduction of tea and, more specifically, the boiling of water.

How did you analyze so much data? 

The analysis compared areas based on water quality, which had to be inferred. That measure of water quality is based on geographical features, such as the number of running water sources or elevation. 

In areas where you expect water quality should have been inherently worse, you see a bigger decline in mortality when tea comes in. It’s not like the water itself is pure or up to the standards of drinking water that we have today. But what you see is those areas that should have benefited more do benefit more as they begin to boil water for tea consumption. 

I am so lucky to be able to stand on the shoulders of giants here—the historical demographers Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schofield who collected these data. Very few places in the world have data like this, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the monumental efforts of demographers and historians who went through the parish records in England and basically constructed these data series that I then was able to analyze. 

What’s the modern takeaway here? 

I’m a development economist and a labor economist. We know water is important, not just for health but also for people’s economic lives and social lives. We know there are still many developing nations where access to clean water, especially for women and girls, is still a struggle. 

It can be challenging to identify the causal impact of clean water on people’s lives because we already know it’s so important, but quantifying that can be difficult. 

This research is an example of people changing their behaviors, not because of any outside influence or suggestions about healthy habits or clean water—but simply because they wanted to drink tea. It is a great example of how a population adopted a healthy behavior without someone trying to change culture or customs from the outside, but because they wanted to adopt the practice from within. 

It’s something we can look at and possibly try to emulate when considering future interventions aimed at improving health more generally, including with respect to water. 

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CU Boulder Today regularly publishes Q&As with our faculty members weighing in on news topics through the lens of their scholarly expertise and research/creative work. The responses here reflect the knowledge and interpretations of the expert and should not be considered the university position on the issue. All publication content is subject to edits for clarity, brevity and  university style guidelines .

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Tea Was a Real Life Saver in 18th Century England

By Ernie Mundell HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 27, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Sipped from porcelain cups amid the music of Mozart and periwigs of the 1700s, tea was introduced to England and began its quiet work saving thousands of lives, new research confirms.

It wasn't the leaves that kept tea drinkers out of danger: It was the boiled water tea was served in.

Unboiled water had long left England's residents at very high risk for bacterial illnesses such as dysentery , dubbed the "bloody flux" during this period.

Tea helped change all that, the new study found.

U.S. Cities With the Most Homelessness

When the beverage was first introduced into England around the 1780s, the Industrial Revolution was just getting underway, explained Colorado University Boulder researcher Francisca Antman .

"Population density is rising, cities are really growing, people are being packed tighter and tighter," she said. "That should actually be a period where we see a lot of increasing mortality. But we end up seeing this surprising decline in mortality that can be explained by the introduction of tea and, more specifically, the boiling of water."

Antman, a professor of economics at CU Boulder, noted that the importance of boiling water wasn't understood in the 18th century.

However, "tea became affordable to nearly everyone in England in the late 1780s," she said, so the practice quickly spread.

Just how important was this shift from cool to hot beverages, in terms of health?

To find out, Antman tracked 18th century death rates before and after tea's introduction in 400 different English parishes. She also investigated the sources of water available to people living in each parish -- whether the water was running or stagnant, for example.

"In areas where you expect water quality should have been inherently worse, you see a bigger decline in mortality when tea comes in," Antman said in a university news release.

"It’s not like the water itself is pure or up to the standards of drinking water that we have today," she added. "But what you see is those areas that should have benefited more do benefit more as they begin to boil water for tea consumption."

The new findings, published recently in the journal The Review of Economics and Statistics , shouldn't simply be viewed as ancient history, according to Antman.

"We know water is important, not just for health but also for people’s economic lives and social lives," she said. "We know there are still many developing nations where access to clean water, especially for women and girls, is still a struggle."

In the example of tea, people made an incredibly healthy change away from germ-filled water as a side effect of a behavior they embraced for reasons other than health.

"It is a great example of how a population adopted a healthy behavior without someone trying to change culture or customs from the outside, but because they wanted to adopt the practice from within," Antman said. "It’s something we can look at and possibly try to emulate when considering future interventions aimed at improving health more generally, including with respect to water."

More information

Find out more about dysentery at the Cleveland Clinic .

SOURCE: Colorado University Boulder, news release, May 20, 2024

Copyright © 2024 HealthDay . All rights reserved.

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