The Enlightenment and Universal Law

I just told my class a few weeks ago that the European Enlightenment was characterized by, among many other things, a healthy skepticism for dogmatism, a rejection of blind authority to traditional sources of power and knowledge, an openness to different ideas and opinions from the New World and beyond, and a driving curiosity to explore selfhood and subjectivity (seen best in the 18c novel, via Locke).

But just the other day we were reading Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man," and I heard myself telling the same students that the poem is a representative Enlightenment text for its assertive appeals to Universal Truth and an unchanging "Nature" (human and otherwise) that parallels Newton's "laws" of gravity and physics and the subsequent confidence in the culture at large that God's ways could finally be explained as a function of Reason.

So which is it? Is Pope's poem an Enlightenment text for its foundation in Unchanging Universal Truth, or is it a kind of anti-Enlightenment text for its completely trusting capitulation to an (albeit Reasonable) God and its refusal to acknowledge that different people might have different angles on Truth?

Domestic histories: another perspective

Much to my regret, I won't have time to participate in this week's reading event. But let me offer you instead a few mostly half-baked thoughts on a different kind of 'domestic' sphere - livestock husbandry - which also has an important place in the long 18th century.

Yesterday's Guardian had a review of Jenny Uglow's biography of the engraver Thomas Bewick. The paper version was illustrated with one of Bewick's engravings, the Leicestershire Improved Breed (from A general history of quadrupeds).

Bewick's interests ranged far beyond portraits of prize livestock; but the genre was much in vogue from the late 18th century onwards and well into the 19th century, until prints and paintings were superseded by photography. This went in step with the rise of livestock improvement and 'new breeds' (now of course very old breeds, and most of them very rare to boot).

Fashions of the time dictated that size (no doubt contrasting with the general run of small, skinny, scrubby mongrels at the time) was everything - the John Bulls of the animal world, you might even say. Vast cattle, fat sheep and long pigs, all perfectly groomed and set against a backdrop of idyllic pastures, sometimes tended by equally well-groomed, plump, smug yokels. No real sheep ever looked quite like these: the animal portrait was intended to advertise, and idealise, a breeder's wares.

They look so strange and quaint to us. But in the late 18th century these animals were at the cutting edge of scientific farming. They can be seen as symbols of 'progress', and a domestic and practical application of 'the Enlightenment'. And I think the impulse to have them painted was both hard-headedly commercial and sentimental.


A few links:

Thomas Bewick
Bewick Society

Livestock in Art
A matter of good breeding
Farm animal portraits