Virtuous discourse: Sensibility and commuity in late eighteenth-century Scotland

213 Pages·1987·7.708 MB·English

by  John Alfred Dwyer

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VIRTUOUS DISCOURSE:
Sensibility and Community
in Late Eighteenth-Century
Scotland
JOHN DWYER
Department of History
University of British Columbia
K A it 4> H ® BE
IIHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
3 0560 40051181 9
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HOTI
JOHN DONALD PUBLISHERS LTD
EDINBURGH
For Charlene
© John Dwyer, 1987
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any form or by any means without the
prior permission of the publishers, John Donald
Publishers Ltd., 138 St Stephen Street, Edinburgh,
EH3 5AA
ISBN 0 85976 174 6
Exclusive distribution in the United States of America
and Canada by Humanities Press Inc., Atlantic
Highlands, NJ 07716, USA.
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‘• ; i. I Phototypeset by Quom Selective Repro, Loughborough.
Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow
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A cknowledgements
I would like to thank those who provided the intellectual assistance and emotional
tolerance necessary to complete the task at hand: Professors James Winter and Ian
Ross, who brought me in from the cold, and my friends Doreen Schmidt, Lionel
Friess, Angela Dempster, Sam Sommers, Bill Brown, Vai Green, Reinie
Heydemann, George and Pauline Knox, Sandy and Dale Walker, who added so
much warmth. A particular debt of gratitude is owed to Richard Sher, whose
painstaking examination of the manuscript was carried out in the best tradition of
the literati of enlightened Scotland. Other North American scholars who have
aided this work include: Roger Emerson, Dan Klang, Harvey Mitchell, Murray
Tolmie, Larry Bongie, Steve Straker and Ed Hundert.
The Scottish contribution to this book was considerable. I am grateful for the
help and kindness of Rosalind Mitchison, Geoffrey Carnell, Harry Dickinson,
Nicholas Phillipson, John Tuckwell and the librarians in the Edinburgh
University Library and National Library of Scotland. My special thanks to Roger
Mason, Alexander Murdoch, and to all the inhabitants of Edinburgh and
Scotland, who have not forgotten what it means to be a moral community and to
share their bounty with a stranger.
Finally, my thanks to the Canada Council for assisting my research for this
book.
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Contents
Page
Acknowledgements v
Introduction 1
1. Periodicals, Preachers and Press 10
2. Discursive Domains 38
3. The Construction of Adolescence in Late Eighteenth-Century
Scotland 72
4. The Symphony of Sympathy: Late Eighteenth-Century Scottish
Reflections on Private and Domestic Life 95
5. ‘A Peculiar Aptitude to Please’: Complacent Women and
Scottish Moralists 117
6. The Novel as Moral Preceptor 141
7. Theory and Discourse: The 6th Edition of The Theory of
Moral Sentiments 168
Conclusion. The Decline of the Scottish Literary Republic 186
Select Bibliography 194
Index 198
vii
I
Historical explanation is not the application of generaliza­
tions and theories to particular instances: it is the tracing of
internal relations. It is like applying one’s knowledge of a
language in order to understand a conversation rather than
like applying one’s knowledge of the laws of mechanics to
understand the workings of a watch. (Peter Winch, from
The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy)
I shall abandon any attempt, therefore, to see discourse as a
phenomenon of expression ... the verbal translation of a
previously established synthesis; instead, I shall look for a
field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity. I
(Michael Foucault, from The Archaeology of Knowledge)
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Introduction
Every friend to letters must feel a sensible pleasure, that, amidst the general flow of
dissipation, science and polite learning still raise their heads and flourish.
(STUDIOUS to the Caledonian Mercury, 13 March, 1775)
This study hinges upon the concept of virtuous discourse — the ethical vocabulary
and its characteristic usage among the late eighteenth-century Scottish literati.
The term ‘discourse’ indicates an attention to the broad framework and internal
connections of language, while the adjective ‘virtuous’ suggests that moral
concerns saturated the vocabulary of Scottish men and women during this period.
While the concept of virtuous discourse may seem a novel or foreign tool for the
examination of Scottish culture, it serves two particularly useful functions.1 Not
only does it avoid such increasingly anachronistic perspectives as the Scottish
contribution to the discipline of economics or sociology, but it also allows for
reappraisals of Scottish culture based upon a wider sample than a few texts or
thinkers.
The moral preoccupations of eighteenth-century Scotsmen have not received
the attention they deserve. Yet traditional moral discourse in that environment
was so extensive that it could not easily be ignored, by even the most abstract and
progressive theoreticians. Moreover, such moralising was intimately connected to
several critical cultural developments that I will discuss in detail: the
conceptualization of the adolescent, the domestication of women, the credibility of
the novel, and the decline of public man. Running through all of these rich cultural
tapestries was one darkly, coloured thread — the conviction that increased wealth,
individualism and specialization threatened the integrity of the moral community.
Late eighteenth-century Scotland is not typically viewed as an embattled moral
republic. Despite the proliferation of recent scholarship emphasizing the
significance of civic humanism, communal cohesion and polite Stoicism in
eighteenth-century Scottish culture, the ethical component remains obscured by a
tendency to view the second half of the eighteenth century as an ‘age of
improvement’.2 To be sure, the imperative of improvement played a key function
in Scottish culture during a period of transition into modern European socio­
economic life. But economic improvement was constantly measured and
contained within a much broader perspective on the national, and by definition
moral, community. If one is looking for constructions which summarize the
cultural discourse of the period, then phrases like ‘the pursuit of virtue’, ‘the
reappraisal of civic consciousness’ or ‘the rise of sensibility’ are far more
representative than ‘age of improvement’.
The last phrase is somewhat misleading in any case, since there was precious
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2 Virtuous Discourse
little economic growth immediately following the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763),
and thereafter the lowland economy progressed only very modestly until the real
economic upturn at the very end of the century.3 While all the indices — linen,
tobacco, grain prices, and the rationalization of agriculture — point to steady
growth between 1750 and 1785, no observable metamorphosis in commercial
trade, agricultural productivity, or national wealth occurred. The greatest, and
certainly the most visible, transformation happened in the urban centers.
Edinburgh, for example, experienced a large increase in its population; with its
traditional intellectual and social attractions for the wealthier members of landed
society, it also witnessed other significant changes during the closing decades of
the century.4 It rapidly became the focal point for luxurious consumption, as well
as intellectual and fashionable refinement, in the nation. Because of its historical
and strategic importance, Edinburgh also became the center for the dissemination
of information and culture.5 Its literati held undisputed pride of place within the
nation and helped to mold the movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment.
The Scottish highlands were a different story altogether. Despite significant
geographical and economic variations, they tended to constitute an economic
backwater, as Adam Smith pointed out in such examples as that of the highland
villagers who still used pebbles or nails as major forms of currency.6 Agricultural
production was pitifully low and remained so throughout the century, because of
the highlanders’ use of primitive technology and an outdated system of crop
rotation.7 Even the cattle found it difficult to forage for nourishment and had to be
fattened up in the northern counties prior to their sale in England. Indeed, so far
behind were the highlands that even those Scotsmen who were most concerned
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about the negative effects of economic improvement were unabashed ‘improvers’
as far as the highlands were concerned. The highlands were as Youngson has aptly
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u termed it, ‘a region of poverty’. Their remote populations, many of whom spoke
only Gaelic and could not read any English, remained stubbornly impervious to
the social, cultural, and economic propaganda of the enlightened Edinburgh
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literati. Alexander Carlyle described the highlanders as an abject ‘nation’ which
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had ‘not yet felt the sweets of Independence or Industry, nor been instructed by
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rational or manly Preachers’.8
The much used phrase, ‘age of improvement’, needs to be understood as a
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i cultural imperative rather than a strictly factual observation. Its meaning rested in
a critical way in the civic consciousness and discourse of those patriotic Scotsmen
who linked economic advancement and polite learning with the creation of a stable
modern polity. Their enthusiasm for a Forth-Clyde Canal was so extreme that the
original proposal had to be scrapped in favor of a much grander scheme.9 The
construction of the New Town during the 1780s and 1790s was a testament to the
classical and orderly aesthetic consciousness of Edinburgh’s most respectable
citizens.10 The^supportfor new university buildings reflected their faith in the
powerof education to mold the rational, sensitive and, above all, virtuous citizen.
The spread of clubs throughout the lowland centers was indicative of the desire of
many patriotic Scotsmen to have economic and polite culture proceed hand in I
hand. The rage for agricultural improvement, as demonstrated in the constant
Introduction 3
experimentation in new seed varieties from the mid 1760s, remained a constant of
Scottish life.
The spirit of improvement was much more than a corpus of knowledge or a
series of events, it was a complex network of symbols and mental approaches. It
represented new ways of looking at the world, founded upon deductive reason and
empirical observation, rather than upon dogma or fossilized traditions. It was
reflected in the attacks of the Moderate clergy of the Church of Scotland upon the
‘Spirit of Fanaticism’ which for so long had checked the advancement of ‘Art’ as
well as ‘Industry’.11 At the level of high culture, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of
Nations (1776) represented what was most positive and creative in the Scottish
attitude towards economic modernization. This Scottish product had an
enormous impact upon British society generally, providing the intellectual
rrtionale for a commercial and industrial society. At the same time, The Wealth of
Nations was the highly visible tip of an immense socio-cultural iceberg. There
were countless patrons of improvement in Scotland who, while they might not
have fully understood Smith’s attack upon mercantilism, helped to create the
milieu in which his masterpiece was produced.
The Scottish discussion of the economy and its improvement has been of
particular interest to historians, who have been eager to trace its contribution to
the notion of a market economy and Marxist economics.12 However, this
preoccuption has not gone entirely unchallenged. As distinct from those who look
to the eighteenth-century Scottish writers for the roots of economic, and possibly
alienated, individualism, other observers have focused upon the Scottish
preoccupation with the concept of community, the conviction that man was by
nature a social being and the view of society as an organic and moral entity. In a
pioneering work, Gladys Bryson maintained that a distinctive feature of
eighteenth-century Scottish thought was its emphasis upon the social attributes of
man and the tendency of members of the Scottish School to give human affectivity
and the notion of community priority over abstract reason.13 Certainly, an
excellent case could be made for just such an interpretation of Adam Smith’s other
famous, and so often overlooked, work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
Just as a man could not know his own bodily features without the aid of a ‘looking
glass’, argued Smith, so too the propriety and impropriety of man’s behavior could
only be assessed with reference to the community — that ‘mirror’ which the
solitary individual lacked.14 Comparisons between Smith’s theory and recent
perspectives on human interaction merely highlight Smith’s profound social
insights.15
But the eighteenth-century Scots did not view themselves as sociologists. They
regarded themselves as civic moralists and rhetoricians. An emphasis upon the
moral character of Scottish thought has produced some new and important i
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research which reveals not only the complexity of the enlightened Scottish
consciousness during this period of social change, but also the unwillingness of
Scottish writers to detach civic from economic matters. Their primary model
always remained the moral rather than the market economy. Nicholas Phillipson’s
examination of civic morality in Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ralph a
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4 Virtuous Discourse
Lindgren’s penetrating discussion of the significance of the concept of community
in both Smith’s early and later writings, and Richard Teichgraeber’s attempt to
reevaluate the relationship between Smith’s moral and economic discourse, all
evidence the potential of approaches which concentrate upon the moral rather
than the market aspects of Scottish thought.16 Stressing a far greater continuity in
Scottish moralizing from its pre-Union and Presbyterian origins, scholars such as
Duncan Forbes and Knud Haakonnssen have emphasized the civic jurisprudential
traditions of natural and Roman law.17 John Robertson has taken a different path,
using the controversy over the militia to demonstrate the vitality and adaptability
of the civic humanist tradition in Scotland.18
Such studies affirm the moral character of Scottish thought, but they have a
tendency to reduce cultural discourse to a handful of thinkers, texts or issues.
Calling for a more liberal definition of Scottish culture, Richard Sher suggests that
the Scottish literati were a community of multidimensional beings who performed
many different roles.19 Adam Smith himself was a complex character; his friend
Hugh Blair was ‘often amused with the opposite views which he took of the same
subject, according to the humour in which he happened to be’.20 The culture in
which he and his fellow literati operated was rich and varied, a complex and often
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paradoxical interaction of traditional and modern values, beliefs and ideas.
Without going quite so far as to equate Scotland’s Enlightenment with its culture,
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historians clearly need to pay far greater attention to the various levels of discourse
among its literati.
What a movement away from intellectual texts or excessively rigid categories
immediately discovers is that the respectable members of enlightened Scottish
society were by no means as modem as they might first seem. For example, the
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enlightened Scots of the late eighteenth century were not the unqualified
defenders ofimprovement that they are so often caricatured as being. They were
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acutely and often painfully aware that economic improvement did not necessarily
imply human improvement. In his economic, hot to rheTitiofTKis moral, writings,
Adam Smith pointed out tliat economic progress measured in terms of the
increased division of labor could have potentially disastrous effects upon the
A* 3j condition of the manual worker.21 Smith was critical of large manufacturies
because of their effect upon the moral identity and creativity of their employees.22
|Mr y [ Morebvei^Jjjmkh. viewed the emerging bourgeoisie as a particularly selfish and
/ irresponsible class of individuals. ' ~
Yet Smith was a decided optimist when compared with many of his friends and
contemporaries. Enlightened Moderate preachers in the Church of Scotland,
including Smith’s close friends Hugh Blair and John Drysdale, painted a much
more threatening picture of the moral consequences of economic evolution. The
essays of the cream of Edinburgh’s young literati, the Mirror Club, were
characterized by the discussion of strategies for avoiding moral corruption and
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communal disintegration in the wake of the new commercial environment.
Despite all attempts at urbanity and cheerfulness in the Mirror and Lounger, the
decline of the moral community always loomed in the background. Such concerns
implied neither simplistic reaction nor idiosyncratic singularity, for a similar
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