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8. The Eighteenth Century

 

History

Ideas Literature Art Music Architecture Gardens

Here for Queen Anne and a modern Scottish nationalist viewpoint on the Act of Union with Scotland - the most important act of her reign. Also, the War of the Spanish Succession and the victories over the forces of Louis XIV achieved by John Churchill, who became the Duke of Marlborough ('Malbruk s'en va-t-en guerre...') For the gift of a grateful nation, see Blenheim Palace below.  By the Peace of Utrecht 1713 Britain acquired among other areas Hudson's Bay and Newfoundland from the French and Gibraltar and Minorca from the Spanish.  And here if you wish you can read of the loss of Minorca in 1756 in a later war and the fate of the unfortunate Admiral Byng, about whom Voltaire wrote: 'Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.'  (In this country it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others.) For a potted history of the Hanoverians, click here. Read here for Jacobites (and they're not all dead yet!), Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Battle of Culloden - the final (?) end of Scottish independence.

 Here is a chronology of events with especial reference to the American War of Independence.  The break-away of the American colonies was the one major defeat for the United Kingdom in this century, though historically inevitable, no doubt!

 18th c. costume can be found at this site.  And an overview of 18th c. London and rural life (not very easy to read).

Ideas [to be amplified]

Mary Wollstonecraft has come into new prominence in our time because of her insistence on the rights of women.  Tom Paine was a controversial figure with his support for the American and French Revolutions and his concern with the Rights of Man.   There were at this time three important philosophers in the empiricist tradition, Bishop George Berkeley, an idealist unusual in English thought,  David Hume, a sceptic and agnostic and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment, and Edmund Burke, a leading conservative thinker for some 30 years.  (For John Locke, see the seventeeth century page.)

Literature

Here is a site with a very wide range of links.  And here is another.  And here is the index to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature - an extensive goldmine!

Poetry

The dominating verse measure of the classical age was the heroic couplet.  Here is an overview of 18th c. poetry, unfortunately not very easy to read owing to unfortunate colour choice!

Alexander Pope was the defining poet of the early century, the high point of English classical poetry - his couplets are always closed (i.e. end in a full stop or semi-colon), unlike those of his predecessor Dryden (see previous page), who sometimes has run-on lines or triplets. Link to a hypertext version etc of The Rape of the Lock. Links to other poetry. A much-quoted poet.

Oliver Goldsmith's [for biography, see under drama] poem The Deserted Village deals with the effects of the Enclosure movement on the English peasants and the countryside as men were driven from the land - see the second and third sections, for example.

Thomas Gray [short biography], 'the most learned man in Europe', departed from the heroic couplet in reflective verse such as the 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard', perhaps the most quoted poem of the age; his 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College', 'On the Death of a Favourite Cat' (mock-heroic verse about a cat) and other poems have also given many well-known lines to the language. See here for quotations from Gray. He also published translations of Celtic and Icelandic poetry and recorded a trip to the Lake District, which mark him as an early forerunner of the Romantic movement.  Here is a more extensive Gray site.

Gray's 'Elegy' qualifies him also as one of the so-called 'graveyard poets', of which Edward Young is otherwise the best-known representative with his 10,000-line blank verse poem The Complaint: or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-5), usually known simply as Night Thoughts [excerpts]. Melancholy became an accepted feature of mid-eighteenth c. life, and suicide was fashionable; as Voltaire sardonically wrote somewhere (exact reference unknown to me): 'These are the dark, November days, when the English hang themselves.'  The Age of Reason was becoming the Age of Sensibility.

Other poets of the time were such as James Thomson [some quotations] (who also wrote the original version of 'Rule Britannia'), whose long blank verse poem The Seasons was enormously popular both in Britain and on the Continent; William Collins, [selected poetry] whose early poems had Persian settings but who also set an Ode in the wild Highlands of Scotland; William Cowper (pronounced 'Cooper'), who suffered from religious melancholia and a sense of sin, but enjoyed a steady popularity [selected quotations]. His long poem The Task also used blank verse.

The great 'Pre-Romantic' poets were: 1. Robert Burns, the Scottish national poet and the greatest lover (?) and writer of love poetry and songs (mostly in dialect) in our literature, but also of patriotic verse ('Scots Wha' Hae'), of egalitarian sentiment ('For a' That'), of narrative verse like the famous and funny Tam o' Shanter (here with commentary) and of cutting satirical verse such as 'Holy Willie's Prayer' (also annotated).

2. William Blake. [alternative biography] There are many links to this greatest of visionary poets [see also below under Art], who worked in almost entire obscurity in his lifetime. His greatest works, such as Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience [both here with a concordance], The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [a commentary here] (all beautifully illustrated by Blake) existed only in a few engraved and hand-coloured copies. His God was both loving and a God of wrath, his Hell was full of necessary energy, while Reason, law, the Church imprisoned the soul.  [Selected poetry here]

Drama

This was a great age of the theatre, especially under the actor-manager-playwright David Garrick, who reformed many of the old practices at Drury Lane theatre. The actors' and barristers' club today is called after him.

However, although the theatre flourished, little drama from that time is regularly acted today. The main names to note are:

1. John Gay [biography and texts] with his ballad opera The Beggar's Opera,the source of Brecht's Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera).
2. Oliver Goldsmith, whose play She Stoops to Conquer [comment] is a still much acted classic.
3. Richard Brinsley Sheridan [alternative biography], the wittiest of British comedy-of-manners dramatists before Oscar Wilde. (His wife, an actress, was painted by Gainsborough). His comedies, especially the School for Scandal [text] [comment and [synopsis] and The Rivals[text] [comment], are still standards of the English stage. The latter play includes Mrs Malaprop - some of her 'malapropisms' will be found among the following quotations.  He was also a politician famous for his witty and sometimes cutting speeches [eg. "The Right Honourable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts."]

The Novel and Prose

The 18th c. novel is conventionally accounted the start of this genre, although prose fiction has been written since classical times and the boundaries are not clear-cut. Daniel Defoe is usually accredited the father of the English novel with his plain writing, his journalist's eye for human interest and his realistic settings and characters; his Robinson Crusoe [searchable text with introduction] was the only book J.J. Rousseau would allow his 'Émile' to read, as it taught the lesson of learning by doing. (The modern Caribbean poet and Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott has used Crusoe in his poetry and the castaway theme has become a common one.)  Crusoe was followed by a spate of what the Germans call 'Robinsonaden', of which The Swiss Family Robinson is probably the only one still remembered.

Like Swift (below), he was capable of strong irony, as in his The Shortest Way with Dissenters, purporting to be a suggestion how to get rid of dissenters (free church followers). This was taken seriously, but he was himself a dissenter. When the hoax was discovered, he was put in the stocks, but was fêted by the crowd. There is the text of Moll Flanders and a commentary here.

Jonathan Swift was a savage satirist, whose Gulliver's Travels fits rather awkwardly into the frame of the novel. His Modest Proposal shows his irony at its strongest, but also his feeling for the starving poor of Ireland. Links to other works can be found here and selected quotes at this site.  Many other background links are available here.

Samuel Richardson -  an author immensely popular in his own time and very significant for the development of the novel, both in technique (the epistolary novel) and in analysis of emotion and character.  See the Cambridge History.

Henry Fielding [scroll down for index to various pages on Fielding and Smollett], was the author of the most enjoyable of 18th c. novels, Tom Jones [text]. He was also an excellent and decent magistrate, who founded the forerunner of the future London police force, the Bow Street Runners.

Tobias Smollett [see above] - his best novel is probably Humphry Clinker, a picaresque account of a journey round the British isles by Matthew Bramble and his party.  The fastidious Bramble's highly exaggerated account of taking the waters at Bath is amusing, but there may well have been a modicum of truth in it (Smollett was himself a doctor).

Laurence Sterne may be called the father of the anti-novel as Tristram Shandy [text], a sort of prolonged conversation, in many ways breaks the barely established conventions of the novel and plays many tricks with the reader. His Sentimental Journey  (an excerpt here) is typical of the transition from the Age of Reason to the Age of Sensibility and tears are always ready to flow, not least over the ill-treatment of animals. The biggest weepie is probably Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, full of tears with asterisks to mark the inexpressible. Goldsmith, too, shows the sentimentalism and melancholy which came to replace the Age of Reason or of Satire in his novel The Vicar of Wakefield.

Feeling is further cultivated with the addition of horror by the Gothic Novel, of which Horace Walpole is the first exponent with The Castle of Otranto , while Mrs Ann Radcliffe (excerpts and links) was the most accomplished exponent. A site for the Female Gothic.  (The most famous example, a work which created a myth, belongs to the following century, namely Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).

Outside the novel, early 18th century prose is dominated by the influence of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (who, like Defoe and Swift, were both journalists), the founders of The Spectator , with its well-known Spectator Club[Addison's own account].  It is no mere accident that the rise of the novel and of the periodical newspaper coincided with the rapid growth of the middle classes in the 18th c.

The outstanding figure of the age was Samuel Johnson, a learned, witty, dominating, infuriatingly prejudiced writer, critic and lexicographer, perhaps most famous nowadays for his various sayings and opinions (often insulting) on all and sundry. He had health problems, dressed badly, often spoke brusquely, yet his company was everywhere sought. Extensive links to his works and to his biographer, James Boswell, will be found here.

A range of other 18th c. links will be found at this extensive site. Here are links to two further important female writers of the time, Aphra Behn, and the much-travelled Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

And for science fiction enthusiasts, here is a timeline of early SF, not only in Britain.

Art

The 18th c. was a golden age of English art, now largely executed by native artists.

William Hogarth is a much-loved painter whose art was often a moral comment on society as in "Gin Lane" and "Beer Street". Four of his moral series may be viewed at this site. They were engraved and widely distributed . He was also a very fine portrait artist [various links at the first site], and his sketch of a shrimp girl is a delight.  1997, the tercentenary of his birth, saw a number of exhibitions in London, that at the Tate drawing attention particularly to some of his fine portraits.  Another site with various links. This too to essays, books ets.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy, was a proponent of "history painting" and the Grand Style (here you can take a tour of some British and American history painting). In contrast, 18th c. England is seen as the first age when children were viewed in a special light, and not just as incomplete adults, which is reflected in the art of the time, including that of Reynolds (the site here is good on the topic with illustrations!).

Thomas Gainsborough is nowadays probably the most admired of 18th c. portrait artists, whose informal pictures of his daughters are particularly sensitive (they ended their lives mentally disturbed). This is a painter who shows the Age of Sensibility in his delicacy of touch and the sensitive expressions of some of his subects.  He would have painted more landscapes than he did if these had been in demand. His 'fancy' pictures were, however, popular.  This site will give you many links to various works by the artist, including the famous "Blue Boy" in Van Dyck costume.

George Stubbs took a scientific interest in animal and human anatomy, and is one of the foremost of British animal painters, painting animals domestic,wild and exotic. The Olga's Gallery site has links to many of his paintings.  The theme of horses and lions was repeated many times, and his 'Horse Attacked by a Lion' is found in a number of versions. On the web I have also found related subjects, A Horse startled by a Lion, A Horse Frightened by a Lion and A Horse Being Devoured by a Lion (before and after scenes, so to speak). This well illustrates EdmundBurke's philosophical theory of the Sublime, in which beauty and terror are combined. He also painted so-called conversation pieces, a popular form of art, and country scenes, usually with animals involved, such as his Haymakers [enlargable pictures] or The Grosvenor Hunt. Horses were, however, his most frequent subject, usually commissioned by a patron.

Other notable painters of this time: George Romney, who was fascinated by Emma Hamilton (born Hart), Nelson's mistress, and who died insane, (like many others forced to paint portaits for a living, Romney grew tired of portrait painting and was interested in Shakespearean subjects) but his ability is shown in this lovely child portrait; the Scot Allan Ramsay,  whose portrait of his wife is justly famous, Joseph Wright of Derby [links to many of his pictures] (who did not make his career in the capital and liked to paint scenes lit by candles, fire or other artificial lighting), and the German-born society painter Johann Zoffany, (a site with links).  We have barely touched on sculpture in this survey, but here we may note the work of John Flaxman [links to works], perhaps best known now for his contribution to the Wedgwood pottery firm which appeared in this century and is still going strong.

Two painters in particular may be seen as Pre-Romantics, Fuseli and Blake. The 'pre-' label sits uneasily, as they both broke thoroughly with Academy conventions and were older contemporaries of such as Constable and Turner, but William Blake, at least, was so individual and so little known in his time that he belonged to no school or movement. His thought, however, was a one-man revolt against convention and for the power of the imagination more extreme that any of the Romantic School. Many of his paintings, unique in their power and vision, show the struggle between good and evil, [this site contrasts Blake with Bush and Osama bin Laden!] between energy and gentleness, both of which are necessary (see the literature section above). The God of religions, The Ancient of Days from the book Urizen (your reason?), like the rational Newton, measures out the world with dividers; soulless materialism is also illustrated in the man-creature Nebuchadnezzar. Elohim/Jehovah drags an unwilling Adam into the world, together with the serpent. 'Pity' illustrates a scene from Macbeth, and Pity is pale - good, but weak?

J.H. Fuseli (Füssli in his native Switzerland) painted literary scenes from Milton and Shakepeare, such as the 'Three Witches', or 'Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers'. His most notorious painting (rendered in several versions) was 'The Nightmare', a far cry from classical moderation but perhaps sublime (and erotic) in its terror and beauty.  A painting connected with both legend and (possibly) Sweden is 'The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches".  Other links.

Music

This is a century in which English musical life was very active but was largely dominated by composers of foreign origin. The greatest of these was undoubtedly the late Baroque composer George Frideric Handel (the name he adopted in England). While remaining thoroughly German throughout his successful career, he was influenced by contemporary English tastes, for instance for the oratorio of which his eternally popular Messiah is the greatest example. This was influenced by Purcell and the great English choral tradition, and has remained an integral part of English cultural life. You will here find synthesized Handel in the MIDI-files, and a page of further links.

A successful and very popular English contemporary of Handel was Thomas Arne ('the English Orpheus'). His most famous music today is the stirring Rule, Britannia! [melody], a setting of a patriotic poem by James Thomson (1700-1748), the poet of The Seasons (see above).  Much of his music is available today on CD.

A later German adornment of English musical life was Johann Christian Bach ('London Bach'), the youngest son of Handel's greatest contemporary, Johann Sebastian. The nine-year old infant prodigy Mozart met J.C. Bach on a concert tour in London, and claimed that the older man had taught him to sing.

Architecture

During this century London became the wealthiest city in the Western world, which was not least reflected in its and England's architecture The century began with English Baroque dominant in the later works of Wren (see above, 17th c.) The outstanding Baroque architect of the time was, however, Sir John Vanbrugh, soldier, courtier, man-about-town, Restoration dramatist and after 1707 'amateur' architect. His greatest works were Castle Howard in Yorkshire and Blenheim Palace near Oxford, built for the victorious John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. The style is heavy and decorative with details like the towers added for sculptural effect, to lead the eye and provide 'movement', so important to the Baroque, in architecture as in art.

After the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, many Scots settled in the English capital which was a richer city than Edinburgh. One of these was the architect James Gibbs, who worked in various classical idioms. His most influential building was probably St Martin-in-the-Fields, now in one corner of Trafalgar Square. The Baroque design was less influential than his new (much discussed and much copied) feature, the Wren-like steeple rising from the roof of a Greek temple style building, also used by Gibbs in other churches.  His influence is found not least in North America.

Gibbs is responsible for one of the best-known buildings in Oxford, the Radcliffe Camera (a library), a Baroque or even Mannerist design with its spiral effect. On the other hand, he could work in the Inigo Jones/Palladian idiom, which in the 1720's came to displace the Baroque, seen as a Catholic and exaggerated art form. A good example of this is the Senate House in Cambridge.

Richard Boyle, Lord Burlington gathered together architects working in the Neo-Palladian idiom, inspired by the 16th c. Italian architect Andrea Palladio, the 1st c. B.C. Roman Vitruvius (also an early engineer) and the English heir to these, Inigo Jones [early 16th c., see above].

While the principles of harmonic proportions between rooms and parts of buildings, as well as the temple facades Palladio gave his villas were the most important influences, one villa in particular caught the imagination of architects, the Villa Capra or Villa Rotonda. This is seen very clearly in Colen Campbell's Mereworth Castle, but also in Chiswick House [alternative view], the pleasure house Lord Burlington designed (with help from Campbell and Kent) for himself in the garden of his mansion. While the Palladian exterior tended to show the Roman virtue of gravitas, and indeed could even seem austere, the interiors were usually highly ornamental, even magnificent (any connection with the English national character, if one believes in such things?). The elaborate interiors of Chiswick Villa were by William Kent, a mediocre portrait painter found by Lord B. in Rome, who became an architect in his own right, a great interior designer and one of the first landscape gardeners of note.

A perfect example of this contrast is Holkham Hall [the Wikipedia site] built by Burlington and Kent for the great agricultural reformer Thomas Coke, later Earl of Leicester. The somewhat bleak and staccato exterior (built in a copy of a yellow Roman brick Coke brought home from his Grand Tour) in no way prepares the visitor for the quite extraordinary entrance hall.

Gibbs, Campbell and Kent possibly all worked on Houghton Hall (a better view), built for the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) first Prime Minister of England, Sir Robert Walpole.

Palladian style town houses are found in great number in London, Edinburgh and supremely in Bath, a city dominated by the architecture and layout of John Wood the elder and his son of the same name. The pattern of square (this Carfax Hotel site has links to many views of the town), circus [detail] and crescent established there became standard elements of Georgian and subsequent town planning.

From mid-century the spirit of improvement led to a spate of building acts and road acts, and especially the Building Act of 1774 may be regarded as a milestone. Like many before it, it sought to reduce the risk of fire, now by hiding wooden window frames behind brick reveals (in 1709, window frames were required to be recessed four inches into the wall; Queen Anne's Gate in London is a good example of a pre-1709 street). The 1774 act also classified London houses into "rates", First to Fourth, where a First Rate, for instance, was a house valued at over £850 and covering more than 900 square feet.

The typical First Rate was a four-storey house (building heights being strictly limited) with a basement, the latter below street level at the front where the new roads were built up, but opening onto the garden at the back. In the Georgian house, the main floor was the first floor (i.e above the basement and the ground floor). In England, as in the Netherlands, domestic buildings were divided vertically by party walls, whereas on the Continent townspeople usually lived in buildings divided horizontally into apartments. Dutch and English houses also featured the sash window (ie two halves divided horizontally and sliding up and down in grooves, balanced by hidden counterweights) which appeared in both countries in the late 17th c. and which matches perfectly the classical facades of the time.

After the death of Burlington in 1753 two architects stand out during the rest of the century, William Chambers and Robert Adam. William Chambers, born in Gothenburg, was a member of one of the many Scottish families and English families (Carnegie, Chalmers, Chapman, Douglas, Hamilton) who settled in Sweden and his knighthood was in fact the Swedish Order of the Polar Star.  Somerset House was his greatest work, part-Palladian, part French (he studied architecture in both Paris and Italy). The Chinese Pagoda in Kew Gardens was one of the results of his journeys to China with the Swedish East India Company, and of the taste for chinoiserie which offered an alternative to classicism in the second half of the century. His design for these gardens was more formal than the usual English Palladianism and his work on Chinese gardens and architecture was widely influential (eg Kinaslottet) (see below, Gardens). In Sweden, he was also responsible for the design of Partille slott, and his Treatise on Civil Architecture became a standard work.

More fashionable than Chambers among the aristocracy and gentry and also more adventurous was Robert Adam, whose father William was the most prominent Scottish architect of his day. Robert, too, did much work in Edinburgh, notably in the New Town (second link), but made his main career in London and England together with his brother James. For instance Syon House contains some of his splendid interiors (see the hall here). His library at Kenwood House is one of the most beautiful rooms in existence, but not shown at its best here. (Kenwood is a wonderful place to visit with a splendid art collection of manageable size - and it's free!  (It also figured as a backdrop in the film Notting Hill.) The Adam style is mainly about interiors, where the Adam Brothers' large firm would remodel everything from furniture to friezes, from carpets to keyhole covers.

Adam usually worked in a classical idiom partly inspired by recent discoveries of the ancient Etruscan civilization [another Etruscan site] (as at Osterley Park  - some photos), but he also built a 'Sublime' Gothic cliffhanging castle in Ayrshire, Culzean (pronounced Cullane) - there's a good view of the cliff-edge site here. The interiors are classical.

 Just as Horace Walpole introduced the Gothic novel (see above), he also built himself a house in the 'Gothick' style, Strawberry Hill (now a school) - here's a fan-vaulted and colourful interior). 'Strawberry Hill Gothic' became another popular alternative to classical styles (see for instance the remarkable Perpendicular salon inspired by Henry VII's chapel in Westminster Abbey at Arbury Hall - the novelist George Eliot was born on the estate). In the following century the Gothic Revival fought out its famous 'Battle of the Styles' with classicism.

Here is an excellent site with links to these and other Georgian architects.

Gardens

This is the century when the English Garden became an international concept in opposition to the highly formal Baroque garden (examples) that dominated at the start of the century. The strict Palladian mansion was surrounded by a landscape carefully created by man to seem as natural as possible, but representing a harmonious, balanced and classical ideal of natural perfection. There were usually classical temples and other eye-catching details dotted about at strategic points, such as the Palladian bridge at Stowe - modelled on that at Wilton House [click on the link page].. William Kent was the first major representative of the style (see his Temple of Venus at Stowe), but the most influential and best-known gardener of all was Lancelot 'Capability' Brown who created lakes and open vistas wherever he went.  See the typical Palladian landscape created around Holkham Hall in Norfolk.

Later in the century, the Picturesque movement affected gardens too, as did the taste for chinoiserie fostered by Chambers among others. Scroll down on this site for a brief history of the English garden with links.  See also the next homepage, 'Romantic and Regency' (page 6).

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