What is optimism? Voltaire’s Candide has a scathing answer: “It is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong.”
Penelope J Corfield is not so dismissive of the personal or philosophical disposition to concentrate on the brighter side of life. The dust jacket of her new book, The Georgians, describes her as an optimist, and there are multiple references to optimism in her wide-ranging survey of the “long” 18th century, which she dates from 1680 to 1840. Optimism is connected to the demographic boom in many areas of Great Britain; to the expansion of towns, trade and industry that led the writer Daniel Defoe to declare Britain in the 1720s the “most flourishing and opulent country in the world”; and to the popular catchphrase, “You can’t stop progress.”
Corfield, professor of history at Royal Holloway, University of London, vividly evokes the Enlightenment optimism that Voltaire satirised. Light, she explains, “became a particularly significant symbol of desirable change”. It was a metaphor for the development of reason, education and science. And thanks to the oil-fired lamps pioneered in England in the 1790s, and gas lamps after 1820, the townscapes of Britain and Ireland were literally illuminated. A belief in linear progress “was slowly winning the battle of ideas”, even if the Irish famine in the 1840s “was a huge blow to concepts of universal betterment”.
The novelist Brigid Brophy wrote that “the two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the eighteenth century”. Corfield’s comprehensive survey of the Georgians assembles evidence for this claim: their deeds and misdeeds, their contributions to cultural and scientific progress and their pursuit of empire and enslavement are a hotly disputed legacy. The historian contributes calm: “There’s no point in simply asserting that the past should not have happened as it did.”
Thematically rather than narratively structured, The Georgians compiles extensive lists of achievements that have shaped the present. A range of specialist financial services were invented in London: fire insurance (after 1681), marine insurance (after 1688), life assurance (after 1706), the stock exchange (after 1698). The Bank of England was created as an autonomous self-regulating institution in 1694 and by the late 18th century international investors were responding “favourably to Britain’s fiscal and political stability”.
As to Britain’s activities overseas, Corfield rejects the idea that the British were simply universal “baddies” or “goodies”. Of Britain’s rule in India she writes: “the two-way encounter between Indians and Britons was a complicated but mutual history, calling for understanding as well as careful assessments of its benefits and disbenefits.” But she also quotes from Edmund Burke’s speech for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Britain’s first governor-general of Bengal, India. Listening to Burke, Hastings felt himself “the most culpable man on earth”. “Be you never so high, the law is above you,” was a common Georgian saying.
Each of the book’s chapters ends with a section called “Time-Shift: Then and Now”, offering eclectic recommendations for reading, visiting or viewing online texts, artefacts and places that connect the Georgians to us. One is the civic memorial to the philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-76) outside the High Court on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, showing Hume dressed as an ancient Greek philosopher. Corfield describes the “playfully superstitious homage” of those who rub the statue’s toe for luck despite Hume’s own rationalist credo. She does not, however, mention contemporary demands that the statue be removed because Hume was an unashamed racist who sought to benefit from the slave trade.
The chapter in which Corfield directly discusses slavery includes the statistic that “between the later 16th century and 1807 . . . some 3.1 million enslaved people were taken in British ships from Africa, of whom perhaps 2.7 million reached America”. She comments that “it was a colossal total — perhaps as much as one quarter of all such shipments”. All abolitionists, she writes, “agreed that enslavement contradicted the enlightened temper of the times”. Pro-slavers lobbied behind the scenes, but did not cultivate pro-slavery associations.
The chapter ends surprisingly with a list of five trees and shrubs that have become “naturalised legacies of Georgian Britain’s global explorations”: the cedar of Lebanon, the weeping willow, the common rhododendron, wisteria and the Douglas fir. For all her optimism, Corfield’s shift from the brutality of slavery and colonialisation to the solace of the natural world echoes the stoical end of Candide: “We must cultivate our garden.”
The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 18th Century Britain by Penelope J Corfield Yale, £25, 488 pages
Ruth Scurr is author of ‘Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows’ (Chatto & Windus)
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The Georgians — the age that shaped Britain, for good and bad
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