Philosophy, Politics and History

Abstract

Around 1848, Marian Evans appears to have read Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764).¹ Into the second half of the nineteenth century, the book was associated with unorthodox intellectual stances: the schoolboy Coleridge was flogged for reading it, and in 1842 one of Holyoake’s friends tried to smuggle a copy into Gloucester gaol for the leader of English secularism to read as he awaited trial. In England, the work was quite widely translated from the 1760s to the 1840s, and helped promote a spirit of free inquiry.² Voltaire’s work was framed to furnish wide-ranging reflection and was aimed, not at philosophers,but at thinking men. Its method was such as to appeal to the ever-curious Marian Evans, for Voltaire deployed his knowledge of such diverse topics as psychology, physiology, Oriental and classical history. Voltaire’s standpoint was historicist and tolerant; his moral pragmatism, with its elements of anti-intellectualism, foreshadowed Rousseau’s views, and he also meditated critically upon the ethical implications of the solitude Rousseau was to exalt.³