Georgian era

The Georgian era is a period in British history from 1714 to c. 1830–1837, named after the Hanoverian Kings George I, George II, George III and George IV. The definition of the Georgian era is often extended to include the relatively short reign of William IV, which ended with his death in 1837. The subperiod that is the Regency era is defined by the regency of George IV as Prince of Wales during the illness of his father George III. The transition to the Victorian era was characterized in religion, social values, and the arts by a shift in tone away from rationalism and toward romanticism and mysticism.

The term Georgian is typically used in the contexts of social and political history and architecture. The term Augustan literature is often used for Augustan drama, Augustan poetry and Augustan prose in the period 1700–1740s. The term Augustan refers to the acknowledgement of the influence of Latin literature from the ancient Roman Republic.

• In the eighteenth century the English ruling classes – squirearchy, merchants, aristocracy – were men hard of mind and hard of will. Aggressive and acquisitive, they saw foreign policy in terms of concrete interest: markets, natural resources, colonial real estate, naval bases, profits. At the same time they were concerned to preserve the independence and parliamentary institutions of England in the face of the hostility of European absolute monarchies. Liberty and interest alike seemed to the Georgians therefore to demand a strategic approach to international relations. They saw national power as the essential foundation of national independence; commercial wealth as a means to power; and war as among the means to all three. They accepted it as natural and inevitable that nations should be engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, prosperity and predominance. Such public opinion as existed in the eighteenth century did not dissent from this world-view. The House of Commons itself reflected the unsentimental realism of an essentially rural society. Patriotism coupled with dislike and suspicion of foreigners were perhaps the only emotions that leavened the vigorous English pursuit of their interests; a pursuit softened but hardly impeded by the mutual conveniences and decencies of international custom and good manners.
  • Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (1972), p. 20

• Unlike most of Europe, Britain had no censorship and its political press was both more sophisticated and more widely distributed than that of any other European nation – few continental periodicals ever approached the extensive circulation of the Gentleman's Magazine, even Paris had no daily press before 1777 and certainly the obscenity and scurrility found daily in English cartoons, ballads, plays and pamphlets would never have been tolerated by continental rulers. Moreover London had a political significance quite unlike that of any other European capital. Europe's largest urban community – dominating the nation to the extent that one-sixth of the population spent part of their working life there – was endowed (unlike Paris, its nearest rival) with an autonomous and surprisingly democratic municipal government and within its parliamentary constituencies with a very broad electorate, both of which were the seed-grounds of political education and urban radicalism. The extent of political liberty enjoyed in England (as its natives were proud of reminding themselves) and the degree of political sophistication – even if largely, though by no means completely, confined to the metropolis – were greater than in any other European nation.
  • John Brewer, 'The Misfortunes of Lord Bute: A Case-Study in Eighteenth-Century Political Argument and Public Opinion', The Historical Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (March 1973), pp. 18-19

• William Warburton's Alliance between Church and State was published at the time of greatest strain in 1736. It offered a realistic defence of the position of the Church, one which abandoned all pretensions to an independent authority, and yet laid on the State a clear duty of protection. It was strongly approved by Sherlock and the court. In time it came to be seen as the classic statement of complacent Georgian Erastianism and a mark of the stable relationship between religion and politics in mid-eighteenth-century England.
  • Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (1989), pp. 43-44

• Trade was a national preoccupation and the constant concern of Parliament and the government, for all his contemporaries were agreed with Defoe that trade was the cause of England's increasing wealth. The trade of England, both overseas and domestic, was extremely rich and varied, based partly on things made or grown at home and partly on an extensive re-export trade of raw materials from the colonies in America and luxury goods from the East. In order to encourage trade, Walpole removed all restrictive measures on the export of English manufactured goods. He also allowed into the country the raw materials needed for them duty free. But, of course, there was no general tendency towards free trade. Everyone, including Walpole, believed that English manufacturers had to be protected at all costs. The Irish were forbidden to make cloth or export their wool to anywhere but England in case the greatest of all English industries – cloth manufacture – should be endangered in any way. This fear of foreign competition was at times carried to fantastic lengths: it was an offence to shear sheep within four miles of the coast in case the fleeces should be smuggled overseas. Yet this attitude – absurd as it might be in many manifestations – was fundamentally realistic. Eighteenth-century politicians realised with great clarity that wealth meant power. Chatham, who was more preoccupied with England's grandeur than any other statesman, planned his campaigns with the merchants of London and planned them to capture French trade. For trade was wealth and wealth was power.
  • J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1950; 1964), pp. 21-22

• The appetite of England had been whetted by the rapid commercial expansion. A world of never-ending luxury could be won by vigorous and aggressive action against her competitors; so it seemed to many of London's merchants. That war would bring commercial wealth was a deep-seated belief which influenced English politics profoundly.
  • J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1950; 1964), p. 27

• The age of Walpole was rough, coarse, brutal; a world for the muscular and the aggressive and the cunning. The thin veneer of elegance and classic form obscured but never hid either the crime and dissipation or the drab middle-class virtue and thrift. For the majority of England, life was hard and vile, but the expanding world of commerce and the rich harvests brought both prosperity and opportunity, which bred a boundless self-confidence.
  • J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1950; 1964), p. 33

• The success of the slave trade agitation has obscured a great deal of the Sect's other social work. Active Christianity was the panacea for the world's ills; in consequence, education and missionary enterprise were more important to the Sect than the more direct ameliorations of social conditions, such as control of child labour, shorter working hours, cheap food, and higher wages. They and their supporters set up schools for the poor, especially Sunday Schools for ragged children, which were interested principally in the inculcation of morals and Christian principles, as narrowly interpreted by Simeon or Wilberforce. Not only the poor received their attention, but also the wealthy and middle classes, and, in spite of much aggressive opposition, prudish piety began slowly to replace that frank cynicism which had been the hall-mark of eighteenth-century fashion.
  • J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1950; 1964), pp. 159-160

• Out of doors, crime was rife and often bloody: smugglers had little compunction about slaying excise officers. And, from the rough-house of the crowd to the dragoons' musket volley, violence ran through public and political life, as English as plum pudding. Force was used as a matter of routine to achieve social and political goals, smudging hard-and-fast distinctions between the world of criminality and politics.
  • Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982; rev. ed. 1991), p. 99

• Upright citizens – not just blackguards and bravoes but the village Hampden too – did not shrink from force to get their due. There was a cacophony of verbal violence: newspapers, cartoons and street ballads blasted their targets with scabrous insults and Billingsgate scurrility; political sermons thundered from pulpits.
  • Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982; rev. ed. 1991), p. 100

• The lava flow of violence ran through the political landscape, sometimes underground, sometimes on the surface. Unpopular politicians were often ragged, peers' carriages pelted and rocked, and their windows smashed, as they left Westminster... Minorities were tempting targets. Methodists were treated as cockshies (John Wesley saw it as a mark of Divine favour that no brick hit him personally), as were homosexuals, witches, bawds and Frenchmen. The Act of 1753 legalizing the naturalization of Jews brought baying anti-Semitic mobs on to the streets: it was immediately repealed. Irish-baiting and Scots-baiting were national sports. Fear of popery sparked the Gordon Riots in London in 1780, though targets broadened to include the rich, Lord Mansfield, breweries and Newgate goal.
  • Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982; rev. ed. 1991), p. 101

• It is often the custom to think of the eighteenth century, prior to the French Revolution, as a period of effete politeness and intelligence, of cultured and artificial decadence, of scepticism, atrophy, and want of enterprise... With regard to the continent of Europe, there is a certain amount of symbolical truth in this popular impression, but, for Britain, a more illuminating picture of the eighteenth century would be supplied by a vision of something more robust—Clive planted four-square across the breach of Arcot; Wolfe and his men scrambling up the precipitous forest track towards Quebec; Captain Cook's sails sweeping into Botany Bay; Wesley's lean face and long white hair, as he preaches to mass meetings of miners and throws powerful men into fits of hysteria; James Watt working in the instrument maker’s shop, with thoughts in him that shall have their consequences in the history of mankind
  • G. M. Trevelyan, 'The Age of Johnson', in A. S. Turberville (ed.), Johnson's England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age, Vol. I (1933), p. 1

• The eighteenth-century English, on the average, were an earnest, virile, original, unconventional, and energetic race.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, 'The Age of Johnson', in A. S. Turberville (ed.), Johnson's England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age, Vol. I (1933), p. 1

• With regard to the continent of Europe, the popular impression that the eighteenth century was effete and conventional has at least a certain relation to truth... But when we turn to the Britain of the period we have a different story to tell. This was the time when our fathers conquered Canada and half India, rediscovered and began to settle Australia, and traded on an ever-increasing scale all over the inhabited globe; reorganized British agriculture on modern methods; began the Industrial Revolution in our island, thence in later times to spread over the whole world; and if the thirteen American colonies were at the same time lost to the British Empire, it was the result less of decadence in Great Britain than of young and mutinous energies in English America.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, 'The Age of Johnson', in A. S. Turberville (ed.), Johnson's England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age, Vol. I (1933), pp. 2-3

• Whether or not I am right in supposing that the England of the eighteenth century had an energy of spirit that was lacking elsewhere in the Europe of that day, it is at least certain that this view was then generally held upon the Continent. After the Marlborough wars with which the century opened, and, still more after the great victories of Chatham in two hemispheres in the Seven Years War, foreigners were always asking each other what was the secret of English success, and the answer they found was that the secret lay in our free institutions. In the days of Charles I and II our Parliament had been regarded abroad as a source of confusion and weakness to England. But the course of William III's and Marlborough's wars had changed that view completely. For the British Parliament had defeated the all-worshipped despotism of Louis XIV in a long-drawn contest, in which England had proved supreme alike in land warfare, in sea warfare, in diplomacy, and in financial strength. This unexpected event gave a prestige to our institutions which coloured European thought from the time of Marlborough right down to the French Revolution. The prosperity of England under Walpole, the constant increase of her trade and maritime power, her victories under Chatham in Canada and India, all confirmed the same impression. Even our great catastrophe—the loss of the American Colonies—was read in France as another demonstration of the power that freedom gives. It was not only our Parliament that was admired, but freedom of speech, press, person, and religious toleration.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, 'The Age of Johnson', in A. S. Turberville (ed.), Johnson's England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age, Vol. I (1933), pp. 3-4

• In the eighteenth century the English working man—then called the jolly yeoman or the industrious ’prentice—was intensely British, boasted himself a free-born Briton, and had no use for the frog-eating, priest-ridden Frenchman of his imagination. The average Englishman had not made the Grand Tour, and had no information about foreigners such as is being constantly poured in upon us to-day through newspapers, cinemas, books, pamphlets, and photographs. What the common English thought of the French you can see in Hogarth's uncomplimentary picture, entitled ‘Calais Gate’, in the National Gallery. This contempt for, and ignorance of, foreigners was extended not only to the Irish, but even to the Scots—who only became understood and admired in England in the age of Walter Scott, partly through the powerful influence of his pen.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, 'The Age of Johnson', in A. S. Turberville (ed.), Johnson's England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age, Vol. I (1933), p. 6

• The life that the English gentry lived was as different as possible from that of their continental friends. The nobles of France and Italy thought little of existence away from the Court of their master, the King or reigning Duke. But the English gentry, when they came to town, came first and foremost to their own Parliament, only secondarily to the King's Court... But the bulk of their lives the English gentlemen spent neither at Court nor yet in the purlieus of Parliament, nor in London at all; but in the country, among their neighbours of all classes whom they led, entertained, bullied, and at election time courted and bribed. It was to their country houses that they brought back the art treasures they had collected on the Grand Tour—treasures in our day being scattered oversea by the auctioneer's hammer. They lived among their neighbours, hunting foxes, shooting partridges, inclosing and draining land, improving breeds of sheep and cattle, governing the countryside as Justices of the Peace. Their whole manner of life and way of thought was English, and though every English gentleman was recognized as belonging to the same social level as the continental nobleman, he was also recognized as belonging to a separate and unique island species of the genus European gentleman.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, 'The Age of Johnson', in A. S. Turberville (ed.), Johnson's England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age, Vol. I (1933), pp. 6-7

• There was therefore in eighteenth-century England, prior to the changes gradually made manifest by the Industrial Revolution, a national solidarity and unity of idea which bound Englishmen of all classes together and separated them from foreigners. Power, as we think looking back, was unduly concentrated in the hands of one class, the country gentry, but their monopoly was not popularly regarded as a grievance. The novelist Fielding is one of the very few contemporary critics of squirarchical power in the mid-eighteenth century. Classes were distinct in England—less distinct and rigid, indeed, than on the Continent at that time, but much more distinct and rigid than they are to-day. Wealth was very unevenly distributed. But there was little or no social discontent, and the national idea made every one proud of being a free-born Englishman.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, 'The Age of Johnson', in A. S. Turberville (ed.), Johnson's England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age, Vol. I (1933), p. 7

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