Chapter 3  Historical context: 1798 - 1832

This section of the paper will commence with an evocation of the times in which Whately and the Noetics lived highlighting: their principal philosophical challenges, the nature of God; political ones, the indivisibility of Church and State; and the practical challenges these produced.

3.2  The times and their spirit

As discussed in the introduction, we are concerned with the period between the publication of Malthus Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and the proclamation of the Reform Act (1832). This period has been called “the end of the beginning of modernity” (Gore 2005, p. 149). In this brief sketch, our aim is to consider the Geistensgeschichten or ‘spirit of the times” as defined and outlined previously in Blaug’s (1990) categorisation of approaches to the conduct of economic history. I seek here to illustrate, what we call in contemporary parlance, the zeitgeist. The mood, the tone, the intellectual concerns that would have been pertinent to a group of Anglican divines, the Noetics, in the period here considered.

To summarise the historical backdrop: wars and revolutions across the Channel; economic transitions and great flows of population into the industrial cities at home; all put pressure on the extant institutions which were still broadly intact from the Glorious Revolution of 1662. These Oxford Dons, elite members of the Anglican establishment and esteemed political and religious (a distinction which could be regarded as somewhat anachronistic) commentators, men were leaders of debate and shapers of public opinion. Their role as leading educators in the most prestigious and powerful educational institutions in the rhealm – the source of a large share of the country’s political, spiritual and professional leaders – gave them wide influence. In the case of Whately, Copleston and Senior, they were political actors as well. They can be regarded as leading members of the ‘clerisy’, in Coleridge’s (1830) terms, his very concept likely to have been based on observing them at work. In this role, they knew the centrality of aligning any reform programme which persuaded them rationally, with the tenets of the liberal theology which had emerged as a result of the British engagement with Newtonian natural theology (A. Waterman 1991; Waterman 2008).

3.3 The indivisibility of Church and State in early modern Britain

A succession of authors have drawn a religiously infused portrait of this part of the early to mid-nineteenth century Britain which had hitherto been drained of its religious colour (Clark 1985; Hilton 1986; Mandler 1990; A.M.C. Waterman 1991b; Donald Winch 1996).  There can be no understanding of this period of the history of Britain without examining the role of the Church in its parliamentary capacities (as the ‘Lords Spiritual’ in the Upper House), as well as its role in the education of Statesmen and the elite, and thereby filtering the doctrines and ideas for diffusion to the various orders of society. Coleridge described the elite who fulfilled this filtering role as a clerisy, and, in this particular context, we mean real clerics not just those acting in loco clerica⁸.

J.D. Clark emphasises the unities and coherences of the period from 1660-1832 and designates it as “the long eighteenth century” (Clark 1985). Clark’s portrait presents the essential dimensions of England in the period under examination as Anglican, aristocratic and monarchical; an ancien regime which balanced upon the “middle ground of English life: that form that presented itself as both constitutional and royalist, libertarian and stable, tolerant and expressing religious orthodoxy, innovative and respectful of what was customary”⁹. The intricacy of the relationship between the Church, the Parliament and the Crown, meant that any calls for reform needed to recast a settlement between these three elements.

For the Tories in the Church of England, Jacobin impulses were doubly haunting. An unresponsive and inefficient pastoral system, which failed to serve the needs of the population in the emerging industrial cities, was exacerbated by the commonly-held belief among the majority of Bishops, that the Church, regarded as a divinely ordained hierarchy, be defended at all costs. Even modest reforms were greeted by most clergy, and particularly the mostly Tory Bishops, as aimed at destroying Christianity and morality tout court. The risk of Jacobinism, had seen vaste swathes of the middle and merchant class “rush back to their pews” (Clark 1985; Hilton 1986).

The text of the day which best captures the tone and impending drama is the Black Book published in 1820 and written by journalist John Wade. This polemic outlines the abuses of the Church; its ineffectiveness; and the costs of its conservatism and resistance to reform:

To spare the rich and plunder the poor, is certainly not Christianity; it is more like Church of Englandism, which, by monstrous union of Church and State, has perverted the pure, simple, charitable faith of Christ into a tremendous engine of guilt and spiritual extortion (Wade 1820, p. 315).

Wade’s second book, The Extraordinary Black Book in 1831, further incited calls for reform. Shortly after its publication, the House of Lords (comprising a large number of Bishops) rejected the second Reform Bill (which proposed a redistribution of votes from the ‘rotten boroughs’ to the fast-growing industrial towns of the North). Jacobin risk flared into the Bristol Riots of 1831. The crowd turned on the Palace of the Bishop of Bristol and burnt it to the ground. Whately, then on his way to Dublin in his Bishops carriage, was attacked by the mob in these riots, surely and event to focus the mind on the need for reform (de Giustino 1995; de Giustino 2003).

3.4 Which God?

As the image of God in a religious society changes, the world-view pivots and there are implications for the intellectual paradigm in which political and social analysis is conducted. The competing factions jostling for influence included the Noetics (rationalists), Evangelicals (pietist), and the Philosophical Radials (athiests). The Noetics were busy placing Newtonian natural theology and Aristotelian logic at the service of the ‘moral sciences’. Their ‘watchmaker’ God was discernible from his great creation; a lawmaker who set in train, vast, complex systems, like seasons and markets. Understanding Providence meant leaving the master to his work, and recognising the limits of human intervention. Morality for this group involved logic in reasoning, and wise legislators ensuring fairness in the face of sectional interests, and the pursuit of virtue by free, but logically and morally educated, individuals. A laissez faire of: free trade; specialisation; division of labour; the Divine genius which turned the desire for social success, with the innate moral and benevolent sense, into public benefit from private striving.

The Philosophical Radicals were avowed atheists or distant desists. The other religious faction was the Evangelicals. These more emotively religious folk, were moved by a Jesus who suffered on the Cross on our behalf and by the potential for redemption by atonement for ‘the Fall’; a movement of personal piety, not the study of impersonal forces (Hilton 1986). Our ‘Oxford economic apologists’, the Noetics, did not chime with the “dominant evangelical ethos of the day” and this cost them influence (Hilton 1986, p. 49). Whately, in particular, did not subscribe to this Augustinian ‘original sin’ end of the theological spectrum. He took the most optimistic view of the prospects for human society and moral progress in the presence of increasing wealth (Hilton 1986, p52-55).

3.5  Political programmes – three types of radicals against the Tory’s

England in the period under examination was under the shadow of various threats: possibile revolutionary contagion from France; economic instability, driven in part by wars and revolutions and the resultant inflation, but also by the cataclysmic economic transformation, we now call the ‘industrial revolution’; and a bellicose Napoleon threatening to invade Britain. Religious conviction among the privileged classes increased in response, as did the fear of radicalism among the lower classed (Hilton 1986; Mandler 1990; A. Waterman 1991; Donald Winch 1996)¹⁰.

The fall of both the monarchy and the Church in France weighed on the minds of the men who ran both in England. It made them sensitive to the benefits and risks in: pre-emptive constitutional reform; increasing the welfare of the ‘lower orders’ of society; and expanding education for the broader populace. The risks inherent in the excesses, inefficiencies and perceived corruption of the Anglican Church were significant.

As part of the intellectual establishment, the Noetics were the Coleridgian clerisy, an active intellectual class contesting reform programmes. Conservative, liberal and radical schools of thought struggled for supremacy and the adoption of their programmes in the court of public opinion. (Allen 1985, pp. 95-96).

Those calling for reform were called ‘Radicals’. But there were at least three main types of Radicals: the parliamentary radicals (to which group the Noetics belonged), the popular radicals and the philosophical radicals (both of which the Noetics opposed in no uncertain measure). The parliamentary radicals were, in Whately’s day, led by Earl Grey. Following in the tradition established by Charles James Fox, they called for measured electoral reform focused on the land and capital owning middle-class. The popular radicals argued for the expansion of the franchise to include artisans and the labouring classes. Their support in the early nineteenth century was limited and subdued by harsh repression. The Philosophical radicals included James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo and JS Mill, and agreed with the parliamentary radicals on electoral reform, but focused their attention on legislative reform on utilitarian lines.

The opposition to all reform came from the Tories who sought to preserve the ancien regime tout court. They believed that accession to any of the demands would result in a slippery-slope to the sort of chaos seen in France. They called for the Church, and the Aristocracy, to be defended at all costs as a divinely ordained natural order. In these debates, the Evangelicals were divided.

The formation of government by the Whigs under Earl Grey’s leadership (1830), saw new legislation presented to Parliament enunciating reform of the electoral rolls and the end of religious discrimination¹¹. The final demise of the old system was swift. In 1832 the ancien regime in which the Noetics were powerful figures came to its end as much at their hands as any. This expansion of the franchise and rights, destroyed for all time the unique privileges of the aristocracy and the clerisy.

3.6 Economic reform – Corn Laws, Poor Laws and Currency Wars

The other great programmes for reform were economic in nature. These reforms were driven by knowledge of Adam Smith’s science of the wise legislator as outlined in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the WON (1776). It entailed opposition to the mercantilist policies, like the Corn Laws, which served to protect domestic corn and cereal growers from less expensive foreign competition¹². David Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage was important here. Despite being reformist on electoral matters, the Whig government of Earl Grey declined the call to repeal the Corn Laws and they were finally repealed by the Duke of Wellington in 1846.

 The other major economic reform proposal driven by the Whigs was the amendment of the Poor Laws. This will be examined as a collaborative project of the Noetics in chapter 5, section 5.8.

Chapter 4  Richard Whately

Overton (1894)

4.1 Introduction

Richard Whately (1787-1863) was a leading light of his times¹³. He was a wide-ranging thinker who made contributions to fields of knowledge, including logic, epistemology, rhetoric , moral philosophy and political economy based on Aristotelian logic and premises; a reformist educator in Oxford and Ireland; an Anglican priest who ministered throughout his life; a widely-read populariser of economics, logic and moral philosophy; a founder of political economy as a University discipline at Oxford and Trinity College, Dublin; a pioineer of social science and statistical collections; a theologian and, finally, the Archbishop of Dublin from 1831 until his death. In this section, we will consider Whately’s origins, character, education and career. 

In the public rhealm J.S. Mill was so impressed with his contribution and intellectual stature that in 1846 he urged the Edinburgh Review publish “a general estimate of the man and his writings….W[hately] is certainly a very remarkable and even eminent man, and one whose merits and faults are both very important to be pointed out” (Mill quoted in Rashid 1977 p147). I will endeavour to building on the existing secondary literature, contribute to this portrait of eminence, merit and fault.

4.2 Origins

Richard Whately was the fourth son of Joseph Whately of Nonsuch Park, Surrey and Jane Plumer. He was born on 1 February 1787 in the home of his maternal Uncle, William Plumer, in Cavendish Square. His family tree contained its share of vicars and country parsons, including his father. Joseph Whately was also a lecturer at Gresham College a centre of new ideas and debate in enlightenment Britain. Whately began life as a “puny sickly child” so delicate that he was not expected to live (Tuckwell 1909, p. 51). Despised by his elder brothers “as a sort of changeling”, he was left to his own devices as he grew, displaying great curiosity, eager immersion in books and “theoretic flights in ethics and politics” as well as stunning ‘feats of mental arithmetic’, which may have pointed to some aspergic tendencies¹⁴. The penchant for “castle-building”, speculation on abstract subjects and “Utopian schemes for ameliorating the world” and the conduct of government was the result of highly developed powers of concentration to which he believed “he owed everything in his life” (Tuckwell 1909, p. 51).

4.3 Character

Whately, “acute in mind, resolute in temper, robust in body, in society genial to the point of boisterousness” was known, in the Oxford period, for striding through the fields, dressed in white, with his dog ‘Sailor’ in tow, stunning passers-by (especially under-graduates caught in the company of ladies) as the well-trained Sailor, dropped from trees into the water (Tuckwell 1909, p. 59). “In Oxford of his day Whately’s was a name to mention with bated breath” opines the author of the entry in the National Dictionary of Biography (Rigg 1885). “Whately’s presence was enough to discomfort the polite, anger the complacent, and embarrass the bashful” chimes another (de Giustino 1995, p. 220). He has variously been described as “brash”, “arrogant”, “alarming”, “provocative”, “forensic”, “tender” and “optimistic”¹⁵. The elements of his character that are certain and agreed are his forensic intellect, powers of concentration, abstraction and racionation; his scrupulousness, integrity and consistency of position; and kindness (Tuckwell 1909, p. 62).

His harsh manners and brusqueness with those of inferior intellect were considered arrogant by some. His highly “analytical, rational-type, not tempered by any sympathy with an emotional religion of any kind” (Overton 1894, p. 118) was considered much more like Bentham and Mill than to the rest of his Oxford colleagues (A. Waterman 1991, p. 207). The Mandler (1990) reading is of a fundamentally optimistic belief in human nature and society, and the power of providence to liberate the good for mankind through increasing wealth as long as it follows ethical principles (Mandler, 1990, p81-103). 

Other more serious critiques made of him in his day include the charge by many of his colleagues that he was “more provocative than profound”(de Giustino 2003, p. 56). Some regarded him as more suited to “destructive rather than constructive work”(Overton 1894, p. 118). Others, particularly those on the other-side to Whately on the issue of Church reform,  saw him and his Liberal politics as “opportunistic”(Corsi 1988, p. 93). Whately is also recorded as lacking the moral weight of his protégé, Thomas Arnold. Overton (1894), although not a contemporary, after examination of the biographical records of both men, concludes that Arnold was “far inferior intellectually (as it seems to me), but far superior in moral weight” (Overton 1894, p. 120).

Those close to him who knew Whately well record a character who balanced his extreme acuity of mind with great tenderness in family-life, to his life-long friends; and great fidelity to his religious faith and the practice of Christian kindness.

To give the last word to one of Whately’s closest friends, Thomas Arnold: “Now I am sure that in point of real essential holiness, so far as man can judge of man, there does not live a truer Christian than Whately; and it does grieve me most deeply to hear people speak of him as of a dangerous and latitudinarian character, because in him the intellectual part of his nature keeps pace with the spiritual – instead of being left, as the Evangelicals leave it, a fallow field for all unsightly weeds to flourish in. He is a truly great man – in the highest sense of the word – and in the safety and welfare of the Protestant Church in Ireland depend in any degree on human instruments, none could be found I verily believe, in the whole empire, so likely to maintain it”(Fitch 1901, p. 270).

4.4 Education and the Oriel Noetics

Whately cannot be understood in isolation from the community of scholars that both formed and sustained him in his intellectual endeavours: the community of Oriel College, Oxford.¹⁶ Under the leadership of first Edward Copleston (Fellow, 1789-1814; Provost 1814-1828; Bishop 1828-1849) and then Whately himself (Fellow 1811-31), Oriel College was a hive of intellectual industry, leadership and culture.

From his production of entire shelves of books on a wide array of subjects, some two million words, we can infer that Whately was well-served in his educational formation. Near age ten he was placed in a private school near Bristol. The school regime strengthened his constitution and subdued his precocity. At Oxford he had the good fortune to have been discovered by Copleston as teacher and tutor. For the first time, Whately found someone who could understand his mental acuity in all its scope, appreciate his abstract imaginative powers,  and “draw out the powers of his mind” (Tuckwell 1909, p. 55). Whately would always give to Copleston the credit for the best of his education.

Whately matriculated from Oriel College on the 6^th of April 1805 and graduated with a B. A. (double major second class) in 1808. This second class result was deeply disappointing to him, despite being regarded as the fault of the examiners (Tuckwell 1909, p. 56). He did, however, win the prize for the English essay, “The Arts in the Cultivation of Which the Ancients were less Successful than the Moderns”. The end of his formal professional education was marked by his election, in 1811, as Fellow of Oriel College. This was, in his view, “the great triumph of his life” (Tuckwell 1909, p. 57).  He continued to study theology and, like most Oxford dons of the period, he took Holy Orders in 1811, and in due course, the degrees of Bachelor of Divinity and Doctor of Divinity.

4.5 Whately’s career

As a Fellow of Oriel, Whately first came to prominence through writing Christian apologetics and on Church government. His first well known piece was an anonymous tract, a witty Christian-apologist challenge to Hume and the other extreme skeptics of religion of the day, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819), which compared the scant evidence for miracles with the scant evidence anyone who speaks of Napoleon has of his existence. He published influential reviews of Jane Austen’s work in the Quarterly Review in 1821¹⁷.  In lauding her realism, social commentary and capacity to capture the spirit and sensibility of the times, he sends us reaching for the pages of Austen’s novels for clues to understand the society he lived in, as well as his views on moral education and the development of moral imagination. Whately celebrated the legitimacy of the novel as a genre. He argued that imaginative literature, especially narrative, was more valuable than history or biography. The novel, as pursued by Austen, offers profound insights into general human nature and experience thereby expanding the reader’s moral imagination.

In 1820 he met his own life’s companion, his wife Elizabeth. After their marriage in 1822, they and returned to residence at Oxford where he continued on the theme of Church governance delivering the Brampton Lectures On the Use and Abuse of Party Spirit in Matters of Religion¹⁸. In 1823 they moved to Halesworth in Suffolk. Here he acquitted his parish duties, which were not over-burdening, with more than customary consideration. In 1825 he returned his residence again to Oxford as the principal of St. Alban Hall. His head filled with plans for reform, particularly the centrality of teaching logic and rhetoric as central discipline of the University curriculum and in the formation of able minds, he succeeded in this task, with the assistance of his then friend and protégé, J.H. Newman (Tuckwell 1909).

Oxford was the perfect soil for this “eccentric among eccentrics”  to drive his and Copleston’s vision, of what was possible for Oxford, into existence. Whately was a brilliant and enthusiastic teacher (Tuckwell 1909; Akenson 1981). He knew he was teaching the statesmen and professionals of tomorrow and that ‘forming their minds’ was forming the future. He avoided dogmatism and employed the Socratic method by “stimulus and suggestion”, aiming to “elicit the learner’s powers” (Tuckwell 1909). It was said of Whately that “no Don was ever less Donnish” due to the oddity in his manners and habits, and his defiance of convention. He is included in Annan’s study of the great Oxford dons of the nineteenth century, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and Geniuses (Annan 1999, pp. 40; 45-46). This un-conventionality increased rather than diminished his influence. Of the Oriel Common Room it was said that it “stinks of logic”(Tuckwell 1909, p. 59). It was here that Whately’s “cold, penetrating intellect” and passionate reformist views, found their best expression. In this milieu, and wherever else Church reformers congregated, in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, Whately was afforded the audience of an “oracle” (Overton 1894, p. 119).

With time and maturity, his concerns and published writing moved beyond Christian apologetics and Church governance. His contribution on logic first appeared as an article in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1826) and was ultimately published as a stand-alone treatise with numerous editions of this text. It was read by hundreds of thousands (Akenson 1981). Elements of Logic became a landmark piece of work in Britain and the United States where it gave great impetus to the study of logic. J.S. Mill remarked that Whately had “done more than any other person to restore this study [Logic] to the rank from which it had fallen in the estimation of the cultivated class in our country…..” (Mill quoted in Rashid 1977, p148).

Whately also contributed an article to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana entitled Rhetoric which was also adapted into a book, Elements of Rhetoric, published in 1828. In 1831 Whately was elected to the recently established Drummond professorship of Political Economy at Oxford in succession to his protégé Nassau Senior. The lectures delivered as part of his duties, Introductory Lectures (1832) were highly influential and their impact will be explored later in this narrative.

The economic and political debates of the day have been regarded by Moore & White (2009) as a contest between two axes: the Christchurch based Charles Lloyd, who had a great influence on Peel, (the Lloyd-Peel axis), and their combatants, the Oriel team comprising, Copleston, Whately and Senior (the Noetics). It was in these debates, and during this period, that Whately came to the attention of the Foxite Liberals of Holland House “that busy and witty conservatory of liberal opinions” (de Giustino 2003, p227). After the 1830 establishment of the Whig led Government, many of Whately’s Oxford students won junior offices with the Whigs (Mandler, 1990). The Foxite Liberals believed in the abolition of slavery, the extension of civil rights, Catholic emancipation and religious toleration, improvements in the penal code (Whately’s was particularly passionate about the end of Transportation) and Poor Law reform. All ideas Whately both subscribed to, and promoted in his writing, teaching and preaching.

When the Grey government got to work on the reform of the franchise, it was the Lords Spiritual who blocked the proposed legislation several times. (Ultimately culminating in the Bristol Riots in which the mob attacked Whately’s carriage near Birmingham). The Whigs planned to slowly change the character of the House of Lords by adding more liberal Bishops to its ranks. This was no easy task given that most potential candidates for Bishoprics were Tories, and, those few of a more liberal persuasion, often proved to be unsuitable for other reasons, infirmity, age or lack of conscientiousness. Lord Melbourne was head to remark on the news of the passing of a Bishop “Not another Bishop dead!”– a far cry from the most famous exclamation in British history about another Bishop, at another time (de Giustino 1995)¹⁹.

Added to the Whigs’s challenge of finding a healthy, scrupulous, liberal, potential Bishop, was the need to find someone who could cope with the exigencies of Ireland; Dublin was a Tory stronghold and the “Irish question” was one of the most important political challenges of the century. The Earl Grey led Government wanted a real reformer; someone capable of improving the tense situation: “If the constitution required them occasionally to place men on episcopal thrones, the Whigs required prelates to make the political and religious establishment, more rational, less expensive, and somewhat more responsive to public opinion” (de Giustino 2003, p225). They had found their man in Whately.

Several prominent Whigs of Whately’s acquaintance promoted him on intellectual grounds, for they too were devotees of the new discipline of political economy and admired his free-wheeling intellect. Lord Brougham recalled that he promoted Whately’s appointment by recommending one of his books to Premier Lord Earl Grey, who as a result gave his recommendation to Whately with “perfect confidence” and looked forward to "sincere, zealous co-operation . . . in carrying into effect such reforms as may be conducive to the Church itself²⁰”. (Grey quoted in de Giustino, 2003). They also promoted him on grounds of character. Whately was known to believe that the first duty of a public official was scrupulousness and efficiency (de Giustino 2003).

News of his appointment to the Bishopric of Dublin was met with alarm and dismay on both sides of the religious and political divide. The Tories thought him a Catholic-loving latitudinarian, given his views on state endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy, and free religious instruction; the Catholics thought they’d been sent a rabid pugilist. The appointment of Whately as Archbishop had, in fact, been a shrewd and measured choice. In fact, JS Mill was amazed they had made such a splendid choice, “One of the most progressif men in this country is Dr Whately, lately appointed Archbishop of Dublin; which is in itself equalent to a revolution in the Church (Mill 1831 as quoted in Rashid 1977 p149).

The Dublin period was not as happy for Whately as his Oxford years (Akenson 1981). He was not well suited to the formality and convention of a divided Ireland. Intellectually however, it was productive. He published only one course of economics of his own, but one of his first acts was to endow a chair of political economy at Trinity College. Established in 1832, the Whately Chair was modelled on the Drummond Chair the founding of which he had negotiated, and been the second to fill. The Whately Chair and Trinity College became the intellectual base for the rise of the economics discipline in Ireland. There is a significant literature which traces this lineage and development and the influence of the holders of the Whately Chair on Irish life and thought (Black 1945, 1947a, 1947b; Boylan and Foley, 1992; Goldstrom, 1996)²¹.

In Dublin Whately concentrated many years of study into an annotated edition of Bacon’s Essays. In 1859 he produced an annotated edition of Paley’s Moral Philosophy. This work was another particularly influential piece of scholarship to the debates of the times and we will examine it later in the narrative.

In addition to writing directly for educated audiences, Whately also played a major role in primary and secondary education in Ireland, creating the first joint Catholic and Protestant Commissions of education with joint text books, including Catechism (Akenson 1981). In fact, he became not only the head schoolmaster of the Irish people, but through his school texts one of the chief instructors of the English working classes as well (Akenson 1981, p. 172). As a populariser of economics education he was extremely successful. His books were published in multiple editions, and translated into sixteen languages, including Maori. Millions of school children, working class people and others were introduced to the tenets of political economy through his work (Rashid 1977, p154-155).