24/9/07 - English Literature - Individualism and the Rights of Man

In the 'Age of Reason', literature expressed reason, progress, affectibility, clarity and secular response to the world, which was the focus of scholarly thought throughout the period. In 1707, the Scots went on to theorise the new modernity, for example, William Robertson in his History of America and Adam Smith, who theorised the new capitalist economy and became a great Enlightenment figure. By the end of the eighteenth century, there was a prevalent belief that the height of the Enlightenment had been achieved with Karl Marx and Industrialism.

In the mid-to-late eighteenth century the Declaration of Independence was a beacon of light to the world, but a terror to crowned heads. It was an unforeseen democratic revolution. It was a sign of Enlightenment. Many people gave up their lives to make a new start in America, to find freedom from arbitrary rule and to find liberty. Enlightenment politics were the result of the Revolution.

Mary Wollstonecraft was outraged by Edmund Burke's writings on the French Revolution. Burke's opposition to the French Revolution of 1790 was written before the dethronement of the French monarchs. Wollstonecraft's was the first written response to Burke and the second was Thomas Paine's. Burke's Hymn to Unreason was in praise of prejudice and blind obedience. He supported colonisation; he had an organic model of society.

Godwin's Principles of Political Justice was published at sold at the enormous price of three guineas: a sum that only a lucky few could afford. He was the most influential Enlightenment figure of the time. Wordsworth read his works avidly, and Coleridge was also one of his admirers. Mary Shelley was his daughter, and she married his closest follower, Percy Shelley. There was not a liberal thinker in the English-speaking world that didn't know his name. He cohabited with Wollstonecraft, but did not marry her at first because they both believed that marriage was an unnatural construct of society. He was the most radical and vocal thinker of the time, so why did he disappear from the literary and celebrity world?

He was England's first anarchist philosopher: he went against the rational accrued political parish and was in favour of anarchy. The twentieth century Industrial Revolution practised his ideas of equality and independence. Godwin went into hiding to escape the repercussions of his philosophy. His avid follower, Percy Shelley, wrote about the effects that Godwin's philosophy would have on the wider world if it was taken into action, in his poem "Prometheus Unbound":

"And behold, thrones were kingless, and men walked
One with the other even as spirits do,
None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain, or fear,
Self-love or self-contempt, on human brows
No more inscribed, as o'er the gate of hell,
'All hope abandon ye who enter here;'
None frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear
Gazed on another's eye of cold command,
Until the subject of a tyrant's will
Became, worse fate, the abject of his own,
Which spurred him, like an outspent horse, to death.
None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines
Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak;
None, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart
The sparks of love and hope till there remained
Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed,
And the wretch crept a vampire among men,
Infecting all with his own hideous ill;
None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk
Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes,
Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy
With such a self-mistrust as has no name.

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt form awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man
Passionless? - no, yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane."
[Shelley, "Prometheus Unbound"]

The limits of mankind are without boundary here. His procedures could make a new and desirable way of life possible.

In Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, he defended the status quo by attacking the Jewry of the Revolution.

"These gentlemen of the Old Jewry, in all their reasonings on the Revolution of 1688, have a revolution which happened in England about forty years before, ..."
[Burke, Reflections, pp. 99ff]

He defends institutional continuity on the grounds that previous revolutions were a necessary part of organic evolution, but that the French Revolution is not an organic revolution like those in England and America. If the French could only adopt English thought they might keep order and stop "warping." He believes that there is no process of climbing the social ladder: one is born into a station and must keep it. He uses latinate prose, i.e. the long syntax of prostyle. It demonstrates the cultural superiority of the writer and makes the work inaccessible to unedicated eyes, so has a repressive function: if a person couldn't understand it, how could they be capable of political thinking?

"A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risque [sic] the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve. The two principles of conservation and correction operated strongly at the two critical periods of the Restoration of Revolution, when England found itself without a king. At both those periods the nation had lost the bond of union in their antient [sic] edifice; they did not however, dissolve the whole fabric. On the contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient part of the old constitution through the parts which were not impaired. They kept these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered might be suited to them. They acted by the ancient organized states in the shape of their old organization, and not by the organic moleculae of a disbanded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign legislature manifest a more tender regard to that fundamental principle of British constitutional policy, than at the time of the Revolution, when it deviated from the direct line of hereditary succession. The crown was carried somewhat out of the line in which it had before moved; but the new line was derived from the same stock. It was still a line of hereditary descent; still an hereditary descent in the same blood, though an hereditary descent qualified with protestantism. When the legislature altered the direction, but kept the principle, they shewed that they held it inviolable."
[Burke, Reflections, p. 106]

Remember that the Reflections was a plea for unreason. Burke therefore defends all kinds of prejudice.

Wollstonecraft's response was to be more reasonable. She praised friendship. She became the leading Enlightenment figure of feminism. However, she was essentially 'airbrushed' out of society when information about her private life was published in her biography written by her widowed husband. The did keep a small following, including Jane Austen, who pcked up and developed her sober and humane arguments for the just treatment of women.

Paine's response to Burke was to point out that Burke "pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird."