New twists on the thinking-man's century

ENLIGHTENMENT: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World by Roy Porter (Allen Lane, 25)

THE 18th century made Britain, not merely as a political entity, but in its habits and mental attitudes. You need just walk down Kensington Church Street to see in the windows of antique shops - all those 18th-century armchairs and drinking-glasses - a thoroughly modern domesticity. As for our mental decor, it was then we learned to read newspapers and novels, attend public exhibitions and performances, talk nicely to the other sex, disbelieve in God.

There are fashions in the interpretation of the 18th century. While to its luminaries, it was an age of Progress and Improvement and Trade and the Polite, the Victorians saw only atheists and libertines and the overturning of the social order at the Bastille.

For Marx, the 18th century burdened the world with the bourgeois ideology known as political economy (renamed economics) and the miseries of the Manchester factories. As a schoolchild, I learned about something called The Enlightenment, an age of free enquiry sandwiched between two deplorable ages of religious bigotry. At college, I learned that The Age of Reason was an illusion. It was really the Age of Feeling, which blows out in a gust of pornographic fantasy and floods of sentimental tears.

Now the postmodernists lecture us about masculine control and conformity, an assault on the natural world, incipient colonialism.

In Professor Roy Porter's learned and interesting book, the British 18th century is all those things and more. So broad is his reading and so generous his sympathies, that he can justify all of those interpretations. If Porter has a preferred 18th century, it is an age not unlike our own, where once privileged information percolates through society (though by means of print rather than computerised telephony), where women and strangers come into their own and questions of good and evil, and right and wrong conduct have ceased to be dogma and are become matters of human nature.

The book opens with a bang-up Aunt Sally: the British Enlightenment or the enlightenment in Britain has been neglected.

While few people dispute that Paris was the capital of the 18th as of the 19th centuries, even the philosophes acknowledged the pre- eminent role of John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton in clearing away the rubbish of the medieval schools, and of The Spectator in creating a new personality, self-conscious and polished, for the inhabitants of capital cities.

What is true, I think, is that the London of Dr Johnson and the somnolent English universities were alarmed by some of the metaphysical consequences of the writings of Locke and Newton, but those did not deter the Scots. David Hume emerges from this book, as from others, as the great British mind and soul of the century and if even he, in the end, failed to pursue his scepticism to its conclusion, who is to blame him, if that conclusion was the Terror and the Guillotine?

Locke, Newton, Hume and Smith - London and Edinburgh - supply the ballast of the book, but there are thrilling passages on the lesser centres of Birmingham, Norwich, Newcastle and such second-or third- rank luminaries as Price, Priestley, the anarchist Godwin, the geologist Hutton, Lord Monboddo, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Adam Smith feared that the division of labour would soon apply to mental pursuits, but Porter's breadth of interest is truly pre- modern: novels, conjectural history, the cults of nature and suicide, pleasure gardens, witchcraft, medicine, newspapers, biblical criticism, insurance, the rules of cricket, geology, prisons, workhouses and lunatic asylums, science fiction, pineapples. In one or two passages, sentences are so stiff with information they read like crossword clues, while on the last page Porter is still pumping it out as the credits come down.

Even so, he ignores commerce, finance and warfare as well as the North American and European continents Voltaire Who? You'd better hang on to Dickson and Plumb and Paul Hazard's European Thought in the Eighteenth Century.

Professor Porter wants to be friends with everybody so every now and then he throws in some post-modern jargon - oh! the strategies, the discourses, the subversive interiorised gendering elites! - and the cliches of the Press and TV (soundbites, trashing).

Such sentences have a fatigued air about them and are just killed by the 18th century quotations that follow them. It seems the 18th century was new in a way ours is not.

Roy Porter will be lecturing on The Enlightenment "Removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge" tomorrow at 5.30pm, Beveridge Hall, Senate House, Malet Street, WC1.

Admission is free. There are two further lectures on 7 and 14 November.

For further information, call The Institute of Historical Research on 020 7862 8740.

Copyright 2000
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