The Restoration
and the entire eighteenth century were
times of enormous change and growth in
Great Britain. The population doubled
to nearly ten million, trades and industries
multiplied, and the balance of power in
the traditionally agrarian "nation" shifted
to cities. A series of wars with France,
allowed Great Britain to annex colonies
around the world, such as Canada and India.
Exploitation of the colonies, especially
the lucrative and inhumane slave trade,
brought unprecedented wealth. New periodicals
and novels represented the lives of ordinary
women and men. Major male authors came
to England from Ireland (Swift, Burke,
Sheridan, Goldsmith) and Scotland (Thomson,
Hume, Boswell), their interests not entirely
unlike those of English white males. The
gulf between the rich and the poor widened,
as perceptions of individual interests
and rights led to new class conflicts.
The Restoration of 1660
saw the return of Charles Stuart to England
and the end to twenty years of civil war
after the abdication of Richard Cromwell.
The religious issue, however, was not immediately
solved. Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics
were largely excluded from public life. Charles
II's Exclusion Bill dissolved Parliament
and effectively divided the country into
two political parties. The Tories
drew their strength from the landed gentry
and country clergy, represented conservative
values, and supported the Crown; the Whigs
were more progressive and diverse, and included
powerful nobles, merchants and financiers,
bishops and low-level clergymen, and the
Dissenters. Neither party could tolerate
the rule of James II, the Catholic brother
of, and successor to, Charles II; secret
negotiations paved the way for the Dutch
William of Orange, a champion of Protestantism
and husband of James's Protestant daughter
Mary, who arrived in the Glorious, or Bloodless,
Revolution of 1688. The Toleration Act permitted
freedom of worship, although not to Catholics
or Jews, with the condition of allegiance
to the Crown.
Although Britain profited
from war profits and the weakening of France
and Spain during the reign of Anne, political
tensions embittered. George I became the
first Hanoverian king, and the Whigs returned
to political power. Robert Walpole became
the first "prime minister" of Britain.
The rise of the Empire under George III,
particularly the consolidation of power in
Canada and India, withstood the loss of the
American colonies. During
George III's long reign, cries for anew
social order based on liberty and radical
reform emerged alongside of colonial expansion.
England entered the slave
trade in the early 1660s, enslaving people
from the West African coast (Guinea) and
trading them for sugar from Surinam, Barbados,
and later Jamaica. In 1713, Great Britain
was awarded the contract to export slaves
to the Spanish Indies. By
the 1780s, when Britain shipped a third of
a million African slaves to the Americas,
the national economy depended on the "trade." The
violence and brutality of the voyage across
the Atlantic — the Middle Passage — is
described by the former slave Olaudah Equiano.
Slave-owners renamed Africans, split families,
and worked to erase all memory of life before
enslavement. Slaves were viewed as less than
human by slave-owners eager to make a profit.
Although John Locke maintained that all men
were equal, he invested in the slave trade
and drafted The Fundamental Constitutions
of Carolina, which granted absolute power
over slaves. Even more reprehensible in its
disavowal of the realities of slavery, James
Boswell argued that slavery uplifted Africans
by introducing them to Christianity. Other
Britons, however, were troubled and ashamed
by the slave trade. The black writer Ignatius
Sancho and the white writer Laurence Sterne,
for example, exchanged letters in which both
expressed their sympathy for slaves. A bill
abolishing the British slave trade became
law in 1807.
Skepticism
and freethinking dominated the late seventeenth
century and continued through the Restoration. Thomas
Hobbes's Leviathan had argued
that only absolute government could check
the "perpetual and restless desire
for power" in all human beings. The
French philosopher Michel de Montaigne
followed the ancient Greek skeptics to
argue that knowledge derives from our senses,
but the inaccuracy of our senses makes
reliable knowledge impossible to achieve.
Samuel Butler, John Dryden, and John Wilmot,
the earl of Rochester, were among those
British thinkers who followed this doctrine.
Still, religious beliefs were not excluded
by this doubt of the faculty of human reasoning.
New fields of science, statistics, and
economics emerged in the debates between
champions of ancient and modern learning.
The main thread of English philosophy tended
to shun metaphysics for empirical investigations
of nature. Sentimentalism and evangelicalism
places a new importance on individuals.
Female authors, such as Anne Finch, Countess
of Winchilsea, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
and Frances Burney, investigated the gap
between the self as it appears to us in
introspection and the identity that others
fasten to us.
A sudden
change in taste, a desire for elegant simplicity,
emerged in English literature around 1660. For
Augustan poets, who aspired to the ideals
of the Roman poets Virgil, Horace, and
Ovid, "Nature" became a source
of pleasure and an object of inquiry. Although
Samuel Johnson considered Alexander Pope
to have brought the heroic couplet to "perfection," blank
verse became a suitable medium for poetry.
Prose writers also looked to the classical
past for inspiration, often experimenting
with them as in Henry Fielding's Joseph
Andrews, which he described as a "comic
epic-poem in prose." Although no readership
was considered too small to address, the
eighteenth century was the first to distinguish
between "high" and "low" art.
John Dryden is considered to have brought
England a "modern" literature
between 1660 and 1700 that combined a cosmopolitan
outlook on the latest European trends with
some of the richness of Chaucer and Shakespeare.
The comedy was the real distinction of
Restoration drama.
The novel,
whether Gothic or sentimental, emerged
as a major literary genre of the eighteenth
century. Gothic romances, with their
forbidden themes of incest, murder, necrophilia,
atheism, and torments of sexual desire,
became popular. Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson,
and Henry Fielding popularized the novel
as an emerging literary genre. Richardson's Pamela combined
high moral tone with sexual titillation
and minute analysis of the heroine's
emotional states of mind. By the end of
the century, most of the leading British
novelists were women, including Frances
Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Maria Edgeworth.