The Eschatology of Everyday Things, England, 1600–1800

See Hillel Schwartz, “Millenarianism (Overview),” in Mircea Eliade, editor-in-chief, Encyclo-pedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1986) 9:521–31; Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989 ).Google Scholar

On senses of an ending, see of course Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), but also Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 ).Google Scholar

Hillel Schwartz, Century’s End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siècle from the 990s through the 1990s (New York: Doubleday, 1990; revised and abridged paperback edition, 1996).Google Scholar

Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 ).Google Scholar

Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980 ).Google Scholar

See G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Nicholas Thomas, “Objects of Knowledge: Oceanic Artifacts in European Engravings,” in his In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 93–132. I highlight exoticism because there has long been a quite complex cultural connection between ideas/feelings about the “end of time” and myths/maps about the “ends of the earth” - a connection that often goes unrecognized, sometimes even with regard to the figure of the New Jerusalem.Google Scholar

DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns,10–14.Google Scholar

As one forerunner, consider the Ancient/Modern debate traced by Heiko A. Oberman, “Via Antiqua and Via Moderna: Late Medieval Prolegomena to Early Reformation Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 1 (1987), 23–41.Google Scholar

On the philosophical implications of the development of calculus, see esp. Niccolò Guicciardini, The Development of Newtonian Calculus in Britain, 1700–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Douglas M. Jesseph, “Philosophical Theory and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20, no. 2 (1989) 215–44; Paolo Mancosu, “The Metaphysics of the Calculus: A Foundational Debate in the Paris Academy of Sciences, 1700–1706,” Historia Mathematica 16, no. 3 (1989), 154–63; Katherine Hill, “Neither Ancient Nor Modern: Wallis and Barrow on the Composition of Continua. Part One: Mathematical Styles and the Composition of Continua,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 50, no. 2 (1996), 165–78, revealing that John Wallis, who embraced the algebraic method, nonetheless remained “ancient” in his notions of fixed magnitudes, space, and time, while Isaac Barrow, who stuck to geometrical methods, embraced “modern” ideas of fluctuating magnitudes, space, and time. Ancient and Modern were, in this context, less a question of method than of perception; we often confuse the two.Google Scholar

On French fairy tales, see esp. Marc Soriano, Les Contes de Perrault, culture savante et traditions populaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), a work ignored by DeJean, who however (and throughout) emphasizes the centrality of Perrault’s work to the Querelle in France. In England, see Roger Thompson. ed., Samuel Pepys’ Penny Merriments (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), esp. “Histories” and “Magic,” 24–94, and also Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen, 1981), recounting many a tale of inversion.Google Scholar

See Allen G. Debus, Chemistry, Alchemy, and the New Philosophy, 1500–1700 (London: Variorium Reprints, 1987), reexamined in Piyo Rattansi and Antonio Clericuzio, eds., Alchemy and Chemistry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994); Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Face of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Bernard Joly, “Alchimie et rationalité: la question des critères de démarcation entre chimie et alchimie au XVIIe siècle,” Sciences et techniques en perspective 31 (1995), 93–107; Maurice Crosland, “Changes in Chemical Concepts and Language in the Seventeenth Century,” Science in Context 9, no. 3 (1996), 225–40; Lawrence M. Principe, “The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest,” Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1996, DAI 1996, 57(5):2183A, reconsidering Boyle’s lost “Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of Metals.”Google Scholar

See Joseph M. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977 ), and his Humanism and History ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987 ), 107–22.Google Scholar

Recent examples: Peter Earle, “The 1690s: Finance, Fashion, and Frivolity,” in Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman, eds., Fins de Siècle: How Centuries End, 1400–2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 99–124; Leo Braudy, “Unturning the Century: The Missing Decade of the 1690s,” in Elaine Scarry, ed., Fins de Siècle: English Poetry in 1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 65–93 — more critical.Google Scholar

Per contra: Margaret C. Jacob, “The Crisis of the European Mind: Hazard Revisited,” in P. Mack and M.C. Jacob, eds., Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 ), 251–72.Google Scholar

Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985); Stephen Trowell, “George Keith: Post-Restoration Quaker Theology and the Experience of Defeat,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 76, no. 1 (1994), 119–37; Christopher Hill et al., The World of the Muggletonians (London: Temple Smith, 1983); William M Lamont, “The Muggletonians, 1652–1979,” Past and Present 99 (1983), 27–40.Google Scholar

In England, this has been tracked best by Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See also John F. Tinkler, “The Splitting of Humanism: Bentley, Swift, and the English Battle of the Books,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49, no. 3 (1988), 453–73; Jeffrey Smitten, “Ancients, Moderns, and Augustan Culture,” Storia della Storiografia 20 (1991), 127–35; and James E. Force, “Sir Isaac Newton and the `Battle of the Books’: Scientific Progress and the `Druidical’ Religion,” in Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence, James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, eds. ( Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999 ), pp. 237–57.Google Scholar

I am willing to push the metaphor of acceleration over from physics to the social and cultural arena earlier than was done in common English usage. Cf. Michel Blay, La Naissance de la Mécanique Analytique: La Science du mouvement du tournant des X Vile et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992 ); Michael J. Buckley, Motion and Motion’s God ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971 ).Google Scholar

C. John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ).Google Scholar

Hillel Schwartz, Kuaves, Fools, Madmen, and That Subtile Effluvium: A Study of the Opposition to the French Prophets in England, 1706–1710, University of Florida Social Sciences Monograph, 62 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978); Richard H. Popkin, “Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story,” Jewish History 8, nos. 1–2 (1994), 43–54.Google Scholar

See Gregory F. Scholtz, “Anglicanism in the Age of Johnson: The Doctrine of Conditional Salvation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 2 (1988/89), 182–207, then questioned by Donald Greene, “How Degraded Was Eighteenth-Century Anglicanism?,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 24, no. 1 (1990), 93–108.Google Scholar

David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), 219–36; Gavin Lucas, “The Changing Face of Time: English Domestic Clocks from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Design History 8, no. 1 (1995), 1–9, on the new eighteenth-century focus on hour and minute. Cf. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 ).Google Scholar

Richard Hatchwell, “A Footnote to `Letts Time Travel’ — the First Printed Diaries?,” Manuscripts 41, no. 3 (1989), 219–22; Margaret Hunt, “Time-Management, Writing, and Accounting in the Eighteenth-Century English Trading Family: A Bourgeois Enlightenment,” Business and Economic History 18 (1989), 150–59; and, of course, E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967), 56–97.Google Scholar

Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); K.T. Winkler, “The Forces of the Market and the London Newspaper in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History 4, no. 2 (1988), 22–35, arguing for the predominance of public taste in shaping the newspaper trade.Google Scholar

See John Ashton, A History of English Lotteries (London, 1893) and his The History of Gambling in England (London, 1898); Francis Baily, The Doctrine of Life-Annuities and Assurances,2 Vols. (London, 1813), 1:x-xxvii, on the history of earlier work; John S. Ezell, Fortune’s Merry Wheel: The Lottery in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 1–59. On financial times, see Kenneth J. Weiller and Philip Mirowski, “Rates of Interest in Eighteenth-Century England,” Explorations in Economic History 27, no. 1 (1990), 1–28, who find eighteenth-century rates so unstable that neither wars nor government intervention nor “rational expectations” can account for them.Google Scholar

Jane Wess, “Lecture Demonstrations and the Real World: The Case of Cart-Wheels,” British Journal for the History of Science 28, no. 1 (1995), 79–90; Dorian Gerhold, “Packhorses and Wheeled Vehicles in England, 1550–1800,” Journal of Transport History 14, no. 1 (1993), 1–26; Penelope J. Corfield, “Walking the City Streets: The Urban Odyssey in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of Urban History 16, no. 2 (1990), 132–74. Consider also the late eighteenth-century rediscovery of “First Aid,” which had attracted little attention when the first such booklet was published in 1633: Norman Gevitz, “Helps for Suddain Accidents Endangering Life: Stephen Bradwell and the Origin of the First Aid Guide,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 67, no. 1 (1993), 51–73.Google Scholar

Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville, VA: University Presses of Virginia, 1985), 168–74; Serge Roche, Germain Courage, and Pierre Devinoy, Mirrors,trans. C. Duckworth and A. Munro (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 19–29 and throughout.Google Scholar

Contrast seventeenth-century accounts of the deathbed as battleground for the last of a series of confrontations between good and evil with eighteenth-century desires for, and accounts of, deathbed changes of heart and mind: Barbara R. Dailey, “The Visitation of Sarah Wight: Holy Carnival and the Revolution of the Saints in Civil War London,” Church History 55, no. 4 (1986), 438–55; O.M. Brack. Jr., “The Death of Samuel Johnson and the Ars Moriendi Tradition,” Cithara 20, no. 1 (1980), 3–15; Robert G. Walker, “Public Death in the Eighteenth Century,” Research Studies 48, no. 1 (1980), 11–24; John Sitter, “A Poetics of Conversion in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 10 (1981), 181–89; Henry D. Rack, “Evangelical Endings: Death-Beds in Evangelical Biography,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 74, no. 1 (1992), 39–56.Google Scholar

See esp. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chaps. 18–19 on death, funerals, and burials. Concerning the demographic transition of the 1700s, see John Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), observing that the general eighteenth-century decline in infant mortality was late in coming to London itself. On romantic aspects, see most recently Lorna Clymer, “Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper, and Wordsworth,” English Language History 62,no. 2 (1995), 347–86, demonstrating how immortality was being shifted away from the one who had died to the community of survivors and their memory of the deceased. I would draw the implication that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the deathbed had for many become a far more conclusive place than ever before.Google Scholar

Reinhard C. Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Wolf Lepenies places this in the sociopolitical context of changes in the position of nobility and bourgeoisie: Melancholy and Society, trans. J. Gaines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Chronic famine and chronic food riots were prompts for Edmund Burke’s famous Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770), and Mark Harrison has pointed out how regular were the crowd- (and riot-) forming occasions of the working people. Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Wolf Lepenies places this in the sociopolitical context of changes in the position of nobility and bourgeoisie: Melancholy and Society, trans. J. Gaines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Chronic famine and chronic food riots were prompts for Edmund Burke’s famous Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770), and Mark Harrison has pointed out how regular were the crowd- (and riot-) forming occasions of the working people: “The Ordering of the Urban Environment: Time, Work, and the Occurrence of Crowds, 1790–1835,” Past and Present 110 (1986), 134–68.Google Scholar

Michael D. MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990 ), 121–3, 133.Google Scholar

Geoffrey W. Clark, “Betting on Lives: Life Insurance in English Society and Culture, 16051775,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1993, DAI 1993,53(12)-4436A; Lorraine J. Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University, 1988); Anders Hald, A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750 (New York: Wiley, 1990); Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

Lynn Hunt, “Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800,” in Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography (New York: Zone, 1993), 9–45. Cf. Henry Abelove, “Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in England,” Genders 6 (1989), 125–30, drawing a parallel between the apparent increase of productive sex (presumed from evidence of population growth) and the rise of a rationalized capitalist system of production. Nicholas Rogers, “Carnal Knowledge: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Westminster,” Journal of Social History 23, no. 2 (1989), 355–75, cautions against using illegitimacy rates as an index to changing sexual appetite or indeed to sexual liberation. Adrian Wilson, however, in “Illegitimacy and its Implications in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London: The Evidence of the Foundling Hospital,” Continuity and Change 4, no. 1 (1989), 103–64, shows that marriage in London was courtship-led, while in the countryside courtship was induced by promises of marriage. It is in these contexts that one needs to revisit the history of Joanna Southcott and her pregnancy, but see also Roger Robins, “Anglican Prophetess: Joanna Southcott and the Gospel Story,” Anglican and Episcopal History 61, no. 3 (1992), 277–302, Southcott as a feminist. Contrast Anna Clark, “The sexual crisis and popular religion in London, 1770–1820,” International Labor and Working-Class History 34 (1988), 56–69; Deborah M. Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985 ).Google Scholar

Lloyd G. Stevenson, “Suspended Animation and the History of Anaesthesia,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 49, no. 4 (1975), 482–511; Sean M. Quinlan, “Apparent Death in Eighteenth-Century France and England,” French History 9, no. 1 (1995), 27–47. Quinlan associates a more intense fear of premature burial with an eighteenth-century shift from the sacred notion of death as an event to the secular notion of death as a process, less distinct and therefore more likely to lead to mistaking the still-alive for the dead. But given that physicians, anatomists, and budding biologists in the eighteenth century were adding stages to dying in much the same manner as revival ministers were adding stages to the process of conversion, the threat of premature burial could equally well have encouraged people to make additional efforts to have their death (like - and sometimes at the same time as - their conversion) be an event, distinct and remarkable. Cultural struggle with fears of premature burial and brushes with ghosts (who, in anthropological terms, are people who have not been given a proper funeral and seeing-off) deserves further study as a particularly revealing nexus of senses of endings, as with the Near-Death Experience so popular in this fin de siècle.Google Scholar

Sommerville, News Revolution in England,135.Google Scholar

Is Bruno Latour’s impatience with the “Enlightenment” program - not yet achieved - therefore a modernist complaint, in his We Have Never Been Modern,trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)?Google Scholar

Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 147–8 on the sauces of Antonin Carême, who however also invented the soufflé, a time-sensitive delicacy highly susceptible to interruption/deflation and made possible through the closer control of heat in the kitchen range, itself a product of Count Rumford’s better design and the availability of better metal-tempering procedures, on the second of which see, in brief, Cyril Stanley Smith, “The Development of Ideas on the Structure of Metals,” in Marshall Clagett, ed., Critical Problems in the History of Science ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959 ) 482–9.Google Scholar

See David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Malcolm R. Jack, Corruption and Progress: The Eighteenth-Century Debate ( New York: AMS Press, 1989 ).Google Scholar

Printed in Jean Harrowven, The Origins of Rhymes, Songs, and Sayings ( London: Kaye and Ware, 1977 ), 211.Google Scholar