Pleasure has been the subject of intense debate across history and became a particularly important part of discourse in the eighteenth century. This blog accompanies my recent article in Social History 49/3 ‘Emotional economies of pleasure among the gentry of eighteenth-century England.’ In that article I argue that amidst the many and varied pleasures of the public sphere, elite men and women laid claim to the family and family relations as the most enduring and pleasurable of pleasures.
Pleasure and its malcontents
Pleasure is and always has been a very problematic human experience. What should we find pleasurable? What does society consider to be ‘acceptable pleasures’? How much pleasure should we indulge in and who should decide this, the individual or the state? Who has the right to experience pleasure and which pleasures are morally robust? These questions have exercised philosophers, statesmen and journalists across history. Many philosophers argued that pleasure needed to be limited and ordered through reason, that pleasures of the mind were superior to those of the flesh. In this way so called ‘higher order’ pleasures, such as those gained from literature, art and music accumulated greater moral currency than the pleasures to be gained through ‘lower’ gratifications, such as sex and the intake of narcotic substances. These principles continue to define many of our conversations about politics and society today. In the UK debates relating to alcohol, drugs, smoking and obesity intersect with concerns surrounding the National Health Service and government spending. In May 2024 the Daily Mail ran with the headline ‘Obese Brits put the whole country in slow lane: Fat staff are twice as likely to take time off sick and are “seriously hampering economic growth”, report finds.’[1] This discourse pretty much always takes place with reference to the pleasure-seeking habits of poorer and less privileged social groups rather than the wealthier and privileged amongst us. The discourse tends to illuminate the lure of fast-food outlets and cheap beer consumption rather than middle-class dinner parties fuelled by French wine and foie gras.
Pleasure in the age of Enlightenment
Historic debates surrounding pleasure reached a crescendo in the eighteenth century as the types, variety and locations of pleasure changed and expanded amidst a step-change in attitudes to pleasures, both ‘sinful’ and ‘innocent.’ These debates were in some ways less prejudicial towards the poor, focusing as they often did on elite groups, although the labouring classes came in for a fair amount of heckling too. The growth of the cities, the development of a ‘new consumerism’ and the enlightenment all fed into these changing attitudes. Desire was also key in driving the new consumerism of the period. The novel goods of the eighteenth century spread refinement and politeness, but that they were also objects of pleasure, as Maxine Berg noted, for their ‘beauty, ingenuity, or convenience.’[2] New contexts for amusement such as the pleasure gardens (Vauxhall is pictured below), the shopping streets and the theatres of London developed during the urban renaissance of this period, offering to locate desire in carefully crafted urban settings designed for pleasure. Rural landscapes were bent to the will of thrill-seeking aristocrats, chasing foxes and shooting game in ever increasing numbers or landscaping the natural environments surrounding country houses for the pleasure and entertainment of family and friends. A series of developments in enlightenment thinking, natural theology, moral philosophy and aesthetics helped to better justify pleasures of the flesh and began to undermine those of the soul. The economics of Adam Smith further democratised desire, lending politeness and respectability to pleasure in the greater goal of the national interest.
Canaletto, The Grand Walk, Vauxhall Gardens, London, WAR COMP
Elites and Pleasure
All of this raised political issues critical to debates around power and liberty. Elites often formed the focus for these critiques, privileged as they were with the time and the money to explore their pleasures in greater conspicuity than the common person. Critics such as William Cobbett decried the absentee landlords neglecting their philanthropic duties in the countryside to chase pleasure in the Great Wen. Meanwhile the aristocratic passions for field sports that had encouraged enclosure and the associated loss of common lands spoke of the way pleasure could distort duty. Pleasurable indulgences were embodied too. In his English Malady the nerve doctor, George Cheyne, meditated on the damage that rich French foods, ‘the materials of luxury’, exotic goods from Britain’s empire in the form of ‘eastern pickles and sauces’ as well as ‘Assemblies, Musick Meetings, Plays, Cards and Dice’ were causing the gentry and aristocracy of England. ‘Such a course of life must necessarily beget an ineptitude for exercise’ he bemoaned.[3] The energetic pursuit of aristocratic pleasures opened them up to wider critiques of their abilities as a governing class, not helped by setbacks in the Seven Years War amid accusations of misgovernment and corruption.
The pleasures of family and friends
Pleasure is, and always has been, problematic. But if we eschew the previous historical focus on public and sensory pleasures and, instead, consider the rather less tortured, if not entirely unproblematic, world of pleasures among family and friends, we find a very different world of pleasure. In correspondence, the only form of communication at distance during this period, family members regularly expressed and discussed their pleasures with each other. This began with the letters themselves. They were highly prized material objects that took time to compose and create. Correspondents, such as William Woolcombe in 1796, often began their letters with statements of pleasure stating, as William did, that his brother ‘forget not that I always receive great pleasure from hearing from you.’[4] Writers also remembered pleasurable moments together, professing a desire to be together again as well as providing gossipy notations on the desirable qualities of others. These pleasures were considered more virtuous and separate from the troublesome pleasures of the public sphere, even if they frequently intersected and overlapped. Pleasure was a way of maintaining family relationships and bonds, of building intimacy between people separated by several days travel or more who might not have seen each other for long periods of time.
Pleasure was allied to other emotions such as desire and surprise in clusters of emotions and often found its way into family narratives. Such stories were no doubt shared and reproduced, serving to further create systems of belonging (and unbelonging). Pleasure could also, though, reveal more troubling feelings and affections. Pleasure was often juxtaposed with anxiety, the lack of one defining the other. Pleasure could be used to express an absence of anxiety and anxious thoughts were often devoid of pleasure. It could also be deployed as a political tool against subordinates. Marginalised elites, such as younger sons and daughters, were at the mercy of the pleasure of their guardians and seniors under the system of strict settlement and primogeniture. Powerful elites could withhold their pleasure from employees and tenants, signalling authority and reinforcing social hierarchies. Subordinates were also frequently reminded that autonomous decisions were ‘not in their pleasure to make.’
Pleasure was a powerful commodity, both in public discourse and private conversations, and it continues to be so. Pleasure, for all the trouble it has caused in the past and continues to cause now, is an essential human experience and a very complex emotion that can reveal so much about our innermost thoughts, our desires and our social ambitions as well as speaking of the wider social, political and cultural contexts within which it circulates.
Mark Rothery is Professor of history at the University of Northampton where he co-leads the Centre for Historical Research. He has published widely on the themes of family, demography, gender (masculinities) and country houses in major monographs and leading journals. His current focus is on the history of emotions. His article in Social History derives from a longer-term project on the history of anxiety. He is currently writing a book for Manchester University Press on the anxieties of landed elites between 1700-1900.
References
[1] The Mail Online, 30 September 2024, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13410109/obesity-hampering-economic-growth-report-reveals.html
[2] Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford, 2007), 5.
[3] George Cheyne, The English Malady (London, 1734), 52.
[4] William Woolcombe, London, to his younger brother, Henry, 2 September 1796, Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, 710/408