The Eighteenth Century and the Enlightenment: A Loose Overview of Portrayals

This has come about for three reasons: Coins and Scroll’s new project; the imminent demise of G+ and having recently finished two novels set during the eighteenth century: Thackeray’s History of Henry Esmond and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. 

I do not claim that this is to be a comprehensive account of the ways the eighteenth century has been portrayed, but it may be of interest. There is a good distillate of Early Modern mores and technology by Joseph Manola at Against the Wicked City. 

"1. Everyone has guns. 2. Telescopes exist. 3. Printing is commonplace. 4. People have access to stimulants as well as depressants. 5. People have access to painkillers. 6. People might have access to phosphorus. 7. Rich people have pocket-watches."

Perhaps this post may offer material to create something like.

Before I begin, I shall be indulging ‘the long eighteenth century’ as a definition: taking the start as 1689. The focus of my regard shall be English language media.

FIRST, PIRATES

The pirate film is at least, in part, perhaps an essential introduction to the technologies and ways of the eighteenth century. Gunpowder weaponry is widespread; so is transoceanic travel. Rich cargos can be found in distant lands, as can the profits of same. Some portions of the world are charted, but by no means all of it. The difficulty of states exerting their authority on far-flung regions is clear.

It is interesting, looking at the summaries of some early pirate films, to see what degree piracy is forced upon our hero, perhaps as a response to injustice: Captain Blood has his start after the Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys. There may be a background of pure rogues, but the hero has his reasons –which become everyone’s reasons. The Mutiny on the Bounty (as popularly portrayed) has something of this. Thinking on it, there seem to be few instances of explicit criminality as a motivation, however much it maybe gloried in.

An exception exists for Stevenson’s Treasure Island: Long John Silver, the archetypal pirate may be an amiable rogue, but his compatriots are hardly portrayed as anything like as good-natured. The revolt of the crew of the Hispanola is not quite an expression of liberty and heroism.

NOBILITY AND NATION BUILDING

Certainly in English literature, there is a great deal of this. The eighteenth century sees upheaval, to be sure, but this brings questions of identity to the fore. It is no strange thing that various British patriotic anthems date from this time. The Jacobite Rebellion, the exploits of the Duke of Marlborough and the Seven Years War all contribute to this. 

Thackeray’s History of Henry Esmond tackles both Jacobite plots and the War of the Spanish Succession, while his Barry Lyndon (and Kubrick’s film of the same) brings up the Seven Years War as central to Redmond Barry’s advance in the world. The flaws and nobility of the Jacobite Cause are played off against one another by Thackeray, as high hopes and self-sacrifice give way to a disappointing reality. 

Barry Lyndon is a wonderful film for this article: the long, high, isolating rooms; the low lighting from candles; the violent backdrop to a genteel world - even the children's magician with his invocation of the spectrum of visible light.

Another aspect of this is the world of letters. Thackeray brings the explosion of 18th century pamphleteers and essay writers to the fore in Henry Esmond; the title character even contributing to that world. There is a laissez-faire approach to the pamphlets: they can be censored and might well be, but the roots of the free press are on display here - and part of political discourse.

SQUALOR AND PREDATION

It will have not have escaped your notice that the Victorian author dominated the section titled Nobility. Well, Thackeray has his share of rogues and shabby deeds, but I do not think it wrong to say that the note of Squalor is clearer in later works.

The mind goes instantly to Gin Lane.

Two great recent accounts of the Enlightenment, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle rest soundly in this regard. Both take a certain delight in charting the course of scientists and aristocrats through grime-ridden city streets. Whilst the crowding and rapid growth of the Industrial Revolution might not have swollen cities, there is plenty of space for rookeries, debtor’s prisons, prostitution and slums. Even where Stephenson brings kindly or noble motives to the fore, one eye is on the squalor and pain of the times. Pynchon, however coated by conspiracy and framing device, is nothing if not more forthright in this.

For both authors, this is especially the case for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Even if by both the treatment of slaves is contextualised as one of many unequal relationships of the time rather than a unique ill, it is still singled out and condemned by protagonists. (Stephenson deals with both the taking of slaves by the Barbary Corsairs as well as the trade of slaves in Sub-Saharan Africa). This is scarcely surprising for authors writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Of course, given the actual course of historical events, any rebellion or liberation needs must be a small scale affair.

The Picaresque dominates both: the high frivolity of massive wigs and frockcoats encountering sewage and upset. Which is distinct from the practicalities of everyday life (consider this chap, for instance).

MEASUREMENT AND ITS ABUSES

I have written on here before about Map of a Nation and the history of the Ordnance Survey. Even if that grows a little out of even the Long Eighteenth Century, it is still relevant at to consider. Not that that counts as a work of fiction.

Given the fame of astronomer George Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, their exploits in charting the Maryland-Pennsylvania border are front and centre here. The adverse effects of chopping a line through the landscape and the unintended (or, given Pynchon's Jesuit conspiracies, utterly intended) effects thereof are made quite clear - by the presumed knowledge of the reader as regards the eventual significance of the Mason-Dixon line, if no more.  The first portion of Mason & Dixon deals with the Transit of Venus in 1761; this is another indicator of the propensity for measurement by the minds of the eighteenth Century. Taking and repeating accurate measurements - learning the span of the globe and the particular parts thereof - is all part of the Enlightenment project. 

The world, by such methods, becomes easier to traverse and to comprehend - for those at the centre of information networks, at any rate. [If you want to bring up Seeing Like a State at this point, you can. However, the ills of Modernism are still a way off.] 'Mapping' as a concept extends to other fields - think, for instance, of the Linnean taxonomy.

WHAT ARE WE LEFT WITH?

Most of Manola's points stand. But we are looking not just at the Early Modern, but the incipient modern, for good and ill: the growth of political discourse, the mapping of the world and the drawing of boundaries, global commerce. Of course, it isn't the Modern World. It's all the discarded ideas and first efforts and groundwork that contributed, bundled up and dressed in a periwig. There's doubtless a lot I've missed (the American War of Independence, for one) - but these are some of the notes portrayal of the eighteenth century offer up.