The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century

1
The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century

• 1660-1800

2
Introduction

• From 1660 to 1800, people from England and Europe
  were pouring into North America.
• These eager voyagers not only sought freedom from
  religious and political persecution, they also
  saw money to be made in the American continents
  rich lands and forests.
• In 1775, these Colonies rebelled against British
  rule and eventually won their freedom.
• The United States was a raw, vigorous, brand-new
  nation.
• Across the Atlantic, however, things were very
  different.

3
From Tumult to Calm

• In 1660, England was utterly exhausted from
  nearly twenty years of civil war.
• By 1700, it had lived through a devastating
  plague and a fire that left more than two thirds
  of Londoners homeless.
• By the middle of the eighteenth century, however,
  England had settled into a period of calm and
  order, at least among the upper classes.
• Despite the loss of the American Colonies, the
  renewed British military forces established new
  settlements around the globe.
• Though life for many was wretched, the middle
  class grew.
• Throughout this period, British men and women
  also produced many brilliant works of philosophy,
  art, and literature.

4
From Tumult to Calm (cont.)

• This long period of time in Englandfrom 1660 to
  1800 has been given several labels the Augustan
  Age, the neoclassical period, the Enlightenment,
  and the Age of Reason.
• Each of these labels applies to some
  characteristics of these 140 years, but none
  applies to all.

5
Augustan and NeoclassicalComparisons with Rome

• Many people liked to find similarities between
  England in this period and ancient Rome,
  especially during the reign of the emperor
  Octavian (63 B.C.A.D. 14).
• When he became emperor, Octavian was given the
  high-sounding name Augustus, meaning the exalted
  one.
• Augustus restored peace and order to Rome after
  Julius Caesars assassination.
• Similarly, the Stuart monarchs of England
  restored peace and order to England after the
  civil wars that led to the execution of King
  Charles I in 1649wars that continued even after
  the king was dead.

6
Augustan and NeoclassicalComparisons with Rome
(cont.)

• The people of both Rome and England were weary of
  war, suspicious of revolutionaries and radicals,
  and ready to settle down, make money, and enjoy
  life.
• The Roman Senate had hailed Augustus as the
  second founder of Rome in 1660, the English
  people brought back the son of Charles I from his
  exile in France, crowned him King Charles II, and
  hailed him as their savior.
• In this age, many English writers consciously
  modeled their works on the old Latin classics,
  which they had studied in school and university.
• These writings that imitate Latin works were
  called neoclassicalnew classical.
• The classics, it was generally agreed, were
  valuable because they represented what was
  permanent and universal in human experience.
• All educated people knew the Latin classics
  better than they knew their own English
  literature.

7
Reason and EnlightenmentFrom Why? to How?

• Labels like the Age of Reason and the
  Enlightenment reveal how people were gradually
  changing their view of themselves and the world.
• For centuries people had believed that unusual
  events such as earthquakes, comets, and even
  babies born with malformations had some kind of
  meaning, and that they were sent as punishments
  for past misdoings or as warnings of future
  troubles.
• People did not ask, How did this unusual event
  take place? but Why did this unusual event take
  place, and what does it mean?

8
Reason and EnlightenmentFrom Why? to How?
(cont.)

• Throughout the Enlightenment, people gradually
  stopped asking why? questions and started asking
  how? questions, and the answers to those
  questionsabout everything from the workings of
  the human body to the laws of the universe
  became much less frightening and superstitious.
• For instance, the astronomer Edmond Halley
  (16561742) took the terror out of celestial
  phenomena by calculating when they were going to
  occur.
• He computed, with immense labor, he said, the
  orbit of the comet that still bears his name.
• He predicted it would appear in 1758, 1834, 1910,
  and 1986and it did.
• And how did he know it would reappear at
  seventy-six-year intervals?
• Because that was the time it took to complete its
  orbit.
• This reasonable explanation made no connection
  between the comet and human affairs.

9
Changes in Religion More Questions

• The new scientific and rational explanations of
  phenomena gradually began to affect some peoples
  religious views.
• If comets were not sent by God to warn people,
  perhaps God didnt interfere at all in human
  affairs.
• Perhaps the universe was like an immense piece of
  clockwork, set in motion by a Creator who more or
  less withdrew from this perfect mechanism and let
  it run by itself.
• Such a view, part of an ideology known as Deism,
  could make people feel self-satisfied and
  complacent, especially if they believed, as
  Alexander Pope noted, that Whatever is, is
  right.
• Other than a tiny minority of enlightened
  rationalists and materialists, most people,
  including great philosophers and scientists like
  Sir Isaac Newton (16421727) and John Locke
  (16321704), remained religious.
• Christianity in its various forms continued to
  exercise an undiminished power over almost all
  Europeans in this period, just as it had in the
  Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

10
Religion and Politics Repression of Minority
Sects

• Religion determined peoples politics in this
  period.
• Charles II reestablished the Anglican Church as
  the official church of the country, which it
  continues to be in England to this day.
• (In the United States, it is called the Episcopal
  Church.)
• With the approval of Parliament, the king
  attempted to outlaw all the various Puritan and
  Independent sects that had caused so much uproar
  during the preceding thirty years.
• Persecution of these various sects continued, in
  varying degrees, throughout the eighteenth
  century.

11
The Bloodless Revolution

• Charles II had a number of illegitimate children,
  but no legal heir.
• When he died in 1685, he was succeeded by his
  brother, James II, a practicing Roman Catholic.
• Most English people were utterly opposed to
  James.
• After all, it was widely believed that Roman
  Catholics had not only set fire to London and
  caused other disasters, but also were actively
  plotting to hand the country over to the pope.
• When Jamess queen produced a little boya
  Catholic heirpolitical leaders transferred power
  to Jamess daughter Mary, who was married to the
  Dutch William of Orange, a Protestant prince.
• Late in 1688,William attacked England.
• King James fled the country, and early in 1689
  Parliament declared William and Mary king and
  queen, thus restoring Protestant rule.
• These events are known as the Glorious
  (bloodless) Revolution.
• Ever since, the rulers of England have been, at
  least in name, Anglicans.

12
Addicted to the Theater

• For eighteen years, while the Puritans held
  power, the theaters in England were closed.
• During the exile of the royal court in France,
  Charles had become addicted to theatergoing, so
  one of the first things he did after regaining
  his throne was to repeal the ban on play
  performances, imposed in 1642.
• Charles and his brother James supported companies
  of actors.
• Boys and men no longer acted the female roles.
• The new theater had real actresses, like the
  famous Nell Gwyn.
• The great witty comedies produced during this
  period reflected the life of the rich and
  leisured people of that time and their servants.
• In addition to dramatists, a large number of
  prose and verse writers wrote not for
  sophisticated people but solely for ordinary
  readers.

13
The Age of Satire Attacks on Immorality and Bad
Taste

• Today, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift are
  regarded as the most accomplished literary
  artists of the early eighteenth century.
• During their own lifetimes, however, Pope and
  Swift were frequently out of harmony with the
  values of the age, and both often criticized it
  severely.
• Although Pope addressed his works exclusively to
  the educated and leisured classes, he also
  attacked the members of these classes for their
  immorality and their bad taste.
• Pope loved order, discipline, and craftsmanship
  both he and Swift were appalled by the squalor
  and shoddinessin art, manners, and moralsthat
  lay beneath the polished surfaces of Augustan
  life.
• Neither Swift nor Pope felt smug or satisfied
  with the world, as many English people did.
• Both writers hated the corrupt politics of the
  time and the growing commercialism and
  materialism of the English people.

14
Journalism A New Profession

• In contrast with Swift and Pope and their
  aristocratic values was a writer named Daniel
  Defoe (16601731), who stood for values that we
  think of as being middle class thrift, prudence,
  industry, and respectability.
• Defoe had no interest in polished manners and
  social poise.
• Swift and Pope looked down their noses at him.
• Defoe has written a vast many things, Pope once
  said, and none bad, though none excellent.
• Defoe, like the essayists Joseph Addison and Sir
  Richard Steele, followed a new profession
  journalism.
• Eighteenth century journalists did not merely
  describe contemporary political and social
  matters they also saw themselves as reformers of
  public manners and morals.

15
A Poetry of Mind, Not of Soul

• Today when we think of great poetry, we think of
  great lyrics.
• Poets such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, John
  Donne, and Emily Dickinson reveal in their poems
  their innermost thoughts and feelings, their
  honest and original responses to life.
• Genuine poetry, said Matthew Arnold, a
  nineteenth-century poet and critic, is conceived
  and composed in the soul.
• Later critics like Matthew Arnold criticized the
  poetry of people such as Alexander Pope because,
  Arnold said, it was conceived and composed in
  their witsthat is, in their minds, not their
  souls.
• These so-called Augustan poets, however, did not
  define poetry in Arnolds way and so should not
  be judged by his standards.
• They had no desire to expose their souls they
  thought of poetry as having a public rather than
  a private function.

16
A Public Poetry Conceived in Wit

• Augustan poets would write not merely a poem but
  a particular kind of poem.
• They would decide in advance the kind of poem,
  much as a carpenter decides on the kind of chair
  to make.
• Many of the popular kinds of poetry were
  inherited from classical antiquity.
• If, for instance, an important person died, a
  poet would celebrate that dead person in an
  elegy, the appropriate kind of poem for the
  occasion.
• Augustan elegies did not tell the truth about a
  dead person, even if the truth could be
  determined rather, they said the very best
  things that the poet could think of saying.

17
A Public Poetry Conceived in Wit (cont.)

• At the opposite extreme, a poet might decide that
  a certain type of behavior, or even a certain
  well-known person, should be exposed to public
  ridicule.
• The poet would then write a satire, a kind of
  writing that says the worst things about people
  and their behavior that the poet can think of
  saying.
• Another important kind of poem was the odean
  ambitious, often pompous poem expressing a public
  emotion, like the jubilation felt after a great
  naval victory.
• Regardless of its kind, every poem had to be
  carefully and artificially constructed in exact
  meter and rhyme.
• Poems were not to sound spontaneous and
  impromptu, just as people were not to appear in
  public except in fancy dress.
• Those who could afford it adorned themselves with
  vast wigs, ribboned and jeweled clothing, and red
  shoes with high heels.
• Peoples movements were dignified and stately in
  public.
• Nothing was what we would today call
  naturalneither dress nor manners nor poetry.

18
The First English Novels

• By the mid-eighteenth century, people were
  writing long fictional narratives called novels
  (something new).
• These novels, which were a development of the
  middle class, were often broad and comicalthe
  adventures, for example, of a handsome
  neer-dowell or lower-class beauty.
• They were frequently told in endless episodes or
  through a series of letters.
• Authorities disagree as to whether Robinson
  Crusoe and Defoes other fictional narratives are
  true novels, but many agree that the novel began
  either with Defoe or with the writers of the next
  generation.

19
The First English Novels

• The novels of one of the most prominent
  eighteenth century novelists, Henry Fielding
  (17071754), are literally crammed with rough and
  rowdy incidents.
• Fieldings rollicking novel Tom Jones has even
  been made into an Oscar-winning movie, proof that
  his high-spirited characters are still fresh and
  funny today.
• Samuel Richardson (16891761) was perhaps the
  first novelist to explore in great detail the
  emotional life of his characters, especially his
  heroines (in Pamela and Clarissa).
• The novels of Laurence Sterne (17131768) are
  experimental and whimsicaland still unique
  despite the efforts of many imitators to copy
  them.
• All these novels tell us something of what life
  at this time was like.
• They also help us understand the joys and
  disappointments of human experience in all ages.

20
Searching for a Simpler Life

• By the last decade of the century, the world was
  changing in disturbing ways.
• The Industrial Revolution was turning English
  cities and towns into filthy, smoky slums.
• Across the English Channel, the French were about
  to murder a king and set their whole society on a
  different political course.
• The eighteenth century was closing.
• Just as at the end of the twentieth century,
  people sensed that a new era was about to begin,
  so did people in England know that the age of
  elegance, taste, and reason was over.