The Georgians and the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment

Immanuel Kant
the German philosopher
who defined the Enlightenment

The eighteenth century is the age of the Enlightenment – the application of reason to all aspects of life. In France it is associated with Voltaire and the other philosophes. In 1784 the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (go here if you want a detailed philosophy tutorial!) published 'Was ist Äufklarung?' (‘What is Enlightenment’?)

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. … Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’,  is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

The origins of the British Enlightenment

The origins go back to the late seventeenth century. Two thinkers above all influenced Georgian Enlightenment thought. Isaac Newton described a universe based on rational principles.  John Locke constructed a theory of knowledge based on the accumulation of ‘impressions’. The human infant was born a ‘tabula rasa’(blank slate) and character was acquired rather than innate.

The Enlightenment in action: smallpox

Georgian doctors were largely ignorant of the causes of diseases and they still treated illness according to Galenic principles. However, there was one significant medical advance – the use first of inoculation and later of vaccination.

Inoculation was brought to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire 1717-18. In Turkey she had her son inoculated and when she returned to England her daughter received the same treatment. Both survived.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
by Jonathan Richardson the Younger
Public Domain

However, it took time for inoculation to be accepted. It came from the Muslim world, it was advocated by a woman, and, above all, it was counter-intuitive and risky (though of course less risky than the disease itself). It was first tried -successfully - on seven condemned criminals. It became more acceptable with Caroline, Princess of Wales, a highly intelligent and enlightened woman, had her daughters inoculated in 1722. 

The Wellcome Library has a couple of fascinating letters, written by George I to his daughter, the Queen of Prussia, urging her to inoculate her children. See here for more.

By the end of the Georgian period, inoculation was being replaced by the safer and more reliable vaccination, pioneered by the physician, Edward Jenner. From his observations of milkmaids, who were generally immune to smallpox, Jenner concluded that the mild ‘cowpox’ they contracted gave them immunity. On 14 May 1796 he vaccinated an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, with 'cowpox' from blisters from the hands of a milkmaid who had caught the disease. 

Thanks to the twin treatments of inoculation and vaccination, smallpox was far less of a killer at the end of the Georgian period than it had been at the beginning. Instead, medical science was puzzling over how to treat the newer threats of tuberculosis and cholera.

Politeness, sociability, and the literary world

Two of the dominant values of the Georgian era were 'politeness' and 'sociability'. Together they give an insight into the values of the period, its leisure pursuits, and its intellectual interests.  

‘Politeness'

The term, derived from the Greek polis (city state), carried implications of good breeding and sociability. ‘Politeness’ united (most of) the aristocracy, gentry, and middling sort in a common culture of ‘gentility’. They frequented the spa towns of Bath, Tunbridge (not yet Tunbridge Wells) and Buxton. Those who could afford to do so spent the winter in London where they attended plays and concerts, and retreated to the countryside in the summer where they paid ceaseless calls on their neighbours and attended the provincial theatre and assemblies. Like Jane Austen's Fanny Prince in Mansfield Park, they subscribed to circulating libraries. See here for another account of circulating libraries.

Newspapers and periodicals

In 1695 Parliament had made the momentous decision not to renew the Licensing Act that had required all published works to gain government approval before publication. This was followed by what the historian Julian Hoppit (A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727, Oxford, 2000) has called ’an explosion of printed matter issuing from the press, be it books, pamphlets, sermons, journals, or newspapers’. One foreigner noted that 

‘England is a country abounding in printed Papers’. 

These catered for a reading public eager for news and the expression of opinion.

The Daily Courant (1702) was the first daily newspaper. 

Members of polite society also read periodicals, The Tatler, The Spectator, and (from 1731) The Gentleman's Magazine.

Title page of The Gentleman's Magazine
from 1759.

The Georgian period: an overview

George I in his coronation robes
by Sir Godfrey Kneller
Public domain

The Georgian period witnessed major developments in the British state and the lives of the people. It was far less dramatic than the seventeenth century but in a different way, the period was just as revolutionary.

The eighteenth century was the inheritor of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, which saw the overthrow of the Catholic monarch James II and his replacement by his Protestant nephew, William of Orange. It ended the prospect of a centralized and absolute monarchy. Power was increasingly located in the ‘King in Parliament’, and after 1689 Parliament became a permanent part of the constitution. It sat every year, and its work-load dramatically increased.

Religion played a major role in the state Although the eighteenth century is often seen as a century of religious apathy, Britain was a profoundly Christian country and witnessed two waves of a major religious revival, the first beginning in the 1730s, the second in the 1790s. Religious sectarianism had not disappeared and anti-Catholicism remained a ferocious force. The establishment in England was firmly Anglican. The monarch had to be Protestant. The Toleration Act (1689) granted freedom of worship to Protestant Dissenters, but they were (at least in theory) barred them from public office. In Scotland, Presbyterianism was the established religion. A series of penal laws, especially harsh in Ireland, discriminated powerfully against Roman Catholics.

The nation state of Great Britain had come came into being. Wales had been peacefully absorbed into England in the sixteenth century but until the Union of Parliaments in 1707 Scotland remained an independent state. The Glorious Revolution acted as a powerful catalyst for political and economic unity. It was fear of a disputed succession that had led to the union of parliaments. This was an economic as well as a political union. Scots now paid the same taxes and customs duties and competed for the same government and administrative posts. But since the Revolution settlement the Scots had been permitted to maintain their own law, and Presbyterianism remained the established religion. Ireland had its own parliament in Dublin, composed entirely of members of the Protestant ascendancy, even though 90 per cent of the population were Roman Catholic.

Georgian Britain was a hierarchical society Politics was dominated by the aristocracy who (along with the bishops) made up the House of Lords. Most members of the Commons were connected in some way to the aristocracy as heirs, relations, or clients. The aristocracy and country gentry retained enormous prestige throughout the period (though anti-aristocratic rhetoric increased from the end of the century). The ‘middling sort’ (not referred to as the 'middle classes' before the 1790s) were increasingly numerous and wealthy, but on the whole they did not aspire to political power. However, they mixed socially with the upper classes in 'polite' society. 

The majority of the population was poor – though the degrees of poverty varied greatly and most visiting foreigners were struck by the comparative prosperity of the English. Few believed it was appropriate for the ‘lower orders’ to have a political voice. 

Britain was an increasingly wealthy trading nation During this period national wealth doubled in real terms. The consequence (and the cause) was a growing domestic market which could only be satisfied through commercial expansion, both at home and overseas. London was the largest city in western Europe and the provincial towns grew in wealth. Britain sought and won an empire in the West Indies, North America, and Asia against international competition and by the end of the period was indisputably the world’s great imperial power.

Britain was also a major European power engaged in a series of wars against other European countries, notably France. She fought the ‘second Hundred Years War’ in 63 of the 144 years between 1689 and 1815 (44 per cent), all but one of them victories. These wars created their own institutions for tax gathering, financial investing and military administration - and in doing so they transformed the British state.

Conclusion

1. Georgian Britain was the inheritor of the Glorious Revolution. It was not a democracy but the monarch's power was restricted by Parliament.
2. It was a relatively prosperous country, a trading nation with a consumerist economy.
3. It fought a series of largely successful wars against France and by the end of the period the British Empire was the largest the world had ever seen.

Queen Anne and and George I: how they were related

This article on the History of Parliament blog neatly demolishes the often repeated story (which I've repeated myself many times!) that there were more than forty people with a better claim to the throne than George, Elector of Hanover. 

The first two Georges

The Hanoverian dynasty celebrated in
the Painted Hall in Greenwich
Sir James Thornhill
Public domain

At 6 pm on 18 September 1714 Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, landed at Greenwich, to be greeted by cheering crowds. In August, following the death of Queen Anne, he had been proclaimed King of Great Britain. He spent his first night in England at the Queen's House. The following day he held his first royal reception there. 

George owed his crown to the Act of Settlement of 1701, which settled the English succession in favour of George’s mother, the Electress Sophia of Hanover and her heirs, ‘being Protestant’.
It remains the law to this day and is the present Queen’s legal title to the throne. By the laws of hereditary succession, James Francis Edward (the Old Pretender), the son of the deposed James II, was the rightful king, but his Catholicism barred him from the throne.