FLESH IN THE AGE OF REASON

Selective survey of how thinking about the self changed in 18th-century Britain, designed to be a sequel to The Creation of the Modern World: The British Enlightenment (2000).

Porter (Social History of Medicine/University College, London), who died in 2002, presents a gallery of literate men who formed thinking about personal identity during the Age of Reason. It was a time, he writes, when “opinion-shaping elites” were abandoning or reinterpreting entrenched Christian doctrines about the body and the soul, finding Christian preoccupation with the flesh vulgar and implausible. After an introductory examination of these doctrines and a brief look at some cultural changes—growing literacy, commercialism, increased privacy—that fostered questioning of old truths, the author focuses on some of those who challenged traditional thinking. Making no pretence of being encyclopedic, he selects a few pivotal pieces of writing, among them Addison and Steele’s essays in The Spectator; the Earl of Shaftesbury’s treatise, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Tale of a Tub; Johnson’s Dictionary; Gibbon’s Memoirs; and Sterne’s riotous picaresque Tristram Shandy. Porter quotes freely from these and from the works of such men as Erasmus Darwin, William Godwin, and Robert Owen to illustrate how the self was being secularized, the emphasis shifting from the Christian idea of the immortal soul incorporated in a weak body to a model of the self that stressed consciousness, or the mind. Among the ways in which this shift manifested itself, Porter notes, was increased emphasis on the perfection of life on earth and of worldly happiness as an end in itself. Attitudes toward corporal punishment consequently shifted, as did thinking about the treatment of the insane, education of children, witchcraft, illness, and alcoholism. As usual, Porter’s wit and erudition are evident throughout.

An impressive and accessible work of scholarship.