Happy hedonists

The hedonism debate

The quest for happiness was crucial to enlightened thinkers throughout Europe. I would not want to suggest that British thinkers had any corner on the idea. Nevertheless, it was a notion that found many of its earliest and most ardent champions in Britain. “I will faithfully pursue that happiness I propose to myself,” insisted John Locke—physician as well as philosopher—at the end of the 17th century. And English thinkers remained to the fore in championing the right to happiness.

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed that we do not see the one that has opened for us.”—Helen Keller

(Credit: DAVID OLLERTON)

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To picture the Georgians as happy hedonists is not to imply that no one was ever happy before, or sought to be. In antiquity, Epicurus and his followers, while not “epicureans” in the crass “eat, drink, and be merry” sense, had urged a hedonism that prized if not the indulgence of appetites, at least the avoidance of pain. Pagans had their bacchanalia; pastoral painting and poetry gloried in golden age idylls; and the old Christian calendar had feasts as well as fasts— not least, the Twelve Days of Christmas. Familiar artistic themes—the revels of Bacchus and Venus, the cornucopia and the flowing bowl—show times and places of holiday, enjoyment, and abandon.

Yet sensualism had always been anathema. Plato had pictured the appetites as a mutinous crew—only Captain Reason would prevent shipwreck—while the Stoics for their part had insisted that the wise must rise above fleeting pleasures. Christianity then expressed contempt for the flesh—true blessedness would come only through abstinence and asceticism. Concupiscence was the consequence of original sin; and omnipresent images of the Expulsion from Paradise, the danse macabre, and the death's head taught the faithful that they dwelt in a vale of tears in which only the mortification of the flesh would release the spirit. Overall, although there were sunny intervals, hedonism as such was wholly condemned by the church. And many such God-fearing Christians remained in the 18th century; Samuel Johnson for his part advocated what might be called an “infelicific calculus”: “Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven with our being.”

What was new about the Enlightenment was the advocacy of pleasure not as occasional binges, mystical transports, or louche aristocratic privilege, but as the routine entitlement of people at large to satisfy the senses and not just purify the soul, to seek fulfilment in this world and not only in the next.

What shifts of thinking made hedonism eligible to enlightened minds? In part it was a new turn in religion itself. By 1700 rational Anglicans were picturing God not as a Lord of Vengeance but as the benign architect of a well designed universe: God wanted to be honoured as the author of human happiness. And alongside this new Christian optimism ran the hopeful moral philosophy and aesthetics espoused by John Locke's protégé, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. His rhapsodies on the pleasures of virtue pointed the way for those who would champion the virtues of pleasure.

Early Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke also gave ethics a new grounding in psychology. Contrary to the rigorism of St Augustine, they held that human nature was not hopelessly depraved. The passions, rather, were naturally benign. And in any case, was not pleasure to be derived from “sympathy” with others? Goodness was, in short, redefined in terms of a true psychology of pleasure—indeed, was its own reward. Good taste and good morals fused in an aesthetics of virtue.

Like nature at large, man became viewed by the “new science” as a machine composed of parts, open to medicoscientific study through the scalpel of a “moral anatomy,” which would reveal the psychological no less than the physical laws of motion. On the basis of such scientific models, progressive thinkers championed individualism and the right to self improvement. It became common, as in physician and satirist Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, to represent society as made up of individuals, each pulsating with desires and drives that hopefully would work out best for the whole hive, with private vices proving to be public benefits. “The wants of the mind are infinite,” asserted the physician and property developer Nicholas Barbon, expressing views that pointed towards Adam Smith's celebration of “the uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition.” “Self Love,” asserted Joseph Tucker, dean of Gloucester Cathedral, “is the great Mover in human Nature.” This atomisation of the “public good” into disparate interests amounted to what we might now call the privatisation of virtue.

Enlightened thinking thus advanced new models of man and rationales for happiness. It exuded confidence. Would not nature ensure not just pleasure but politeness and progress? “New hedonist” was not old rake “writ large,” but the man or woman of sensibility who could pursue satisfaction through sociable behaviour and whose good nature would give as well as take pleasure.

“The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.”—Mark Twain

(Credit: MICHELLE HEALY)

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Hanoverian happiness

Crucially important in giving popular expression to such views were Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Their bestselling Spectator magazine, appearing first in 1711, ridiculed Puritan scrupulosity and cavalier libertinism alike and proposed a third way: the refined gentleman or lady, for whom measured pursuit of rational pleasures in social settings would produce lasting enjoyment. Stressing urbanity, politeness, rationality, and moderation, the Spectator promoted smart pursuits— light reading, tea table conversation, the urbane pleasures of the town. Enlightened thought thus gave its blessing to the pursuit of pleasure, precisely because it redefined the pleasures it was desirable to pursue.

This new gospel of happiness matched developments in material culture and improvements to the urban environment. An effervescent affluence buoyed people up—indeed, by the 1780s, one could literally soar into the air for the first time in human history, thanks to the hot air balloon. As wealth spread, enjoyments that were once exclusive to the few opened up, often to the many and occasionally to the masses: enlightened pleasures were meant, within reason, to be for the greatest number.

Traditionally, exclusiveness had been what gave the spice. Only the leisured classes had the time and money to devote themselves to ease and conspicuous consumption. But the leisure and pleasure industries now expanded, thanks to commercial energies and the “consumer revolution.” In the form of curtains and carpets, plates and prints, ordinary households in the age of Hogarth were acquiring new consumer durables. Homes grew more comfortable as domestic goods that had hitherto been preserves of the rich grew more common: upholstered chairs, tablecloths, glassware and chinaware, tea services, mirrors, clocks, bookcases, engravings, and bric-à-brac to pin on the wall or put on the mantleshelf. For children, shop bought toys, games, and jigsaw puzzles made their appearance. Alongside the Bible and old favourites such as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, magazines, novels, texts of plays, almanacs, and other ephemera tickled tastes for news and novelty, expanded horizons, made people more aware of how the other half lived, and fed rising material and imaginative expectations.

“Let a smile be your umbrella (on a rainy day)”—lyrics by Irving Kahal and Francis Wheeler, 1928

(Credit: ANNA TJERNBERG)

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Urban pleasures

Urban space itself was restyled. The Georgian city blossomed as a centre for socialising, designed for spending time and money on enjoyments. Clubs and clubbing became all the rage. Shops grew more attractive, bright and airy, seducing bystanders with the latest fashions. The traditional shop had been a workshop; now it became a retail outlet displaying ready made goods. Foreigners were bowled over: “Every article is made more attractive to the eye than in Paris or in any other town,” gushed the German novelist Sophie von La Roche on a visit to London. “Behind great glass windows absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, and in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy.” Browsing was such fun. “What an immense stock, containing heaps and heaps of articles!,” she exclaimed, visiting Boydell's, the capital's biggest print dealer. Shopping became literally eye opening.

And what better proof of the Georgian love of pleasure than the pleasure garden itself? Up to two hundred such resorts sprouted among London's suburban villages, with their fireworks and fish ponds, musicians and masquerades. Laid out with walks, statues, and fountains, Vauxhall became London's first great fashionable resort. Bands played, there was dancing, or one could sup—or seduce—in alcoves amid the groves. Vying with Vauxhall, Ranelagh Gardens, right by Chelsea Hospital, opened in 1742. Its chief attraction was a rotunda, 50 m in diameter, with an orchestra in the centre and tiers of boxes. Open to all with a few shillings to spare, pleasure resorts and gardens crowned the Georgian pleasure revolution.

Various forms of entertainment, such as the theatre, were targeted at middle class, middle brow audiences. In boxing and cricket, professional sportsmen emerged, as did the paying spectator. Georgian England supported regular concert series; Handel's Water Music and Fireworks Music were first performed at Vauxhall, while piety married pleasure in his sacred oratorios. Shows vied with spectacles in the great crescent from Fleet Street and the Strand, up through Charing Cross and into Leicester Square, Soho, and Piccadilly.

In all this it was market forces that mattered. The commercialisation of pleasure was driven by entertainment entrepreneurs seeking to profit out of curiosities and commercial breaks, and capitalising on the unquenchable public thirst for novelty and experience. From Samuel Pepys onwards, letters and diaries give ample evidence of a joyous—if also often furtive or anxious—indulgence of pleasure. It was a time, for example, when conspicuous delight was taken in food, helped by low prices and the introduction of exotica such as pineapples. And the pleasures of the table were washed down by those of the bottle. Drinking, judged Samuel Johnson, was life's second greatest pleasure. Sex, of course, was numero uno, as indicated by the true title of the book we now know as Fanny Hill: John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

Were they really happy?

It is hard to take the hedonistic pulse of the past. Help is offered, however, by visual evidence. The prints of Hogarth and others provide ample proof that the English in the age of Enlightenment did not merely indulge in pleasures, but wanted to be put on record enjoying themselves. Alongside images of plebeian Beer Street and Southwark Fair, with a good time being had by all, Hogarth also depicted respectable bourgeois families, not, as their grandparents had been shown, overshadowed by the memento mori of a skull and crossbones, but rather amusing themselves, sipping tea, playing with their children and pets, taking a stroll, fishing, visiting pleasure gardens—doing all the Addisonian things, often with a smile on their face.

And were not simple pleasures best? Archdeacon Paley was a tutor at Christ's College Cambridge, not too many years before Charles Darwin arrived, and an advocate of religious utilitarianism. “I will tell you in what consists the summum bonum of human life,” he wrote, “It consists in reading Tristram Shandy, in blowing with a pair of bellows into your shoes in hot weather, and roasting potatoes under the grate in cold.”