After the hellish experience of civil war, regicide and republicanism under the Stuarts, 18th-century England achieved stability. How it must have warmed the cockles of men’s and women’s hearts: the age of enlightenment, politeness and Georgian poise breaking like sunshine over a darkened and blood-soaked plain. But the coming of peace has sometimes been seen as a loss of sinew, too: ‘Pudding time’, in The Vicar of Bray’s words, when ‘Moderate Men looked big’ and Hogarth’s Sleeping Congregation might happily doze through the snore-inducing sermons of worldly, well-fed divines.
Did English politics and culture etiolate in ‘the age of stability’? To that question this course responds with a resounding ‘no’. English politics in the 18th century were dynamic, sometimes tumultuous, never settled. English culture was highly-wrought and many-faced. Over five days in which we examine the period’s politics and culture from a range of perspectives, we ask: how did an increasingly diverse and complex society tame deadly forces that had bedevilled the previous century and chart a new course for peace and prosperity?
Learning outcomes
- To gain a more detailed appreciation of a century which has sometimes suffered in the shadow of the more towering 17th and 19th centuries;
- To discover the essentially dynamic character of 18th-century stability (and perhaps of political and cultural stability more generally);
- To better understand the possibilities and the pitfalls of efforts to read into the 18th century the birth of ‘modern’ politics and culture.
