Brown R. Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700-1850

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early examples of Welsh poetry and classical models drawn from Welsh verse. Later in the century there was a potent

infusion of romanticism, an unbounded admiration for the ‘primitive’ in culture and nationality.

The boundary between myth and fabrication was indistinct in the eighteenth century. Iolo Morganwg wove his own

fabrications into genuine discoveries to clinch his argument; he invented Welsh traditions the Welsh had never known. Some

of the poems he credited to Dafydd ap Gwilym are as good as any written by the poet himself. As Williams says:

His very forgeries convey a perception which no one else seems to have been capable of…. He had an intuitive grasp of

the historical function of Welsh traditions and of their functional utility to the half-starved and often self-despising

Welsh of his own day. Welsh poets…had been the rib-cage of the body politic, remembrancers, a collective memory

honed for historic action. So he invented a gorsedd, a guild of those ‘bards’…deploying a usable past in order to build

an attainable future….

This was particularly evident in the 1760s with the Scot James Macpherson’s ‘translations’ of the reputedly third-century poet

Ossian, described by contemporaries as the ‘Celtic Homer’. Such was the controversy over whether these were forgeries that

in 1797 the Highland Society of Scotland set up a committee to investigate their authenticity; it concluded that Macpherson

was in use to supply chasms, and to give connection, by inserting passages which he did not find, and to add what he

conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the original composition, by striking out passages, by softening incidents, by

refining the language…

The boundary between reassembling fragments of oral traditions and manuscripts of an early epic and creative editing was

difficult to define.

Parallel to the revival in Welshness offered by scholars and mythologists was a vigorous, though narrow, moralistic and

serious, alternative culture associated with religion, particularly Dissent and Methodism. It too was in Welsh and used the

language more freely and less self-consciously than scholars and nationalists. Its appeal was broader and went across the

social spectrum, while the Welsh revival tended to have a more direct appeal to the educated and literate. By the 1830s and

1840s it had produced a culture more vigorous than that of the cultural revival. It was a culture for action where the recovery

of the past had been connected with raising the status of the Welsh language, literature and history and only rarely with direct

social and political action. The Welsh way of life changed its meaning between 1840 and 1860 away from the notion of ‘Wild

Wales’, primitive, reactionary and rural, to one identified with Nonconformity, radicalism and progress. The ancient past

remained but only as a prelude to what really mattered: the risk of Nonconformity and of the common people. Myth was still

important and romantic failures like Dic Penderyn, hanged after the Merthyr Rising of 1831, quickly attained mythic status.

Cultural growth in Scotland—an ‘enlightenment’

The eighteenth century saw an expansion of cultural activity in Scotland.

This ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ drew upon many

different aspects of human knowledge and experience: from philosophy to science, politics to history, literature, art and

architecture. Architecture was the one art in the eighteenth century in which Scots provided the most creative minds. Robert

Adam and his brothers were the leading exponents of neo-classicism, building elaborately decorated country houses in

Derbyshire and Middlesex and urban architecture in London. Civil engineering was dominated by Thomas Telford, son of an

Eskdale shepherd, and by the Scottish John Rennie, John Smeaton and Robert and Alan Stevenson.

Scottish imaginative literature achieved its apogee in the poetry of Robert Burns and the novels of Sir Walter Scott but

appeared to lead into a cul-de-sac. In poetry the problem was a linguistic one, a consequence of the modification and dilution

of Scottish by English. By 1700 Scottish was seen as the language of the poor, the uncouth and the humorous while the landed

and professional sections of society used English. Speaking with a Scottish dialect betrayed one’s provincial origins and by

the 1750s classes on the proper pronunciation of English were widespread. By 1800 there was a triple crisis in Scottish

poetry. First, Burns had pushed the use of Scottish dialect to perhaps its most imaginative extreme and it was difficult for

other poets to follow him. Secondly, the older Scottish tongue had ceased to develop as a language and was largely incapable

of expressing a wide range of both philosophical and emotional ideas. Even Burns seemed to agree with the eighteenth-

century conviction that Scottish was unsuitable for serious work and he used English if he wanted to write solemnly. Thirdly,

Scottish poets could not yet use English properly. By contrast Gaelic poets like Alexander Macdonald, Duncan ban MacIntyre

and Rob Donn were among the finest poets Scotland had produced. In the development of the novel the question of a

breakdown in linguistic tradition did not occur on the same scale as with poetry. The novel came to Scotland via England but

in the twenty-two novels Scott wrote between 1814 and 1826, particularly those set in the late seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, a nostalgia for Scotland’s past was established. He established the historical novel but his contemporaries and

successors lacked his qualities and their attempts to write novels about the rural past became more and more irrelevant to

256 CULTURE, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE 1700–1850

industrializing Scotland. That they did not break out of the ‘Scott mould’ was because historical novels were popular but, as

T.C.Smout says,

Scott deliberately and Burns unwittingly, thus provided the public with the nostalgic stability and sense of nationhood in

the past that it sensed it was losing in the present. The result, however, was catastrophic to literature, as it twisted its

head back to front—its poetry looking always to Burns and a dead language, in prose to Scott and a past society.

Why was there this cultural Enlightenment in Scotland after 1740? The majority of the major figures were Lowlanders and

from the emerging professional and middle classes. The Highlands contributed little to this cultural revival. English was an

alien tongue, educational provision was inadequate in that area and social and economic changes after 1770 shattered

whatever limited common culture they had. There was considerable patronage from the landed interest. David Hume and

Adam Ferguson lived for a time with families of English peers; Adam Smith gave up his chair at Glasgow to become tutor

and travelling companion to the Duke of Buccleuch. The character of Scottish education also played a major role. Very few of

the cultural pathfinders were self-taught, attending the parish schools and often going on to the grammar school. The

universities were innovative in terms of curriculum and teaching; for example, lecturing in Latin ceased in Glasgow in 1730.

Finally, the influence of the Presbyterian Kirk was moderate. If it did not always encourage changes at least it did not obstruct

them. Cultural development in Scotland was then a consequence of the combination of aspiring and gifted individuals

supported by widespread aristocratic patronage and an innovative education system.

CONCLUSIONS

There is much cultural achievement between 1700 and 1850 which has not been considered in this chapter: developments in

Ireland; the nature and achievements of Augustan and Romantic poetry; the rise of the novel; the development of drama;

artistic and architectural change and British music; the impact of the Enlightenment on British thought and the impact of

political philosophy; the development of moral philosophy, utilitarianism and classical economics; and the emergence of

historical writing. Cultural change was diverse and its impact often limited to particular sections of society or geographical

areas. It was often gradual, building on previous work but, over the decades between 1700 and 1850, this change took on a far

more dramatic and potentially ‘revolutionary’ form.

NOTES

1 Peter Burke ‘Revolution in Popular Culture’, in R.Porter and M.Teich (eds) Revolution in History, Cambridge University Press, 1986,

p. 206.

2 R.Williams Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Fontana, 1976 pp. 76–7 but see the whole of his discussion pp. 76–82

and his later critique Culture, Fontana, 1981. M.Shiach Discourse on Popular Culture, Polity, 1989 is illuminating in theoretical terms

and in its case studies.

3 B.Bocock Hegemony, Tavistock, 1986 provides a useful discussion of the development of the concept.

4 On Gramsci see the brief book by James Joll Gramsci, Fontana, 1977 and R. Simon Gramsci’s Political Thought, Lawrence &

Wishart, 1982.

5 Peter Burke op. cit. p. 221.

6 On popular culture in the eighteenth century see R.Porter English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin, 1982 especially

chapters 4, 6 and 7 for a general discussion. More detailed studies can be found in P.Burke Popular Culture in Early Modern

Europe, Temple Smith, 1978, J.M.Golby andA. W.Purdue The Civilization of the Crowd, Batsford, 1984 and R.W.Malcolmson Popular

Recreation in English Society 1700–1850, Cambridge University Press, 1973. B.Bushaway By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and

Community in England 1700–1880, Junction Books, 1982 is excellent on the rural dimension. H.Cunningham Leisure in the

Industrial Revolution, 1980, questions Malcolmson’s thesis that many traditional practices and pastimes disappeared after 1780. For

the commercialization of leisure in the eighteenth century see N. McKendrick, J.Brewer and J.H.Plumb The Birth of a Consumer

Society, Hutchinson, 1982, especially pp. 265–85 and for the nineteenth century P. Bailey Leisure and Class in Victorian England,

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

7 P.Burke op. cit.

8 A.Macfarlane The Origins of English Individualism, Basil Blackwell, 1978.

9 R.W.Malcolmson op. cit.

10 J.M.Golby and A.W.Purdue op. cit. p. 30.

11 N.McKendrick, J.Brewer and J.H.Plumb op. cit.

12 For a recent discussion see J.Walvin Victorian Values, Deutsch, 1987 and the series of articles in History Today, February-May

1987, now published, edited by G.Marsden, Longman, 1990. See also E.M.Sigsworth (ed.) In Search of Victorian Values,

Manchester University Press, 1988 for a valuable collection of papers on what Victorians themselves valued.

SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850 257

13 J.M.Golby and A.W.Purdue op. cit. pp. 68–69.

14 See R.Swift ‘Guy Fawkes Celebrations in Victorian Exeter’, History Today, November 1981.

15 R.Poole ‘Lancashire Wakes Week’, History Today, August 1984.

16 On the debate about public executions and the abolition of capital punishment see D.D.Cooper The Lesson of the Scaffold, Allen

Lane, 1974.

17 On cruelty to animals see K.Thomas Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, Penguin, 1984

especially pp. 143–91, M.Ritvo The Animal Estate, Penguin, 1990 and B.Harrison ‘Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century

England’, in his Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain, Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 82–122.

18 K.Thomas op. cit. p. 148.

19 J.M.Golby and A.W.Purdue op. cit. p. 55.

20 The most detailed study is B.Harrison Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872, Faber, 1971.

21 ibid. p. 46.

22 ibid. p. 98.

23 V.Berridge and G.Edwards Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, 1987,

especially chapters 3–9, should be read for what it has to say about the problem now as well as in the past.

24 Quoted ibid. p. 45.

25 ibid. p. 107.

26 On language in this period generally see P.J.Corfield ‘From Rank to Class: Innovations in Georgian England’, History Today, February

1987 and her more detailed paper ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth Century Britain’, History Today, February 1987 and

her more detailed paper ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth Century Britain’, History 72 (1987) in which she explored the

ways in which people’s views of society were reflected in different language use. O.Smith The Politics of Language 1791–1819,

Oxford University Press, 1984 examines how ideas about language were used to maintain repression and class division. G.Crossick

‘Classes and the Masses in Victorian England’, History Today, March 1987 takes the argument forward into the nineteenth century.

27 P.Burke op. cit. p. 3.

28 On the relationship between language and nationality see G.Williams Religion, Language and Nationality in Wales, University of

Wales Press, 1979 and P. Morgan The Eighteenth Century Renaissance, Christopher Davies, 1981.

29 G.A.Williams When Was Wales?, Penguin, 1985, p. 165.

30 On the Scottish Enlightenment see T.C.Smout A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830, Fontana, 1972, pp. 451–83 and

B.Lenman Integration, Enlightenment and Industrialization: Scotland 1746–1832, Edward Arnold, 1981 for general comments.

More detail can be found in A.C.Chitnis The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, 1976 and J.Rendall The Origins of the

Scottish Enlightenment 1707–1776, 1979.

31 T.C.Smout op. cit. p. 469.

258 CULTURE, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE 1700–1850

Index

Aberdeen 416–18

absentee landlords 13, 303, 380

Achieving Society, The (McClelland) 211

Act for Settling Schools (1696) 17

Act of Union (1536) 400

Act of Union (1707) 16, 17, 172

Act of Union (1800) 13, 112

Act of Union (1801) 112

‘actions and interactions’ 1, 253

Adam, Robert 448

Adams, John 374

administrative centres 396–7

age structure (mortality) 32

aggregate back projection 32

aggregative technique 32

agriculture 6–7, 220, 263;

depressions 68, 69–70;

economic growth and 368–9, 370–1, 374–81, 383–4, 386–92;

England 26–8, 50–2, 58–62, 266–8;

harvests 36, 193, 261–2;

investment 65–7, 188–9, 194–5;

Ireland 13–14, 50–1, 58–9, 64–5, 194–5, 284–6, 391–2;

mechanization 56–7;

prices see prices;

proto-industrialization 110, 111, 113;

Scotland 18–19, 50–2, 58–9, 63–4, 386–9;

techniques 52;

tenant farmers 266, 268, 276–9, 281–6;

wage-labourers 311–13, 318, 321–2, 325;

wages 67, 70;

Wales 20–1, 50–2, 58–9, 63, 267–8, 389–91

agriculture (land reform):

changes 54–7;

dynamic role 49;

enclosure 59–70;

‘golden age’ 70–1, 385;

landownership 58–9, 266–8;

modernity 50–2;

organization 51–2;

regional framework 50;

‘slow motion’ revolution 52–4

Agriculture and Commercial Bank 196

Aikin, John 373–4

Ainsworth, Thomas 177

alcohol (attitudes to) 441–3

Aldcroft, D.H. 148, 156

Alexander, Claud 192

Alexander, William 191

Alison, Sir Archibald 339

Allen, Ralph 143, 227, 408

Allen, W. 68

altitude (impact) 11

America:

trade 161–4, 167, 169–70, 174, 177, 178, 180, 263;

War of Independence 66, 152, 164

Anglicanism 346, 357, 413

animals, cruelty to 439, 440–1

Anti-Corn Law League 70, 181, 301

anti-semitism 363

anti-spirits societies 442–3

Appleby (occupational study) 294

apprenticeship 209, 217, 346–7;

wages and 121, 313, 323, 332, 334, 338–9

aqueducts 156

architects and architecture 303, 448

aristocracy:

culture and 436–8, 441, 449;

economic strength 270–2;

England 27, 207, 268–75, 436–7;

Ireland 274;

lifestyle and power 272–5;

‘open’ 206, 268–70;

peerage and public office 272;

Scotland 16, 274, 282, 283;

Wales 21;