The week of the UK general election has finally arrived. After suffering weeks of incessant sound-bites, you will soon be free of political jargon for another few years. Phrases like “long-term economic plan” have been repeated so often that they have ceased to mean anything. From Margaret Thatcher to Harold Wilson, from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, British prime ministers and politicians have uttered phrases that have echoed throughout history. How many of these famous political quotes do you remember?
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By Mark Philp
Do people at the end of the eighteenth century celebrate their birthdays? More precisely, what did William Godwin (1756-1836) — philosopher, novelist, husband of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) and father of Mary Shelly (1797-1851) — do on his birthday, which falls on 3 March?
Godwin was a man of some exactitude. As a major contributor to the development of utilitarianism, the weighing of competing concerns and interests and the rigorous exercise of private judgment on the basis of rational reflection is a central theme in his philosophy. But his concern with detail is also reflected in the diary that he kept for the last 48 years of his long life. He used the diary to note things very precisely, if often cryptically — such as the entry in 1825: ‘void a large worm’; or in his twice daily recording of the interior temperature of the house for the last ten years of his life.
But he did not note birthdays. He mentions the birthday of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in 1788 because there is a party for Gibbon hosted by the bookseller Thomas Cadell. In 1825 he mentions that of Mary Lamb, sister of the essayist Charles Lamb, when she was 61, possibly also because there was some event. The only other appearance of the phrase in the Diary is in relation to a play which he identifies as Birth Day (probably by the German dramatist Kotzebue), which he sees (in whole or part) on five occasions. Moreover, he makes nothing of his own birthday — 3 March — whether it be his 40th, 50th, 60th, or 80th. The diary entries for his birthdays are wholly undifferentiated from other days. Moreover, there is no evidence that he celebrated Mary Wollstonecraft’s birthday, nor those of any of his children.
Page from William Godwin’s journal recording Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’s (Mary Shelley’s) birth on 30 August 1797
In contrast, he noted over three hundred deaths in the diary — including ‘Execution of Louis’ on 21 January 1793, Edmund Burke on 8 July 1797, the assassination of the Prime Minister Spencer Percival on 11 May 1812, the death (also by assassination) of the German dramatist Kotzebue on 23 March 1819, but also a host of more quotidian occasions involving friends and acquaintances. Interestingly, these dates are all exact – other than Burke, who we now believe to have died the following day! But the exactitude of the others is striking because it means that Godwin was going back to his diary to fill in details as he became aware of them – the news of Louis’ execution took some 36 hours to reach Britain, and Kotzebue’s death would have travelled more slowly. This suggests that he took at least one of life’s major events very seriously, and noted the occasion with retrospective precision.
Is Godwin unusual? That he notes very occasional birthdays of others suggests both that he was, and, because he notes so few, that he was not. Or he was not unusual in the circles in which he moved — the literary and cultural circles of London in the last decades of the eighteenth and first thirty years of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he came from a family of dissenting ministers and was himself a minister in the years following his education, before turning in the 1780s to history and philosophy and an increasing agnosticism, punctuated by periods of atheism. In that tradition — nurtured on such texts as James Janeway’s, A Token for Children being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children (1671) — the manner of one’s life and death has infinitely more significance than the mere fact of birth.
This contrast is also evident in Godwin main philosophical work – Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) — is clear that there is little sacred in mere life. It is what a person does with his or her life — above all what they do for others and for the general good of the community that counts in our evaluation of them. While Godwin speculated that the lot of humanity would involve increasing subordination of the physical to the intellectual, with a concomitant shift to increasing longevity and eventual immortality, it is also clear that he took the measure of his fellow men and women in terms of how they lived their lives — hence his almost obsessive recording of the deaths of his contemporaries, both famous and obscure. The ending of life marks the point for its final reckoning. In Godwin’s philosophy that evaluation is to be made in terms of the person’s contribution to the good of one’s fellow human beings — above all, one’s contribution to their intellectual development and the expansion of the powers of mind and human knowledge. And, on that account, maybe we should commemorate Godwin’s death day instead — 7 April 1836.
Mark Philp is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on eighteenth century political thought and social movements and on contemporary political theory, including Reforming Ideas in Britain (2013), Thomas Paine (2007), and Political Conduct (2007). He directed the Leverhulme funded digitization and editing project on the diary of William Godwin. He co-directs the research project ‘Re-Imagining Democracy 1750-1850’ which has published Re-imagining democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain and Ireland (2013).
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Image credit: Page from William Godwin’s journal. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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A large portion of the beginning of The Mysteries of Udolpho is taken up with Emily and her father traveling through the Pyrenees of France. It seems on nearly every page there are comments on the “sublime charms of nature” with long descriptions on the craggy mountains, the deep valleys, rushing torrents, and the quality of the light. In fact, there is so much of this I began to think Radcliffe was up to something. So it wasn’t long before I found myself borrowing a copy of Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. And now this early sentence in the book makes so much more sense:
This landscape with the surrounding alps did, indeed, present a perfect picture of the lovely and the sublime, of ‘beauty sleeping in the lap of horror.’
I have vague recollections of reading Burke back in college as part of a class in literary theory but my memory has been wiped out to save myself from the trauma that was Hegel, Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Poor Burke never had a chance. Since he is associated in my mind with that class I assumed he was going to be hard going and I’d be scratching my head. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Burke is so very concerned with everyone understanding him that large portions of the essay are given over to explaining his words. I appreciated his precision to a point, after that point I found myself muttering, okay okay, can we just move on? All that to say that if you ever feel inspired to read Burke, you don’t need to worry about not “getting him” because if this essay were a math problem, he’d be getting full credit for showing his work so his readers can follow along with his arguments and not be left in doubt.
If you are like me you equate sublime with beautiful, maybe not every day beautiful but startlingly beautiful, the kind of beauty that moves you to tears. But no, beauty and the sublime have nothing to do with each other. Beauty, you see, inspires pleasure and love in the beholder. It is sunshine and rainbows.
The sublime? It is composed of delight derived from terror, pain, distress and danger. It is a feeling far more intense and elevated than mere beauty. The sublime, according to Burke, is the “strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.” This is because pain, the root of the sublime, is more powerful than pleasure.
Now the pain Burke refers to is not necessarily physical pain caused from tumbling over a cliff while hiking in the mountains in search of the sublime. It is a physical pain but more of one caused by extreme emotion than a broken leg. It’s a hurts so good kind of pain caused by an “unnatural tension of the nerves.”
What elements go into producing the sublime? Burke is kind enough to explain each one in great detail but I will spare you and just list out a few for you:
- Obscurity. This is because you can’t see something clearly and so you are thrown into a state of fear and uncertainty. Obscurity can be caused by darkness or fog, or lots of trees.
- Power. Anything powerful is dangerous and potentially destructive and terrifying. Like a king or a bull or flash flood or God.
- Vastness. As in size. This can be a tall mountain or a deep valley or great plain, lake or ocean. Infinity is also a source of the sublime. Think of the size of the universe and your mind will likely be filled with a sort of delightful horror as you try and fail find the edges.
- Magnificence. As in a great profusion of things as in the stars in the night sky or millions of buffalo on the Great Plains before settlers killed them all.
- Color. Pink is not the color of the sublime. The sublime is not cheerful. The color of the sublime is dark and gloomy, a cloudy sky not a clear blue one, dark brown jagged rocks not a gentle verdant slope.
Can you kind of see a little how Emily and her father’s travels through the mountains was so sublime? And why Radcliffe might want all that in a gothic novel? Because the whole point of a gothic novel is horror (and romance) and since the source of the sublime is terror, perfect combination, right? Radcliffe didn’t write a book based in the supernatural so she pulls much of her gothic horror in early on by using the sublime. We don’t feel it like the readers in 1794 would have, but no doubt much of the scenic descriptions would have been terrifying.
Also of note is that Radcliffe uses the sublime to clue us in to who the good and bad characters are. The good ones all experience the sublime at one time or other while out in nature. The bad characters, not one has a sublime experience. They are too small-minded and petty and the sublime scene that moves Emily so produces nothing but boredom to those who are not good.
That is a bit of what Radcliffe is about with so much mention of what is sublime. While it gets a bit repetitive for a modern reader, she wasn’t just rambling on and on to add padding to the story. Instead, the sublime is an integral part of her approach to the gothic, at least in this novel. I’ve not read any of her others so I can’t say whether it holds true for them. Perhaps next RIP Challenge I will read Romance of the Forest and find out.
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"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."
~ Francis Bacon
"To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting."
~ Edmund Burke
Earlier this month, Harvey Kaye led a discussion of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings at the Bryant Park Reading Room. It got me thinking: what is the influence of Paine on Americans today? Who among us are the devotees? Are we over-quoting, over-citing, over-appropriating his politics?
So, I decided to introduce Harvey Kaye to Elvin Lim, and ask if they wouldn’t mind corresponding about this matter. They readily agreed. Below is the first of four installments of this conversation; the second of which will appear tomorrow.
Kaye is the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, and Professor of History, Sociology and Director of the Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. Lim is author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, and a regular contributor to OUPBlog.
Hi Harvey,
I’m almost done reading your book, and I read it, in part, as a call to return Paine as much to the American Left or Center as he has been appropriated on the Right in recent decades.
To get things started, I’d start with a contrarian volley. If Paine was the major harbinger of the democratic impulse in American society, I do wonder if he nevertheless has a natural affinity to the American Right. I say American, because Burkean conservatives / traditionalists, American Tories of the Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver variety, have always been a minority within the American conservative movement. The conservatism that has had any salience in America has been of the Barry Goldwater / Reagan kind. This mainstream conservatism has always been trenchantly populist.
A reason why, I propose, is that the conservatism that emerged in the 60s was anti-New Deal and anti-establishment. And that was a natural fit with the ideas of the revolutionary generation. Paine et al were not (yet) concerned with building “a more perfect union” – that would be left to the Founding generation. In the 1770s, the concern was one of NEGATIVE liberty, freedom from tyranny (and this was sometimes operationalized as freedom from government – hence the high correlation with natural rights talk).
It is perhaps no surprise then, that the Federalists who took over the reigns of government in the 1790s were in fact highly anti-democratic and anti-Jacobin. (The electoral college, the Senate, and the Supreme Court were institutional instantiations of their anti-democratic bias.) The Federalists had seen the dangers of too much anti-governmentalism and now saw the virtues of POSITIVE liberty, which could only be delivered by good government.
I wonder what you thought of my “affinity” arg
