The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867

Asa Briggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317878537
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The Age of Improvement has long established itself as a classic of modern historical writing. Widely read and quoted it has had a unique influence on teaching and research. This second edition draws on the great volume of new research - produced by Lord Briggs amongst others, since its original publication. The book stresses both the underlying unity and the rich variety of the age, and raises fundamental issues about a period of crucial change in British history - industrialisation, war, constitutional change and the attitudes of politicians towards it, political development, and, not least, society and culture. In the background are the new economic powers based on the development of a coal and iron technology; in the foreground, new social and political problems and new ways of tackling them. The author also discusses perceptions of, and reactions to, changing circumstances, the influence of religion and science on national life, and changing styles in art and literature. The story ends, not with a full stop but with a question mark. Could improvement be maintained? Could balance and progress continue to be reconciled?

CHAPTER 1

Economy and Society in the 1780s

SOCIAL ORDER AND ECONOMIC CHANGE

‘By visiting other countries’, wrote an English traveller in 1780,

a subject of Great Britain will acquire a greater esteem than ever for the constitution of his own. Freed from vulgar prejudices, he will perceive that the blessings and advantages which his countrymen enjoy do not flow from their superiority in wisdom, courage or virtue over the other nations of the world, but in some degree from the peculiarity of their situation in an island; and, above all, from those just and equitable laws which secure property, that mild free government which abhors tyranny, protects the meanest subjects and leaves the mind of man to its own exertion, unrestrained by those arbitrary, capricious, impolitic shackles, which confine and weaken its noblest endeavours in almost every other country of the world.¹

Both the style and the content of this equable panegyric were representative of one set of reactions to the circumstances of the age. To the natural advantages of geography – location, landscape, climate, and resources – Englishmen had added (or so they and many foreigners thought) the acquired advantages of industry, wealth, liberty, and moderation. Taken together, natural and acquired advantages made up a harmonious whole:

Thy Seasons moderate as thy Laws appear,

Thy Constitution wholesome as the Year:

Well pois’d, and pregnant in thy annual

Round With Wisdom, where no fierce Extreme is found …

Where Strength and Freedom in their Prime prevail

And Wealth comes wafted on each freighted Gale.

Not even disputes about the balance of the constitution or the most effective means of encouraging trade and industry seriously disturbed either the equability of such authors or the sense of continuity which they saw reflected in loyalties and embodied both in institutions and in the routines of everyday life. Even radical reformers, for the most part, spoke of restoring old rights rather than creating new ones: ‘If ever God Almighty did concern Himself about forming a government for mankind to live happily under, it was that which was established in England by our Saxon forefathers’, wrote an anonymous essayist of 1771.² When a group of footballers at Kingston-on-Thames were charged in 1790 with riotous conduct while playing in the streets, they pleaded in justification that they were merely celebrating the anniversary of an ancient Saxon victory over the Danes.³

The dominance of family ties made for both order and continuity. In the countryside land belonged to families rather than to individuals and was held ‘in trust’ from generation to generation; decisions relating to its ownership were usually made in terms of family ‘interest’, with complex legal instruments of family control. In the City of London and the towns, business organization also was often associated with family partnerships – there was no limited liability and no national capital market – and industrial initiative frequently depended on loans from brothers and cousins. The road to individual advancement usually led not through the workshop as in the nineteenth century or through the school as in the twentieth, but past the altar; for a man to marry his master’s daughter, or better still his widow, was a recognized avenue to success. Even the unsuccessful at a humbler level were dependent on family both for livelihood and security, and most often on heredity for occupation. Kinship ties – conceived of as an intricate network of responsibilities – upheld both ‘domestic industry’ and small-scale farming, while in the public arena family ‘connection’ counted for more than political party.

Society, however, was something more than a vast cluster of families, some born to property, others to poverty. It had its ranks and orders and its necessary degrees of subordination and authority. They were seldom called in question. Good order was deemed the foundation of all good things, of ‘politeness’ as well as peace, and social relationships, when they were talked about, were conceived of in moral as well as in social terms. It was the Architect of the Universe who had ‘distributed men into different ranks, and at the same time united them into one society, in such sort as men are united’. By Divine decree rather than by human contrivance, the poor, the greater part of society, were placed under ‘the superintendence and patronage of the Rich’. In turn, the rich were charged by ‘natural Providence, as much as by revealed appointment, with the care of the Poor’.⁴

Some thinkers in the eighteenth century, particularly philosophers, defended a modified version of this view of society in terms not of Divine decree but of enlightened human self-interest. Even when active benevolence was not displayed in works of charity, natural economic functions might be equally effective in maintaining social harmonies. The poet Alexander Pope had claimed in his Essay on Man (1733)

That REASON, PASSION, answer one great aim

That true SELF-LOVE and SOCIAL are the same.

Adam Smith was more specific. ‘Society’, he wrote, ‘may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility without any mutual love or affection, if only they refrain from doing injury to each other.’ The pursuit of the general interest of all was encouraged, not hampered, by the division between rich and poor. ‘A prosperous merchant, in augmenting his own private fortune, will enjoy the agreeable reflection that he is likewise increasing the riches and power of his country and giving bread to thousands of his industrious countrymen.’⁵

There were various ways of classifying and subdividing the different ranks and orders which together made up the community.⁶ Many of them were complicated, for the English social system emphasized minute social distinctions and nuances of status rather than broad collective groupings. It needed a novelist like Jane Austen to trace the delicate pattern. There was, however, a bold and massive social pyramid which can be described more bluntly. At the peak of it were the ‘great’, those who, in Daniel Defoe’s phrase, lived ‘profusely’. To belong to the ranks of the great it was still necessary to be a great landed proprietor. Those great proprietors who were entitled to use armorial bearings – the nearest approach to a nobility in England – were not separated from other non-titled proprietors by any thick walls of caste: they were not a noblesse, as in France. A small group of them, however, were renowned for the extent of their ownership and commitments, and the pull of their ‘influence’. Frequent intermarriage, it has been said, gave them the semblance more of tribes than of families. Many of their landed estates were kingdoms in miniature and their London houses were as magnificent as their rural mansions. During the course of the eighteenth century they had extended and consolidated their position.⁷

Below them came substantial proprietors, often with great local influence and preoccupations, and the gentry, that characteristic but imprecise English social group, whose ownership of land provided them with their main title to power and prestige. The gentry maintained estates in a style appropriate to their social position, and were at the same time proud of their independence and conscious of their corporate existence as the backbone of the ‘landed interest’. In addition there were independent yeoman families, although in many parts of the country they had been a declining group for generations. The yeomen, unlike the great proprietors and many of the gentry, farmed their own land. For the most part, the land held by substantial landowners was farmed by tenants, some of them substantial men themselves.

It was a distinctive feature of this eighteenth-century English society that it gave an honoured place not only to the landowner but to the merchant, that it permitted wealth to increase ‘on each freighted gale’. In the world of trade and commerce itself there were natural gradations and degrees of authority. A group of substantial merchant magnates, princes of wealth, drawing their riches from all parts of the world, was easily distinguishable from the ‘middling sort’ of folk, local factors and agents, engaged in domestic trade, men who ‘though highly useful in their stations, are by no means entitled to the honours of higher rank’.⁸ According to Defoe, the middling sort lived ‘very well’, while Adam Smith remarked that they were usually regarded as a superior rank to the yeomanry.⁹ They continued to improve their fortunes – and some of them their prestige – as the century went by. If land conferred secured possession and perpetuated continuous influence from generation to generation, it could be claimed also that ‘to COMMERCE AND MANUFACTURE we may justly attribute the stability of empire and the opulence of individuals; since they encourage a universal spirit of industry, remove local prejudices, and elevate the mind to magnanimity and wisdom.’¹⁰

Below the merchant princes and the ‘middle sort’ came the artisans, people ‘who labour hard but feel no want’, skilled men with subtle degrees of ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’;¹¹ ‘the country people’, a loose term, including many folk who had always been poor, many who were socially displaced in the course of the century, and many whose standard of living fluctuated sharply in ‘good’ and ‘lean’ years; ‘the Poor, that fare hard’, particularly when out of work; and ‘the Miserable, that really pinch and suffer want’. It is important not to consider all these groups as one homogeneous mass. Francis Place, radical London tailor – with his eighteenth-century style of categorizing social divisions – rightly complained in the early nineteenth century of the indiscriminate jumbling together in the term ‘lower orders’ of ‘the most skilled and the most prudent workmen with the most ignorant and imprudent labourers and paupers’. ‘The difference is great indeed,’ he went on, ‘and in many cases will scarce admit of comparison.’¹²

Properly speaking, it was the last two groups described above who made up Adam Smith’s ‘common people’, the base of a social pyramid which few contemporaries believed could or should be converted into a cube. Smith was not exceptional when he wrote that the rich, even when they were concerned only with ‘the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires’, divided with the poor the produce of their improvements. ‘They are thus led by an invisible hand’, he remarked in a metaphor which was soon to be used in many other contexts, ‘to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.’¹³ Rich and poor were always ‘with us’, and no government, however enlightened, could tamper effectively with inequality by supplying to the poor ‘those necessaries which it had pleased the Divine Providence for a while to withhold from them’.¹⁴

Within this social framework, comforting in concept if not always comfortable in practice, each man had his station and each station its peculiar responsibilities. The responsibilities were, of course, not always met – for every charitable action there were many callous and brutal ones – but the concept of social order itself often blossomed out in works of private and corporate philanthropy. The eighteenth century was rightly proud of its ‘improvement’ in private manners and its ripening sense of social duty. For the care of the sick, the aged, prisoners, foundlings, and poor children, new institutions were created during the course of the century, particularly after 1750. ‘We live in an age when humanity is in fashion’, wrote the London magistrate Sir John Hawkins in 1787, and its influence could be traced in many places inside and outside London, both in individual lives and in the growth of voluntary social organizations: on scores of tombstones and memorial plaques in parish churches we read of men like William Whyte, a surgeon of Castor, who died in 1788 and was ‘equally distinguished for professional Abilities, the strictest integrity, and an active Discharge of the Duties of Humanity’.

If the principal duty of the fortunate – those with property and ability – was to meet their social obligations to others, the principal duty of the poor was to be content with their lot. William Paley in his celebrated Reasons for Contentment (1781) explained to them why they had to be. While property provided power and implied responsibility, poverty inculcated virtue. ‘How thankful, then, the poor should be that the very circumstances in which they are placed have such a powerful tendency to cherish the divine spirit of dependence and subordination.’¹⁵ Even highly critical and searching writers, like Adam Smith’s distinguished Scots contemporary and colleague John Millar (Scotland was the home of modern British sociology, not then so defined, as well as of British economics), did not dispute the wisdom of the natural division into ranks and orders. Millar held firmly that any necessary reforms should always be carried out within the framework of ‘those established distinctions of Rank, which it is often unjust and always hazardous to abolish’.¹⁶

Although the view of social order generally accepted was essentially static, there were nonetheless significant features which were modifying the picture even before the development of machinery and the disruptive invention of the steam engine transformed, although not everywhere, the processes of material production. People were already divided into ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’, those who welcomed change and dreamed of its limitless possibilities and those who tried to resist or to challenge it.

Three features were of special importance. First, English society not only permitted but encouraged a considerable degree of individual mobility. Successful merchants, for example, could acquire land in the (limited) land market and convert their wealth into social status; and before long it often became difficult to account for the origins of the fixed property of an established family. ‘Trade’, wrote Defoe, ‘is so far from being inconsistent with a gentleman that, in short, trade in England makes “gentlemen”.’ Of course, there were many complaints about the ‘inundation of new men’ both from discontented supporters of the ‘old order’ like William Cobbett and disturbed ‘peers and country gentlemen’ who ‘looked down on the men raised by merit and industry from obscurity to eminence’.¹⁷ But the frequency of such complaints shows that England before the industrial revolution provided a place for what Adam Smith – and Thomas Malthus after him – called ‘the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition’,¹⁸ a desire, ‘which though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb and never leaves us until we go into the grave’. Millar even went on to claim that ‘every man who is industrious may entertain the hope of gaining a fortune’.¹⁹ In politics, too, many men without the advantages of birth opened the doors of power, although they often had to pay lavish homage, as Edmund Burke did, to the claims of blood and aristocracy.

Second, within the whole social order there had been for many years a general infusion of increased wealth. An interesting letter to the Publi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Note on Footnotes and Abbreviations
• Introduction: Period and Problems
• 1 Economy and Society in the 1780s
• 2 Politics and Government on the Eve of the French Revolution
• 3 The Impact of War
• 4 The Politics of Transition
• 5 Reform
• 6 Social Cleavage
• 7 Britain and the World Overseas
• 8 The Balance of Interests
• 9 Victorianism
• 10 The Leap in the Dark
• Note on Books
• Index