The Age of Reason: Social, Scientific, and Economic Change (1660–1785)

The Great Transformation: 1660 to 1785

The period between 1660 and 1785 was a time of amazing expansion for England. The world seemed fundamentally different by 1785. A sense of new, expanding possibilities transformed the daily life of the British people and offered them fresh ways of thinking about their relationship to nature.

There was a sense of relief and escape: relief from the strain of living in a mysterious universe, and escape from the ignorance and barbarism of the Gothic centuries. This era saw a revival of the desire for living and a sense of security following the upheavals of the Civil War period.

Intellectual Shifts: From Theocentric to Anthropocentric

Nature has been a controlling idea in Western thought ever since antiquity. The Age of Reason fostered a desire to understand nature not through religion, but through observation. The processes of nature had to be taken into account, given that everything was previously explained through religion and the supernatural. During the Christian centuries, religion had rested upon revelation; now it rested largely upon nature, even among the orthodox. This marked a significant shift from the Theocentric theory to the Anthropocentric theory.

The Scientific Revolution and New Thought

The scientific movement of the 16th and 17th centuries, driven by figures like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, produced a “climate of opinion” in which supernatural and occult explanations of natural phenomena ceased to satisfy.

The sense that everything was changing was also sparked by a revolution in science. With the discovery of the earth spinning around the sun, time and space exploded. The microscope and the telescope opened new fields of vision, and the doctrine of the plurality of worlds became endlessly repeated.

The authority of Aristotle was broken; his systems could not explain what Galileo and Kepler saw in the heavens. As discoveries multiplied, it became clear that the moderns knew things of which the ancients had been ignorant. This challenge to received opinion was thrilling as well as disturbing. In *Paradise Lost*, Book 8, the angel Raphael warns Adam to think about what concerns him, not dream about other worlds. Yet, despite the warning voiced by Milton, many later writers found the new science inspiring, giving them new images and possibilities of fact and fiction to explore.

Economic Expansion and the Rise of London

Political power gradually shifted from the King to the Parliament and the cabinet ministers. A huge expansion abroad of British colonies in Asia and North America helped fuel the Industrial Revolution.

London became the center of social, economic, cultural, and intellectual life. Economic principles and ethics became separated, and the new economists proved to their own satisfaction that the individual desire to make money could produce in the long run nothing but good, and poverty could only be the result of idleness.

Coffeehouses, Literature, and the Middle Class

Coffeehouses appeared, replacing the Court as the meeting place of men of culture. Journalists emerged, and poetry became social and familiar. Women were generally not allowed in coffeehouses, limiting the audience for these new cultural hubs.

• There was a correlation between social class and education, between elegance and learning, that has not always existed in subsequent periods.
• Merchants and tradesmen played a very important part in the life of the country. However, the middle classes did not rule the country; political rulers were drawn from the aristocracy, country gentlemen, and big estate owners, though they ruled only with the permission of and in alliance with commercial interests.
• The American Dream serves as an example of triumph in the USA, illustrating that triumph is not only associated with money or power.
• Education and entertainment of the middle classes became a legitimate objective of literature.

London: The Center of Consumer Society

London was the center of business, pleasure, and an emerging consumer society. With growing prosperity, London became a city where everything was for sale. Elegant shops dazzled tourists. Varieties of spectacles and shows drew larger and larger crowds, and theaters expanded to meet the competition. At the London playhouses, the audience itself was often part of the entertainment.

The Royal Exchange, in the heart of the city’s financial district, was not only a hub for business and shopping but also a symbol of globalization: the increasing importance of international commerce to the British economy. Addison’s idyllic picture of the Exchange, written in 1711, celebrates the way in which the whole world seemed to revolve around the blessings of trade. Yet, many English people also worried that foreign luxuries might sap the national spirit of independence and self-sufficiency.

The shift in population from the country to the town reveals how far the life of the city, where every daily newspaper brought new sources of interest, had moved from traditional values.

Changing Tastes in Art and Culture

Formerly, the tastes of the court had dominated the arts, with the monarch standing for the nation. But the 18th century witnessed a turn from palaces to pleasure gardens that were open to anyone with the price of admission. New standards of taste were set by what the people of London wanted, and art joined with commerce to satisfy those desires. Artist William Hogarth made his living not, as earlier painters had done, through portraits of royal and noble patrons, but by selling his prints to a large and appreciative public. London itself, its beauty and horror, its ever-changing mood, became a favorite subject of writers. This shift reflected changing tastes, making culture accessible to nearly all who could afford the price of admission. The city, as a great metropolis, embodied both good and bad—industrialization led to horrific suburbs, and art began to reflect these darker aspects.

Empire, Slavery, and the Cost of Progress

Explorers were traveling around the earth, where they discovered unknown countries and ways of life. These encounters with other peoples often proved vicious. The trade and conquests that made European powers like Spain and Portugal immensely rich also brought the scourge of racism and colonial exploitation.

In the 18th century, Britain’s expansion into an empire was fueled by slavery and the slave trade, a source of profit that belied the national self-image as a haven of liberty and turned British people against one another. Rising prosperity at home had been built on inhumanity across the seas. At the end of the 18th century, as many writers joined the abolitionist campaign, a new humanitarian ideal was forged. The modern world invented by the 18th century brought suffering along with progress. We still live with its legacies today.

Fashion and the Consumer Revolution

England was known as a nation of shopkeepers. The stylish and lavish shops that filled 18th-century London were also a visible sign of growing national power. At the cutting edge of a consumer revolution, they showed the public that the modern world was to be welcomed, not feared. There was something for everyone to desire and possess in this new world of fashion.

During the successful run of *The Tatler* (1709–11), Steele and Addison’s publication, *The Female Tatler* was published three times a week, attributed to an imaginary “Mrs. Crackenthrope, a Lady that knows everything.” Its authors, who probably included both women and men, aimed to amuse and instruct female readers, as shown in a piece on shops from 1709.

John Locke: Empiricism and Liberalism

John Locke (1632–1704) was one of the most important philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. He provided an intellectual basis for theories of politics, religion, and aesthetics, as well as for precepts pertaining to social happiness. He rejected innate ideas in favor of the notion of knowledge based on external sensation and internal reflection. These ideas helped determine the tendency in many writers to describe the observable world instead of making subjective interpretations of the workings of physics.

For Locke, the mind was a *tabula rasa* at birth, a “white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas.” When he rhetorically demanded how the mind acquired “all the materials of Reason and Knowledge,” he answered succinctly, “from Experience.” He gave great importance to the processes of the mind in acquiring knowledge.

The discussion of language centers on the premise that words are signs not of things, but of ideas, and on the related insistence that language is a creation of a society whose members consent to the fact that certain words stand for certain ideas.

Locke’s influential explorations of a theory of government are related to this concept of social consent. He emphasizes that civil societies are bonded together by enlightened self-interest and by the dual necessities of securing individual liberty and the protection of individual property rights. Governments existed as a trust conferred upon them by the consent of citizens. If that trust were abused, or power became arbitrary, then citizens had a right to withdraw confidence and authority from their rulers. Locke is, therefore, the basis of economic theories that dictate that private property is a natural right of man that cannot be taken from him by the State, as well as the creator of the empirical and liberalist school.