England in the Eighteenth Century, Roy Porter, Folio Society, 1998 (4th pr 2003)

Description: This is Porter's well-known "English Society in the Eighteenth Century", re-titled for the Folio Society's History of England series. From a review in the London Review of Books (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n14/john-brewer/rowlandsonian): Porter’s picture of 18th-century England is boldly drawn. In essence, he delineates a nation with a stable though flexible political order, a dynamic and developing economy, and a rich and expanding culture. He opens his account by emphasising the diversity of Georgian society – the different experiences of town and country, of rich and poor, of male and female. He then examines the forces which he believes to have sustained and stabilised the social hierarchy: its permeability, its lack of marked class distinctions and, above all, the polymorphous adaptability of the élite. The patricians, he argues, were by turns both capitalist and paternalist – eager to innovate yet protective of the values that they themselves were eroding. And while they ruthlessly exploited the political system for the spoils that it offered, they also mouthed the ‘sedative rhetoric’ of constitutionalism. Social arrangements, state power and political ideology all conspired to perpetuate the position of those whom Porter somewhat infelicitously calls ‘top people’. The power of the patricians was sustained by other forces designed to maintain the social order. The family, community custom, education and religion were all, Porter argues, means by which the social fabric was repeatedly re-woven. An elaborate skein of institutions and mores held together a polity that otherwise threatened to unravel. The resilience of the Hanoverian social hierarchy and political order seems all the more remarkable in the light of the changes in material and moral life that Porter discusses in the second half of the book. Commercialised agriculture, domestic commerce, foreign trade, and the swift construction of an economic infrastructure with such services as banking, advertising and retailing, broke down traditional relationships, created a monied and commoditised society, and prepared the nation for the great leap forward that the economy took in the 1780s. The consequences of this transformation were everywhere to be seen. Greater prosperity for nearly all classes, albeit unevenly distributed, led to the production and purchase of more consumer goods, to more entertainment and recreation, and to the wider dissemination of élite culture. Affluence and opportunity generated new values. Men and women sought to emulate the taste of their superiors; egoism and personal gratification – the pursuit of happiness – acquired a degree of respectability. As a result, manners and morals were less constrained and more relaxed. Invention and innovation, together with a secular idea of progress, replaced a resigned providentialism. It was, according to Porter, a ‘tonic time’ to be alive. Though a minority of the population lived in dire poverty, and though there were many instances of cruelty and barbarism, the age was imbued with an ‘infectious gaiety and sense of fun’. Indeed, Porter’s predominant image of Georgian society, even though he is at pains to qualify it, is essentially Rowlandsonian: the bottom-pinching, back-slapping, bonhomous and bawdy world of the village alehouse and the city tavern. Gluttonous, inebriate and lubricious, Georgian Englishmen, and, to a lesser extent, women, are depicted as notable for their appetite rather than their restraint. This lust for life, which Porter describes with more than sneaking approval, also excited a much more jaundiced and censorious response. As he shows in his final chapters, the extraordinarily rapid growth in the economy after 1780, the rising cost of poverty which accompanied population increase, together with the deep political fissures that emerged during the American and French revolutions, redoubled the concern of the nation’s rulers to discipline and constrain the populace and to ensure the continued authority of the landed élite. New ways, some more subtle, some more direct, were developed to sustain power: ‘the perils of neglect’, as Porter puts it, were replaced by ‘the pains of attention’. Greater supervision and control – of children, the profligate, the mad, criminals and the politically radical – kept people in their place. Voluntary associations such as the societies for prosecuting felons, for the reformation of manners, for the defence of property, signalled a greater willingness on the part of the prosperous to participate in the regulation of their social inferiors. Yet in this way the patricians survived the rancorous 1790s, remaining the protean but potent landed class which ruled the first industrial nation. ...This synopsis of what I take to be the main themes of Porter’s book cannot do justice to its chief strength: namely, its richness of example. Social historians pride themselves on their powers of ‘thick description’: on their ability to evoke the feel and texture of an age. It is here that Porter excels. He ranges far and wide, from princes to paupers and from the metropolis to the smallest hamlet. Stay-making and corsetry, prisons, rural festivals, diet and housing, bordellos and sex therapists, domestic gadgets like the toothbrush, industrial processes such as iron puddling, ballads and pamphlets, paintings and plays, work and wages, balloons and bastardy are only a fraction of the topics covered by this breathtaking narrative. Indeed, so rich is the feast that at times its superfluity renders it indigestible. There is too little time for rumination. Scarcely have we swallowed one succulent dish than the author gorges us with another. The overall effect is often cloying, though I concede that I would rather bloat than starve... PHX2/0wr9

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