The Humanist Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England. And Today

Abstract

What effect, she or he should ask, does literature have on the way a society thinks and feels about itself? And ultimately on the way it acts? Consciousness, we all know, is a slippery subject. Slipperiest of all is the development of class consciousness: the way groups of people come to be aware of belonging to one kind of social grouping. Literature may be important in this process. It may not. The issue is rarely raised. Chronicling the details of what happens to the minds of masses of people-rather than elites-is no easy matter. For England, the work of the Hammonds, E. P. Thompson, and a few others informs us about the development of working class consciousness during the late eighteenth century. As for the relationship of eighteenthcentury humanism-the work of Swift, Pope, Johnson-to that development, there is no work of significance at all. And ourselves? We hardly begin to understand how a major tradition-Augustan humanism-relates to the development of our own consciousness. But why should we worry about eighteenth-century humanism as a source? Marx once remarked that