6. “THE AGE OF BENEVOLENCE”

The “moral sense” or “moral sentiment,” the “social virtues” or “social affections,” the ideas of “benevolence,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” “fellow-feeling”— these were the defining terms of the moral philosophy that was at the heart of the British Enlightenment. It was this social ethos that was the common denominator of the two Smiths and the two Burkes, of secular philosophers and religious enthusiasts, of Church of England bishops and Wesleyan preachers and missionaries. And it was this ethos that found practical expression in the reform movements and philanthropic enterprises that flourished during the century, culminating in what the Evangelical writer Hannah More described (not entirely in praise) as “the Age of Benevolence,” and what a later historian called “the new humanitarianism.”¹

Early in the century, Bernard Mandeville objected to the social ethos that was already becoming prevalent in his country, attributing it to that “noble writer” Lord Shaftesbury, who “fancies that as man is made for society, so he ought to be born with a kind affection to the whole of which he is a part, and a propensity to seek the welfare of it.”² Decades later, a London magistrate, distressed by what he regarded as the excessive leniency displayed toward criminals, also recalled Shaftesbury, rebuking Henry Fielding for “vulgarizing” him by reducing virtue to “good affections” and inventing “that cant phrase, goodness of heart, which is every day used as a substitute for probity and means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog.” The novel Tom Jones, he said, had done more toward corrupting the rising generation than any other work. “We live in an age,” the magistrate complained, “when humanity is in fashion.”³

Fielding was not only a novelist but also a justice of the peace and prison reformer. In 1740 (several years before the publication of Tom Jones), he praised the virtue of charity that “shone brighter in our time than at any period which I remember in our annals.” ⁴ He might have justified that claim by citing a History of London published the year before, which gave a detailed account of the schools, hospitals, alms-houses, and charitable societies flourishing in the metropolis. “As opulency and riches,” William Maitland wrote, “are the result of commerce, so are learning, hospitality, and charity the effects thereof.” Unlike other countries, he was pleased to report, England had a national, legal provision for relief, as well as a multitude of private charities supported by Englishmen of all ranks who raised vast sums of money to supplement public relief.⁵ By 1756, when the second edition appeared, this section of the book had to be greatly expanded to accommodate the many new societies and institutions that had been established in the interim. Maitland then commended his countrymen for the “truly Christian spirit of benevolence, which at this time so generally prevails amongst us, to the great honour of this age and nation.”⁶

Tocqueville did an injustice to Britain in identifying voluntary associations and civil society with the United States, as if they were unique to that country. The idea of “political association,” he conceded, was imported from England, but the Americans were far more skillful and constant in their use of “civil association.” This was the difference, he explained, between aristocratic and democratic societies. In aristocracies, there was less need for association because a few very powerful and wealthy individuals were capable of executing great undertakings by themselves, whereas in democratic societies, each individual was powerless by himself and therefore had the need to unite.⁷

In fact, there were a plenitude of such associations and a very lively civil society in Britain throughout the eighteenth century (and in the following century as well, when Tocqueville was writing). “Societies” existed for every kind of worthy purpose: “Promoting Christian Knowledge,” “Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor,” the “Reformation of Manners,” the abolition of slavery, and the care of a variety of unfortunates including abandoned infants, sick and maimed seamen, orphans of clergymen, prostitutes, chimney sweeps, criminals, released criminals, and potential criminals (poor boys who might be tempted to a life of crime), the deaf, dumb, blind, and lame. (A “Humane Society” was devoted to the resuscitation of the drowned.) And it was not only the very powerful and wealthy, as Tocqueville thought, who were the moving forces in these enterprises. A lord or lady might lend his or her name to one or another society, but it was generally men and women of not very great wealth or social standing— industrialists, merchants, civil servants, members of Parliament, writers, clerics, retired military and naval men, and civic-minded women—who initiated, directed, and financed them.

The word “philanthropy,” like “benevolence” and “compassion,” was much in fashion, both in the original sense of “love of mankind” and as applied to the many charitable enterprises that flourished at the time. Over a hundred institutions and societies were established in the course of the century, and scores of people contributed not only their money but considerable time and energy to one or several causes, making of philanthropy a profession, a full-time (or very nearly full-time) calling.⁸ Among the notable figures identified as philanthropists were John Howard, Jonas Hanway, Thomas Gilbert, Henry Hoare, Thomas Coram, Griffith Jones, Thomas Bernard, John and Henry Thornton, Richard Reynolds, and Sarah Trimmer. In 1780, Edmund Burke, in a speech supporting prison reform, paid tribute to Howard, who travelled throughout Europe, Burke said, not for personal or aesthetic pleasure but “to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infection of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collage the distresses of man in all countries. . . . It was a voyage of discovery, a circumnavigation of charity.”⁹ (Howard later died of an infection received while attending a prisoner in Russia.)

Philanthropists were also, inevitably, reformers, exposing wretched conditions in prisons and workhouses, proposing varieties of social and legal reforms, and creating and subsidizing new institutions. Between 1720 and 1750, five great London hospitals and nine in the country were founded, and the following half century saw the establishment of dispensaries, clinics, and specialized hospitals (maternity, infectious diseases, insane asylums). An act providing nursing care in the country for the infants of paupers, and such other measures as the paving and draining of many London streets and the clearing of some of its worst slums, resulted in a dramatic reduction of the death rates, for children especially. In the middle of the century, the proportion of burials of children under the age of five to the number of infants christened was almost 75 percent; by the end of the century, that proportion was just over 40 percent.^{10 26}

Philanthropists and reformers came in different sizes and shapes. William Hogarth is not usually included in that company, although he was surely one of them. His caricatures were powerful moral statements and were at least as effective—to judge by the extent to which they were plagiarized, pirated, and adapted for use in novels and plays—as the sermons of preachers and the more sober revelations of reformers.²⁷ “Gin Lane” depicts emaciated men and women in states of drunken abandon: one skeletal man is gnawing on a bone, another man has hanged himself, a besotted woman suckling an infant lets the child fall into the alley below. The inscription over the doorway of the liquor shop reads: “Drunk for a Penny, Dead Drunk for Twopence, Clean straw for nothing.” An accompanying cartoon, “Beer Street,” represents the salutary alternative to gin, with happy, corpulent men and women drinking beer; here the inn sign has merry harvesters dancing around a haystack. It was perhaps no accident that that same year, 1751, saw the passage of the act regulating the sale of cheap gin. Contemporaries recognized what historians have since affirmed, that this measure was a major event in the social history of London.

The series “Industry and Idleness” was even more unashamedly didactic. Hogarth explained that it followed the careers of two fellow apprentices, “the one, by taking good courses and pursuing those points for which he was put apprentice, becomes a valuable man and an ornament to his country; whilst the other, giving way to idleness, naturally falls into poverty and most commonly ends fatally.”¹³ Other moral messages emerged in the dozen plates of that series: the idle apprentice being driven to the place of his execution accompanied by the Methodist preacher who has apparently converted him, at least to the point where the apprentice joins him in singing a hymn; and the final plate where a huge crowd revels in the sight of his hanging at Tyburn—“Tyburn Fair,” as it was mockingly called. The last scene reflected the outrage frequently expressed by his friend Henry Fielding at the “barbarous custom peculiar to the English of insulting and jesting at misery.”¹⁴ The series as a whole was, in a sense, a commentary on the life of another friend, Benjamin Franklin, who in his person seemed to represent the triumphal progress of the industrious apprentice. The last letter Hogarth received before his death, to his great satisfaction, was from Franklin.

In “The Four Stages of Cruelty,” Hogarth dramatized an issue that had troubled Puritans in the seventeenth century and that emerged more prominently in the eighteenth. Hogarth’s cartoons on the cruelty to animals had a double edge, first to expose “that barbarous treatment of animals, the very sight of which renders the streets of our metropolis so distressing to every feeling mind,” and then to demonstrate the brutalizing effect of that barbarity upon the people inflicting it. ¹⁵ The boy who maltreats the animals in the first two scenes grows up to seduce a servant girl, incites her to robbery, and then murders her; the final panel shows his corpse, the hangman’s noose still around his neck, being dissected from head to toe, with a dog nibbling at his intestines. Years later, after the passage of laws suppressing blood sports (bull-and bear-baiting, cock-throwing and dog-fighting), Hogarth was pleased to think that his work (another of his cartoons depicted the gaming scene on the cock-pit) had “checked the diabolical spirit of barbarity” that had once prevailed in the country.¹⁶ A best-selling book for teenagers by “Tom Telescope,” bearing the portentous title The Newtonian System of Philosophy Adapted to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies, lectured its readers on the evils of cruelty to animals, and took the occasion to extend that lesson to slaves and other humans. “Kindness to animals, yes, but greater kindness to human beings” was the theme of Tom’s final lecture.¹⁷

Discussing the campaign against blood sports, the historian Lawrence Stone related it to the upsurge of new attitudes and emotions inspired by the rise of “a new ideal type, namely the Man of Sentiment, or the Man of Feeling, the prototype of the late eighteenth-century Romantic.”¹⁸ Other historians have related the “culture of sensibility” to a “culture of reform” and a “cult of benevolence.”¹⁹ One does not normally think of Shaftesbury or Hutcheson, Smith, Hume, or Burke as romantics. Yet their philosophies, permeated with the ideas of sentiment and feeling, may well qualify them as such. The romantic sensibility gave both an aesthetic and an emotive dimension to their moral philosophy, so that the idea of virtue—social virtue as well as private virtue—had roots deeper than mere reason or even experience. “Pity,” wrote the author of The Man of Experience, “is the greatest luxury the soul of sensibility is capable of relishing.”²⁰

Beauty was also associated with virtue. Shaftesbury set the tone by equating “taste” in the aesthetic realm with “sense” in the moral realm, “poetical truth” with moral truth, beauty with “a generous behavior, a regularity of conduct, and a consistency of life and manners.”²¹ So, too, Hutcheson, positing an inner sense of beauty akin to the inner sense of morality, found the “external beauty” of persons a reflection of their “concomitant virtue.” ²² For Smith, the imagination was the source of sympathy—“it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his [the unfortunate’s] sensations”—as well as of beauty. Indeed, it was the concern for “the beauty of order, of art and contrivance,” that disposed men to those institutions that promoted the “public welfare.”²³

Burke’s most important early work, which was highly regarded by his contemporaries, was on aesthetics. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful—a youthful work, we are often reminded—has earned him a place in the annals of the Enlightenment, even among some historians who otherwise decry him as reactionary, for it is seen as a repudiation of classicism and a harbinger of romanticism.²⁴ A major theme of the book, the association of the sublime with terror, was the very epitome of romanticism, as expressed in the passage on Milton’s conception of death: “All is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree.”²⁵ Yet while asserting, in good romantic fashion, the primacy of the senses and passions over the classical principles of objectivity and perfection, Burke insisted that there were aesthetic standards that derived from “our common nature,” a “sentiment common to all mankind.” That common sentiment, the feeling of sympathy that motivated the social affections, applied as well to the arts, for “it is by this principle chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts transfuse their passions from one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting a delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself.” Thus, to understand literary tragedy, one must first understand real tragedy: “how we are affected by the feelings of our fellow-creatures in circumstances of real distress.”²⁶

In novels as well, sensibility was allied with morality. Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Mrs. Radcliffe, and a host of other writers popular at the time and justly forgotten today, made this the heyday of what has been called the sentimental novel—a sentimentality heavily larded with morality. Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (published in 1761) is regarded as the preeminent sentimental-cum-moral novel. But Richardson’s Pamela preceded it by two decades and went through five editions within the first year. And it was followed by scores of novels, plays, poems, and magazines (the Lady’s Magazine and Female Spectator, for example) in a similar vein, where virtue asserted itself not by denying or subduing passion but by making passion virtuous.

Even the Methodists played their part in this culture. Wesley himself professed to be offended by the very title of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. “Sentimental! What is that? It is not English; he might as well say Continental. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea.”²⁷ Yet he and his followers were as much part of that culture of sensibility as the novelists and philosophers. The Methodists published sentimental novels and poems (somewhat expurgated, to be sure), as well as sermons and tracts. And their theology had at its core feelings, sentiments, and emotions that were given expression in prayers, hymns, homilies, and, not least, in personal services for the sick and needy.

Others who were notably unsentimental and unromantic were sufficiently responsive to sentiment to find some humanitarian cause to elicit their sympathy. Daniel Defoe wrote a tract in favor of foundling hospitals; Mandeville approved of poor relief for the aged and sick; and Hannah More was an enthusiastic supporter of Sunday Schools. In 1758, perhaps recalling the outpouring of money and sympathy to the victims of the Lisbon earthquake three years earlier (a generosity made more remarkable by the fact that the victims were foreigners and Catholics), Samuel Johnson wryly observed, “Every hand is open to contribute something, every tongue is busied in solicitations, and every art of pleasure is employed for a time in the interest of virtue.” ²⁸ Toward the end of his life, Wesley took the measure of the time: “While luxury and profaneness have been increasing on one hand, on the other, benevolence and compassion toward all forms of human woe have increased in a manner not known before, from the earliest ages of the world.” ²⁹

Education does not normally come under the rubric of benevolence and compassion, still less of sentiment or sensibility. Yet education for the poor was an important part of the culture reflected in the British Enlightenment. The charity school movement had been started in 1699 by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. Within three decades there were over 1,400 such schools catering to over 22,000 pupils.³⁰ To Addison and Steele, these schools represented the “glory of the age,” the “greatest instance of public spirit the age has produced.”³¹ To Mandeville, they were yet further evidence of the insidious influence of Shaftesbury and his successors. The “enthusiastic passion” inspired by the schools prompted him to append to a new edition of The Fable of the Bees an essay about them that would confirm, he suspected, the prevailing opinion of him as “an uncharitable, hard hearted, and inhuman if not a wicked, profane and atheistical wretch.” Undaunted, he proceeded to denounce the schools for promoting the very vices they were intended to correct. So far from abating crimes and other social disorders, as their defenders claimed, they had the effect of encouraging idleness by keeping the poor from working. And idleness was more responsible for “the growth of villainy” than “the grossest ignorance and stupidity.”

Reading, writing, and arithmetic are very necessary to those whose business require such qualifications, but where people’s livelihood has no dependence on these arts, they are very pernicious to the poor, who are forced to get their daily bread by their daily labor. . . . Going to school in comparison to working is idleness, and the longer boys continue in this easy sort of life, the more unfit they’ll be when grown up for downright labor, both as to strength and inclination.³²

Mandeville had been quite right in anticipating that the worthies of the age would be outraged by his views. While he criticized the schools as “pernicious to the poor,” Adam Smith condemned Mandeville’s essay as “wholly pernicious.”³³

The charity school movement was succeeded by private educational endowments and, later in the century, the Sunday School movement. Started by a society consisting of both Anglicans and Dissenters, the Sunday Schools had the support of Methodists and Evangelicals as well. By the turn of the century, they had an enrollment of over 200,000.³⁴ Hannah More is often cited as expressing the prevailing view that instruction be confined to reading, especially of the Bible and religious tracts, on the theory that writing would encourage the children to rise above their station. In fact, even the early charity schools had a more liberal concept of education, as is evident from Mandeville’s complaint that they were teaching such “pernicious” subjects as reading, writing, and arithmetic. That most of the Sunday Schools did so as well may be deduced from the records of expenditures on spelling books, slates, pencils, and desks. By 1795, 94,000 spelling books had been distributed; within a decade, that figure had doubled. ³⁵ Sabbatarians objected to writing, but solely on religious grounds; in some cases, classes were held during the week to permit instruction in writing. Toward the end of the century, Sir Frederick Morton Eden, in his voluminous study The State of the Poor, dismissed the objections that had once been levelled against the education of the poor: “It is now admitted on all hands that intellectual acquisitions are beneficial to every class of the community, and that children of our laborers are not the less likely to become useful members of the state in that sphere of life for which they are destined, from having been instructed in reading, writing, and arithmetic.”³⁶

The Sunday Schools were as much a social phenomenon as a religious and educational one. Apart from educating the poor, they had the corollary effect of fostering the same kind of communal spirit that the Wesleyan movement did. School outings, teas, and clubs made them, as Thomas Laqueur, the leading historian of the movement, has noted, “a central feature of working-class community life”—all the more because the teachers often consisted of former students and parents. (This, too, is reminiscent of Methodism, where lay preachers were chosen from the congregation.) The schools were also the product, Laqueur observed, of “a new, more humane, more tolerant, indeed more optimistic view of childhood.”³⁷ The movement for the education of the poor thus reflected the same sensibility and ethos that inspired such other philanthropic and reform movements as the campaign against cruelty to animals, for the abolition of slavery, for prison and legal reforms, and for the establishment of a multitude of societies that undertook to alleviate a variety of social ills.

These educational enterprises—indeed, the philanthropic and reform movements in general—were not inspired by the radicals. Indeed, their only contribution to educational reform involved children of the middle and upper classes. In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had once taught in a school for girls, proposed that girls be educated together with boys and in the same rational manner as boys, rather than in segregated boarding schools where they were thrown together and encouraged to develop the worst habits of the sex. The book is interesting in itself and is a fitting prelude to her Vindication of the Rights of Woman five years later. But neither then nor later did it enter into the discussions and debates about education. Nor did it prompt the radicals to put any of its ideas into effect, or to take any part in the educational experiments that were engaging so many of their compatriots.

The poor themselves were caught up in the same ethos that motivated the reformers and philanthropists, an ethos that combined a communal spirit with that of self-help. The Friendly Societies—insurance clubs, essentially—founded by workers for their mutual aid, were voluntary and independent, self-governing and self-supporting. Members would contribute regular sums (kept, in early years, in strongboxes or wooden chests), to be dispensed to those in need because of illness, infirmity, unemployment, or to pay for funerals and other emergencies; some groups engaged local doctors to attend to the sick. Like the Sunday Schools, the Friendly Societies served an important social function, bringing together people, sometimes in the local public house, for a common purpose and in a common spirit. In 1793, they acquired legal recognition in an act of Parliament providing for their “encouragement and relief.” By 1801, a contemporary study estimated, there were 7,200 such societies with a membership of almost 650,000 adult males—this in a total population of 9 million.³⁸

All of these private, voluntary enterprises, it must be remembered—charities, philanthropic institutions, Friendly Societies—supplemented an elaborate system of public relief. By 1795, that system was expanded by the adoption in some counties of the “Speenhamland system,” providing a family allowance not only for the indigent but for “every poor and industrious man” whose earnings fell below a level determined by the price of bread and the size of his family. A bill introduced by Prime Minister Pitt the following year, intended to establish relief as “a right and an honour,” was finally withdrawn because so many additional benefits and supervisory agencies were added to it in committee that it became impracticable. But even without these additional provisions, the expenditure of public funds had grown considerably. In 1776, the annual cost of poor relief had been £1.5 million; by the end of the century, it was over £4 million.

It was no radical but Adam Smith, implicitly criticizing Price’s famous sermon bearing that title, who wrote that “the love of our country” rests on two principles: a respect for the constitution and a concern for the good and happiness of others. “He is not a citizen who is not disposed to respect the laws and to obey the civil magistrate; and he is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow-citizens.”³⁹ And it was the Tory Samuel Johnson who said: “A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization. . . . The condition of the lower order, the poor especially, was the true mark of national discrimination.” ^{40 28}

Perhaps the most notable feature of this social ethic was its crossing of party, class, and religious lines. When Elie Halévy spoke of “the miracle of modern England”—the fact that England was spared the revolutions that wrought havoc on the continent—he gave Methodism a crucial role in that miracle.⁴² But the Methodist ethos, he pointed out, was shared by others of different philosophical and religious persuasions. It was this convergence of thought and sensibility that proved decisive in this critical period of English history. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Halévy observed, “freethinkers in association with the philanthropists of the evangelical movement would work for the material and moral betterment of the poor. In the interval, they were ‘converted’ to philanthropy through the influence of Methodist preachers.”⁴³

Historians have quarrelled with one or another aspect of that “miracle,” but few have challenged the role of Evangelicalism, the heir of Methodism, in the philanthropic movement. Indeed, the very word “philanthropist,” it has been said, became very nearly synonymous with “Evangelical,” and “philanthropy” was identified with those good works that appealed to Evangelical tastes.⁴⁴ Yet the movement, as Halévy said, extended well beyond the religious sphere. It reflected the dominant social ethic, which was a compound of the religious and the secular, the public and the private, the communal and the individual, the humanitarian and the romantic. If Evangelicalism played a large part in that ethic, so did the moral philosophy that gave it its philosophical rationale. And the two, however different in inspiration and disposition, worked together for what they took to be the common cause: the material as well as the “moral reformation” of the people.

By later standards, of course, the reforms, societies, and institutions reflecting this ethic seem woefully inadequate, and Hogarthian scenes of drunkenness and licentiousness, cruelty and misery continue to dominate the imagination, obscuring the humanitarian intentions behind those scenes (and obscuring, too, the occasional beneficent effects of those cartoons). “The Age of Benevolence” obviously had its underside. If it produced a generation of reformers and humanitarians, it was partly because there was much to reform and even more to offend the sensibilities of a humane person. While one historian finds 1766 noteworthy as the year of publication of Jonas Hanway’s Earnest Appeal of Mercy to the Children of the Poor, a tract that publicized infant mortality rates in the poorhouses and prepared the way for the boarding-out law, another cites that year as a time of an unprecedented number of food riots occasioned by a harvest failure—sixty riots in a three-month period, by one count.⁴⁵

Yet another historian, David Owen, attributes the philanthropic movement to a complex of “Puritan piety, a benevolently humanitarian outlook, and a concern for national interest.”⁴⁶ Others have been less generous, pointing to a mixture of motives in which public-spiritedness and goodheartedness served the interests of self-promotion and selfgratification. ⁴⁷ “The beauty of such enlightened largesse,” Roy Porter writes, “lay in fostering among the bien pensants the glow of a superior sensibility.” But even he does not deny the practical effect of such largesse in the creation of hospitals, asylums, and other charitable establishments, and in the movements for penal reform and the abolition of the slave trade.⁴⁸

This was the distinctive characteristic of the British Enlightenment, especially by comparison with the French. Benevolence was a more modest virtue than Reason, but perhaps a more humane one. And an Age of Benevolence was a more modest aspiration than an Age of Reason, but a more practical one. If that Age of Benevolence fell far short of what reformers at the time, and historians since, would have liked, it did represent—as, indeed, the very idea of Enlightenment did—a notable advance of spirit and consciousness, a “forward march of the human spirit,” as Diderot put it in explaining his Enlightenment.⁴⁹