The Pleasures of Austerity

The Pleasures of Austerity

HELEN BERRY

Abstract: This article challenges the paradigm of untrammelled consumer pleasures inthe Georgian era by exploring the various motivations for disengagement from the domi-nant social codes of polite consumption. It examines the use of the terms ‘austere’ and‘austerity’ in Georgian print culture, and the censure that resulted from being thusdescribed. The religious and philosophical underpinnings of austerity as a stand againstdominant modes of Anglicanism are considered, concluding with a case study of thefashionable physician George Cheyne, whose struggle to control his own obesity led to theformulation of a medical and dietary solution to over-consumption.

Keywords: Georgian, consumption, print, James Gillray, George Cheyne, George III

The 43rd Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, held inOxford in January 2014, took ‘Pleasures and Entertainments’ as its loose theme. I wasasked to deliver an opening lecture for the conference. My response was this paper, which,with some trepidation, I entitled ‘The Pleasures of Austerity’. I was uneasy about this title,of course, because the idea that the Georgian period was one of leisure and plenty, whereluxury and style abounded, is one that has a great deal of currency and has given schol-arly and general audiences much enjoyment and diversion. An exhibition currentlyrunning at the British Library, called ‘Georgians Revealed’, and an academic conference inBath on ‘Georgian Pleasures’, which received widespread national coverage in the broad-cast and social media during September 2013, are but two examples of the enduringpopular appeal of the eighteenth century.1 In books, films and exhibitions, pleasure isrepeatedly elicited through reconstructions of our Georgian forebears enjoying a rollick-ing good time at the card table or on horseback, gorging themselves with exotic daintiesand caffeine, bedecked in luxury fabrics, and disporting themselves in elegant drawingrooms. Public appetite (appropriate word) for the world of Mr Darcy and his ilk shows nosign of abating, with books, television and film adaptations of tales of Georgian rakes andRegency beaux. And there is plenty of archival evidence to illustrate in vivid and colourfuldetail the kind of pleasures that twenty-first-century onlookers might expect to see – fromthe cartoon antics depicted by Gillray and Rowlandson to the array of material goods,imported and domestic, attractively displayed in national collections. But I would like tofocus on another image to capture some of the themes of this article – Gillray’s famoussatirical cartoon of George III eating a boiled egg, entitled Temperance Enjoying a FrugalMeal (1792; Fig. 1). Everything in the room indicates miserliness: the king is using thetablecloth as a napkin to protect his clothing; his breeches are patched; his chair is underprotective coverings; under his feet is a mat to protect the carpet. Even the handle of thebell-pull is covered by a bag. Behind the king’s back is a fireplace; we know it is winter,since in the grate is a vase containing snowdrops, holly and mistletoe, but there is no fire.On the mantelpiece is a small pair of scales of the type used for weighing guineas and acandelabra in the form of a woman’s figure signifying ‘Munificence’, but her two cornu-

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 37 No. 2 (2014) doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12137

© 2014 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

copia are empty. One candle is unlit; the other is merely a stub, its flame extinguished by acandle snuff embellished with a royal crown. While George eats his frugal egg, the queenstuffs salad into her mouth.2 The use of a boiled egg by Gillray to signify frugality may echoHogarth’s Marriage à la Mode (1743-5), where the same meal signifies penny-pinchingbourgeois values. As Robert L. S. Cowley observes, ‘A character’s choice of food [inHogarth] can be [...] revealing as an “index of the mind” in other forms of behaviour.’ InPlate VI of Hogarth’s famous series the interruption of a miserly, officious alderman’smeal is depicted – an egg on a pile of rice with some dried crusts, and water, contained ina ceremonial cup. Linda Colley argued many years ago that the first self-identified Britishmonarch’s propensity for frugal living and marital fidelity was seen as ill becoming thehead of state early on in his reign.3 The austere habits of ‘Farmer George’, featured herethrough his simple meal, came to be seen in a more favourable light during the domesticand international crises (both political and economic) of the 1780s and ’90s, particularlyin contrast to the profligacy of his son, the prince regent. The king’s penny-pinching waysfound public sympathy among a middling sort burdened with additional taxes and risingprices in the shops, helping to found what Colley has called the enduringly popular ‘mythof royal ordinariness’.4 We shall return to the meaning of George III’s egg, his health andpopularity, later.

But why choose a boiled egg over a sumptuous feast? The lure of Georgian pleasure wasand is hard to resist. Even a fairly cursory delve into the archives might seduce even themost hardened historical researcher. The John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Librarycontains many eighteenth-century trade cards. An example serves to illustrate the seduc-

1. Temperance Enjoying a Frugal Meal. Etching by James Gillray, 1792. By permission,British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, 1868, 0808.6225

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tive list of goods on offer: the trade card from one women’s clothing and millinery shop runby a tradeswoman with the surname ‘Moore, formerly Clarkson’, at 4 New-Buildings,Grafton Street. The advertisement, from September 1805, indicates the bewildering arrayof goods on sale in this shop, which assumed the new vogue for purchases by ‘readymoney’ only, rather than on credit:

ribbons, modes, peelings, velvets, lining sarsnets [...] silk, love & lace handkerchiefs [...] silkand cotton gloves [...] Italian crapes, tiffanies, patent net for cloaks, plain & fig[ured] [...] fancyand plain gauzes [...] gold and silver trimmings [...] spangles, Indian berries, Egyptian pebble[...] purse twist, chenilles [...] opera and water-proof handkerchiefs [...] rouge of the first kind,carmine [...] honey water (Best English), rose & marrow pomatum [...] Ceylon soap,Muscovian soap, Bandana soap, Windsor soap, Spermaceti soap [...] violet tooth powder.5

Not to mention shawls, sleeves, ginghams, bonnets, hats, veils and ‘mourning articles ofevery description’. The pleasures of Georgian consumerism are re-enacted when thereader encounters a list or description of the sorts of goods that were on offer to urbanconsumers for the first time in the eighteenth century. In the twenty-first century, clad inthe lurid hues of lycra and polyester, we can no longer tell the subtle differences betweenthe quality of tabbies and shagreens, calicoes and dimittys, and so it is easy to be taken inby the pleasures of shopping, lost in the virtual glamour of the long-dead. As one highlyinfluential collection, a book edited by Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts in the 1990son pleasure in the eighteenth century, reminds us, we seek our own pleasure in recallingthe Georgian age of innocent diversions. In the Preface to this collection Marie MulveyRoberts observes: ‘Trivialized and over-simplified remains the popular view of thepleasure-seekers of the eighteenth century – one that reinforces the stereotype of anArcadia of simple pleasures.’ Mulvey Roberts was writing in 1996, and if anything thisstereotype is even more firmly embedded now, particularly in the public imaginationbeyond the academy.6

So for me to introduce the theme of austerity is to call time on these fancies, to askwhether, in our own era of economic downturn and severe fiscal measures, we maydevelop a new and more expansive understanding of Georgian England, as a corrective tothe tendency in more affluent times to write histories that speak to the prosperous and thecomfortable. The seminal work that marked the reorientation of the historiographytowards the demand-led ‘consumer revolution’ was written by John Brewer, NeilMcKendrick and J. H. Plumb during the stock-market boom of the 1980s.7 The classicsupply-side account of the profound economic transformations that we might call, for thesake of time, the Industrial Revolution was subsequently, over the course of the 1990s andearly twenty-first century, refocused according to the premise of a pleasure-driveneconomy fuelled by consumer demand and the dictates of luxury, fashion and pleasure.

Our preoccupation with the prosperity of the Georgian period is founded on manyepithets – the ‘Age of Improvement’, ‘Age of Manufactures’, ‘Age of Industry’ – and thereis much hard evidence that these contemporary terms were not misplaced. E. A. Wrigley’snew and important study of energy in the Industrial Revolution charts the monumentaltransformations that underpinned the transition from an organic proto-industrialeconomy to a mineral-based industrial one.8 So to call the eighteenth century an ‘Age ofAusterity’ would be anachronistic and misplaced in macro-economic, or indeed socio-cultural, terms, and would lack credibility – this is not my intention. However, it is mypurpose to suggest that prosperity, on which so many pleasures were founded, was not asuniversally enjoyed, or as geographically widespread, as certain accounts may imply, as a

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corrective to the somewhat rosy picture of Georgian England that has been fostered inrecent decades. This is the result, I would suggest, of an over-concentration on London andelite consumption, de-coupled from the material circumstances of the majority ofeighteenth-century people throughout the British Isles. Prosperity – in the sense of bothpersonal fortune and more generally at the national, macro-economic level – waslocalised, sporadic and vulnerable to sudden fluctuations in what was still a predominatelyrural society in 1800.9 Moreover, prosperity brought problems – social ills, upheaval andmoral dilemmas. The increase in urban poverty became a serious problem requiring,eventually, root-and-branch reform to the old Elizabethan poor laws.10 Poverty, or ‘invol-untary austerity’, is not my present concern, however. The destitute had few choices.Instead, my intention is to look at those who elected for a variety of reasons to opt out ofconsumer culture, and at the socio-cultural responses which they elicited. In doing so, Ihope to examine some influential voices that were raised against consumerism duringapproximately the century before 1800, as a corrective to the somewhat Whiggish ideathat the march of materialism was neither questioned nor challenged. The concept of‘austerity’ rather than other closely related words, such as ‘abstention’, is particularlyuseful since, as we shall see, it was freighted with the idea of singularity. Abstention was anoption when faced with consumer choice, but to abstain repeatedly, to the degree that aperson was labelled austere, brought criticism for an extreme separation from pervadingsocial and cultural expectations. Exploring discourses against austerity reminds us thatthe bridge between the eighteenth century and our own secular, consumer age is lesssecure than is sometimes portrayed.

This article begins by addressing the different meanings of the term ‘austerity’ in con-temporary usage during the Georgian era, drawing on the periodicals and newspaperevidence from London and provincial centres. It explores the various ways in which‘austere’ was formulated adjectivally and adverbially in the eighteenth century (ratherthan the noun ‘austerity’, in the modern post-1930s’ sense of a series of government-ledpolicy measures to combat cyclical economic crisis, in particular the enduring problem ofnational debt).11 As we shall see, contemporary print culture indicates that austerebehaviour was considered by the Georgians to be a masculine characteristic indicative ofreligious and philosophical views that were at odds with socially approved standards ofpolite behaviour – producing critical discourses that challenge the perception that theculture of consumption was the primary and unproblematic means of gaining pleasurethroughout society at this time.

Next, I move to argue that the historiography of pleasure has often focused on the moresuperficial or external aspects of social practice and patterns of diversion. The recent risein interest in the history of the emotions promises one means of re-locating the history of‘things’ – their meaning, acquisition and use – within a new interior landscape. Introduc-ing the concept of austerity evokes the range of negative and/or conflicting emotionssurrounding the pleasures of the senses with which eighteenth-century people wrestled,but which are often lacking in accounts of eighteenth-century pleasure-seekers. Shame,guilt and ennui were as much by-products of consumption as pleasure. I shall conclude myarticle, therefore, with an examination of the prospects for pleasure generated by anaustere refusal to engage with the burgeoning culture of consumption – first, through themotivation of personal piety and other-worldliness, and second, as a rational and moralchoice (specifically, refusing consumer excess in order to live a longer, healthier life). Myintention is to show how austerity could be made into a virtue – one that carried pleasuresof its own: specifically, a sense of moral superiority, fiscal prudence and communal appro-bation, particularly among those of a similar doctrinal or ethical position. In the latter

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part I shall be taking as a case study the influential ideas propounded by the vegetarianphysician George Cheyne, a reformed consumer-to-excess for whom the solution to over-indulgence in sensual pleasure among the social elite was to recommend austere self-discipline and a vegetable, milk and seed diet.

I. Definitions of Austerity in Print

The adjective ‘austere’ appears in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), meaning ‘severe, harsh,rigid’, as in referring to God as ‘an austere and rigorous master, always lifting up his handto take vengeance’. This meaning is exemplified in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (ActII, scene iv), when Angelo defends his reputation for honesty by declaring: ‘My unsoil’dname, th’austereness of my life/ May vouch against you; and my place i’ the state.’Another adjectival definition was ‘sour of taste’, with a quotation from Arbuthnot refer-ring to ‘Austere wines, diluted with water’ that were said to ‘cool more than water alone’.One of the earliest examples of the noun ‘austerity’ is included in Johnson’s Dictionary, asmeaning ‘severity’, a ‘mortified life’ and ‘strictness’, in Ben Jonson, Milton and latterlyAddison: ‘This prince kept the government, and yet lived in his convent with all the rigourand austerity of a Capuchin [monk].’ The literary connotations of austerity were thereforealmost entirely negative, with the further connotation of ‘cruelty; harsh discipline’, as inRoscommon’s encomium ‘Let not austerity breed servile fear;/ No wanton sound offendher virgin ear.’12

The discourses surrounding austerity in the print culture of the eighteenth century alsoprovide insights into the gendered expectations of polite sociability in this period. Menwere thought to be prone to austere behaviour, their temperaments inclining them moretowards solitude and taciturnity. In one merry tale recounted in The By-Stander, or Univer-sal Weekly Expositor (1790) the stock figure of the hero Hermocrates, as a bachelor, exhib-its ‘the austerity of the philosopher; a man [...] wrapt up in the austerity of his manners’.Transformed by love for a woman into a gallant, humming with joy, he becomes not onlya better lover but also a better citizen, having formerly gone too far in his state of austereintrospection, leaving him ‘little in a state to judge upon certain subjects’.13 Hermocrateslearns the errors of his former life as ‘A recluse who studies and who meditates, examineshis mind, and not his heart’. The proper social role of the fair sex was to draw men intocompany and thereby render them civil. Women were thought to be particularly disposedto sociability and to need the company of others in order to thrive: enforced seclusion fora girl was deemed to be ‘unjust austerity’.14 Social approval was given to members of thefair sex who maintained a cheerful and sociable demeanour even in the face of adversity.Speaking favourably of a widow who was a confidante to many friends, The Female Spec-tator observed that, even though she was in a pitiful plight, having lost her husband, ‘sheis far from having the least austerity in her behaviour’.15 A woman could appear ridiculousin company or indeed hypocritical if she criticised others for enjoying innocent pleasures.The Female Spectator ridiculed the figure of a woman who attended a masquerade only tobehave as though she were the ‘greatest prude in the nation’; professing to be scandalisedwhen a male companion mistook her for a woman who would enjoy innuendo, banter and‘importunities’, the periodical highlighted the idea that such women should never attendmasquerades, since that was their point. The alleged prude’s discomfort was a ‘just pun-ishment for [...] appearing in a place so little comfortable to the austerity she professed inother things’.16

These reflections on austerity are perhaps unsurprising, given what we already knowabout the importance of hetero-sociability in eighteenth-century society. But the cultural



dominance of the imperative to participate in the establishment of social networks, bondsof mutuality and obligation fostered by conversation, social intercourse and creditexchange is thrown into particular relief if those marginal figures are considered who forvarious reasons chose not to take part.17 They were the killjoys, the misanthropes and thevoluntary exiles from the improving tale of eighteenth-century leisure and pleasure. Wefind them at the upper end of the social scale, in the persons of eccentric nobles whorefused to participate in the usual merry-go-round of polite sociability simply because theyhad neither motivation nor personal inclination to take part. That these figures wereusually male is not surprising, given their economic and social privilege, and the wide-spread social expectation that this was how men behaved without the ‘corrective’ offemale company. Alexander Pope’s memorable and damning verdict on Lord Townshendin Epistle II of his Odes to Horace was that he was obsessed with turnips, and his conver-sation as monotonous as his monoculture.18 Another example was James Hamilton, theeighth earl of Abercorn, whose obituary recalled in detail his utter refusal to be nice. If anyman took pleasure in austerity, it was this relict of a Scottish noble family, a ‘singularcharacter’ who succeeded to his title in 1744 and who had been remarkable in his early life‘for the stiffness and austerity of his manners’, which, it was hinted, were owing to hisScottish heritage and the influence of his clergyman brother. He had an unnaturallyupright gait, and was said ‘to have made the tour of Europe in so perpendicular a stile asnever to have touched the back of his carriage’. He never booed at court, so did not havethe pleasure of ridiculing others like everyone else. In one anecdote the celebrated histo-rian Dr Robertson visited the earl at home and found him walking in his garden. Robertsonreceived short shrift for his unannounced visit, and in attempting to elicit a conversationfrom the taciturn aristocrat he commented on the shrubbery and how much the trees hadgrown since his previous visit. ‘They have nothing else to do’, replied his Lordship, whodeparted company from his guest without another word. An efficient manager of hisfinances, Hamilton died unmarried and childless in 1789, leaving a fortune of £200,000,but the moral implication was clear: he was so unpopular, having eschewed all form ofsocial intercourse, that only a saintly parson could suffer his company in his later years.By refusing to be a social being, the earl’s example was a caution to temper prudence withkindness.

Austerity in the eighteenth century was therefore productive of pleasure for certain elitemen – the voluntary adoption of a lifestyle that was judged excessively frugal by prevailingstandards that were appropriate to middling or upper social rank. In the material realmthe person was judged austere who eschewed not only genteel luxury but also reasonablecomforts. In the realm of conversation, austerity was also regarded with negative criticism– a refusal of the expectations of polite social intercourse that resulted from an innerconviction (whether deriving from personal inclination, moral philosophy or religiousbelief, or all of these in combination) that the niceties of polite convention were not to beobserved. In women, simplicity of life and a frugal attention to living within one’s meanswere socially praised, and attendance to harsh economic realities had to be temperedoutwardly with a sweet countenance and cheerfulness that masked any material hard-ships. In the early autumn of 1813 Frank Austen wrote to his sister Jane about the arrayof foods on display in Rostock market. In an era of international crisis and interruptedtrade, the novelist betrayed her preoccupations in her reply to him: ‘Our cheapest Butch-er’s meat is double the price of theirs – nothing under 9d. all this summer, and I believeupon Recollection nothing under 10d. Bread has sunk and is likely to sink again, which wehope will make Meat sink too.’19 Then this cautious spinster caught herself and remarked:‘But I have no occasion to think of the price of Bread or Meat where I am now; let me shake

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off vulgar cares and conform to the happy Indifference of East Kent wealth.’20 The pleasureof small economies, the satisfaction of living within one’s means, was an unglamoroussource of self-esteem to women of large and modest households, married and unmarried.Good household management was as important to women as creditworthiness was tomen, as recent studies of female account-keeping across the country, from CountyDurham to Cornwall, have demonstrated. ‘Going without’, as the work of AmandaVickery, Nicola Phillips, Mark Overton and others has shown, was better than an unbal-anced account book – even better if neighbours were oblivious to the deft culture of ‘makedo and mend’ that was a mark of the truly resourceful wife.21 A peculiar juxtaposition ofluxury and frugality is also in evidence in the receipt books aimed at middling householdswith genteel aspirations. One such example was the popularisation of apple charlotte, apudding named after the wife of George III. Whether the naming of this dish was due tothe queen’s patronage of English apple-growers or was satirically applied in honour of theroyal household’s reputation for frugality, owing to the fact that the recipe uses up stalecrusts of bread, is a matter of some dispute among food historians.22 Another, slightlyearlier example is to be found reading between the lines of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery(1747), whose more extravagant recipes anticipate the sharp intakes of breath amongcareful housekeepers. In her ‘Cullis for all sorts of Ragoo’ (a kind of paste for adding to richstews) the author’s inclusion of choice ingredients such as ham, truffles, veal and baconinvited the following aside to the reader from the author: ‘Now compute [...] and see if thisDish cannot be dressed full as well without this Expence.’23 Luxury may have been afford-able to some, but it had to be accompanied by justification within the moral compass ofmiddling-sort morality, a difficult balance that threatened to steal pleasure and evoke guilteven in anticipation of sensory indulgence.

Age and social rank, as well as gender, played some part in the negative associationsof unwarranted austerity in the printed commentaries of the day. ‘There is nothingmore unjust than the ill temper which many old people shew towards young men’,opined the Ladies Magazine, reflecting on ‘the Austerity of Old Age’ in 1803. Merrimentand spontaneity were said to decline with advancing years, but to rail against suchqualities was judged to be as ridiculous as being angry with the spring.24 There are alsotraces of class criticism in the public reporting of MPs’ austere views of the generalpublic at the end of the period. The Derby Mercury criticised one Member of Parliamentwho, in a ‘tone of austerity’ attacked the ‘lower orders of people’ for breaking theSabbath, and having the wickedness even ‘to drive [a cart] on that day’. The reader wasinvited to reflect whether it would be worse to drive ‘in coaches, horse wagons, carts orgrave-neck’d phaetons’ on a Sunday.25 The 1790s were hard economic times of greatpolitical uncertainty, but this appeal to the idea that society was ‘in it together’ on reli-gious grounds met with a cold response from the popular press, symptomatic of a hard-ening of attitudes towards the ruling elite and their damning verdict on the morals ofthe common people.

II. The Pleasures of Refusal: Religion

Another consideration that challenges the received idea of unfettered Georgian pleasuresis that of ‘voluntary austerity’ – not a contemporary term as far as I am aware, but onethat might usefully distinguish those who chose to reject the emergent culture of con-sumption on religious or moral grounds rather than the enforced austerity of involuntarypoverty. As the remarkable scholarship of the current BSECS President, Jeremy Gregory,



has been reminding us for many years, the tenets of religious observance framed the livesof Georgian people in an ongoing process of reformation that modified, rather than callingan abrupt end to, the influence of the established church. As he reminded the BSECSconference in 2008, ‘the two apparently opposing tendencies of the [Georgian] age(“reason” and “faith”) are in fact intertwined’.26 I agree with both Professor Gregory andthe recent work of Faramerz Dabhoiwala on the first sexual revolution, inasmuch as itseems to me that one of the most crucial shifts in the long eighteenth century – one thathad social, cultural, political and economic ramifications – was the shift to religiouspluralism.27 In the past decade and a half of historical scholarship the revived interest inthe influence of religion on society and in the socio-cultural, and political, ramifications ofreligious pluralism still has a long way to go in revising an oft-repeated account of secu-larism’s inexorable rise during the course of the Georgian era.28

Thus, for those of moderate prosperity and above on the social scale, the choice not tobe a consumer, or to engage with polite society, were options generated by the politeconsumer revolution of the eighteenth century. The suspicious pleasures of self-denial,which had overtones of ‘Capucin’ Catholic renunciation and ‘hot’ religious zeal, raisedthe twin spectres of papist infiltration from abroad and schism and fanaticism at home inthe minds of many moderate Anglicans. The total abnegation of material comfort and‘innocent pleasures’ was regarded in the dominant culture as the unpopular response ofa minority of stoics, misanthropes and religious enthusiasts to the ‘new world of goods’and luxuries on offer to the middling and upper sorts who were able to afford them. Atemperate view of the Almighty was in vogue among Anglicans by the early eighteenthcentury, following the moderate theology of Tillotson, the late Stuart archbishop of Can-terbury, whose works were enduringly influential. His much-reprinted sermon ‘Of theBlessedness of Giving More Than That of Receiving’ (first published in 1682), forexample, argued that ‘to be able to benefit others, is a condition of freedom and superi-ority, and is so far from impairing our liberty, that it shews our power’.29 A providentialview that wealth could be used to do good works and enjoyed moderately eased theconsciences of comfortable Anglicans. By contrast, certain nonconformist groups keptalive the early Reformation tradition of a more vengeful Old Testament God, who railedagainst ‘Idlenesse’ and punished those who squandered creation’s resources. Theyquoted the Gospel of Luke and the fate of the man who buried his master’s talents in theground, with the resulting censure from the master: ‘Thou shouldst [...] haue answeredmy austerities, with thy laborious care of my aduantage.’30 Biblical precedents weresought for eschewing worldly comfort, during the rising moral concern by religiouscommentators amid the commercial change and rise of the city of London during the1690s. In a translation of the French scholar Jacques Abbadie’s Vindication of the Truth ofChristian Religion against All Modern Opposers (1694) John the Baptist was lionisedfor having been guiltless of any ‘mean designs’ owing to his ‘Austerity of Manners andhis unusual way of living, set down in the Gospel with such a strange and particulardescription’.31

Since sackcloth and a diet of locusts were unlikely to appeal to all but the most zealous,other, more pragmatic voices were raised in advocating moderate frugality amid the rise ofa market-driven commercialisation during the course of the eighteenth century. Towardsthe end of the century the London Daily Advertiser reprinted the sermon of a clergymanfrom Kingston, Jamaica, that recommended moderation in religious devotion, eschewing‘enthusiastic piety’ and ‘useless austerity, and abstinence from things lawful and safe’.Better indulge in harmless pleasures, the argument went, than to harbour ‘censoriousnessand bitterness against those who differ from you’. The counterpoint to religious austerity

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was to be ‘useful and upright in your several stations, to be honest and industrious, soberand good tempered, mild and peaceable, benevolent and charitable’.32 For every urbanitewho embraced the new world of goods without compunction there were others whoderived pleasure from contemplating providential sufficiency in hard times, particularlybut not exclusively those of a religious conviction, whose reliance on providential ‘signs’provided daily moral guidance. The Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner recorded in hisdiary how he wrestled every week with his conscience, particularly over marital disputes,his trade, Sabbath-breaking and his propensity to drink too much. He resolved in February1754 that ‘If I am at home or in company abroad, I will never drink more than four glassesof strong beer’, strictly for toasting the king and the royal family, and to cement ties ofgood neighbourliness, allowing himself ‘If there is wine or punch, never to drink morethan eight glasses, each glass to hold no more than half a pint’.33 Turner was a devotee ofthe sermons of Dr Tillotson (he treated a neighbour to five of his sermons, which he readaloud one Sunday afternoon). The shopkeeper noted his ‘small pleasure’ at being in acrowd of people at an assembly, in spite of there being nobility present, and commentedruefully in his private journal, ‘Oh! How silly is mankind, to delight in so much vanity andtransitory joys.’34

In similar vein the nonconformist Daniel Defoe addressed a broad audience of middling-sort tradesmen in his Complete English Tradesman (1726) with the advice that they shouldbe frugal in habit if they wanted to increase their trade, eschewing the ‘gallantry andgaiety’ of the age and the numerous pleasures – whether the bottle, or women, or anexcessive love of hunting or sports – that threatened the probity and prosperity of theshopkeeper:

I cannot allow any pleasures to be innocent, when they turn away either the body or the mindof a tradesman from the one needful thing which his calling makes necessary, and thatnecessity makes his duty – I mean, the application both of his hands and head to hisbusiness.35

Appropriating the advice of King Solomon, the ‘royal patron of industry’, that ‘He that isa lover of pleasure, shall be a poor man’, Defoe rendered this biblical advice as: ‘Thetradesman that is a lover of pleasure, shall be a poor man.’36

These expressions were more than rhetorical formulae: they were indicative of aworldview that is perhaps incomprehensible to the modern secular reader, but which wasdefended as both logical and rational in the context of a society that provided all toofrequent examples of the fragility of life, the transience of wealth and the unreliability ofmaterial preoccupations as the basis for happiness. As the century progressed, someDissenters assimilated to accommodate their Anglican neighbours’ indulgences, whileothers became more radically separated from mainstream consumer culture. One Dissent-ing minister in Sheffield, the Revd John Pye, an Independent, distinguished himself in hislocality for his ‘zeal and moderation for true Calvinism’ but earned especial praise as ‘arational Dissenter [...] remarkable for his piety, without Monkish austerity’, by whichreaders of his obituary in the Leeds Intelligencer were no doubt invited to compare hisexample with those of his religious conviction who exhibited no such rationality or mod-eration.37 Certainly the gap between the zeal of religiously motivated prosecuting magis-trates and the more Latitudinarian views of many moderate Anglicans had precedentthroughout the eighteenth century: ‘Men of a peevish Austerity’ were criticised in theirattempt to ‘judge every body, and set up for Censors of the most holy things, though theyhave no sense of them’.38



III. The Pleasures of Refusal: Health

One early modern rationale for an austere disposition, especially in men, was a physiologi-cal trait fixed either by their astrological fate or by their physiological humour. An ‘Austereand Saturnine man’s demeanour’, with ‘hang’d down head, with eyes fixed to theground’, was caused by the melancholy sadness induced by the influence of Saturn at thetime of his birth, or by an excess of the choleric humour.39 The revolution in medicalunderstanding of human physiology that followed the discovery of the circulation of theblood, and the influential ideas of Thomas Willis in redirecting medical attention towardsthe function of the nervous system rather than the humours, gave rise to new controver-sies surrounding the cause of extreme behaviour – both a predisposition to excessiveindulgence and sensory gratification or (at the other extreme) complete withdrawal fromsociety. As Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki have recently argued, Willis provoked asubsequent controversy during the eighteenth century about the respective roles of nervesand fluids in maintaining well-being, with one school of thought maintaining the primacyof nerves as the drivers of emotional and bodily health.40

It is here that we turn to one of the most famous proponents of abstemiousness in theGeorgian era: George Cheyne (Fig. 2). Born in Scotland in 1671 or 1672, Cheyne qualifiedas a doctor in Aberdeen and studied both medicine and mathematics in Edinburgh, wherehe later became a Fellow of the College of Physicians.41 He became an acolyte of Newton

2. George Cheyne. Mezzotint by J. Faber jnr, 1732. By permission, Wellcome Library,London

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and moved to London, where he taught mathematics and became involved in RoyalSociety circles, publishing his Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion in 1705. Cheynehoped to make his reputation by proving the existence of God using Newtonian principles,but his work was not well received. He turned to the pleasures of the coffee house andtavern, and soon found himself becoming excessively fat and melancholic, mired in pro-fessional failure. In the ‘Case of the Author’, an autobiographical addendum to what isprobably his most famous work, The English Malady (1733), Cheyne described the tormentshe experienced with his physical and mental health, starting with his constitutionalinheritance from his parents (inclined to corpulence on one side of his family), his seden-tary youth and the laxness of his bowels. He divulged to his readers how ‘my Sufferingswere not to be expressed and I can scarce describe, or reflect on them without Horror’. Butreflect on them he did, in excruciating detail, over the course of an eighty-five-pageappendix, in which he documented how by trial and error, dosings and vomitings, purgesand prescriptions, he worked out how to transform himself from a depressive, who byover-eating and drinking ‘grew daily in Bulk’, becoming ill, ‘fat, short breath’d, lethargic andlistless’, into a slender and healthy individual, partly through rural retirement and medi-tation.42 He subsequently moved to Bath and set up a medical practice as well as taking thecure himself, but relapsed into excessive eating and drinking once again, and ballooned to30 stones (448 lb) in weight.43 Desperate for a solution to his problems, he tried a diet ofmilk, learned from a Dr Taylor of Croydon, which he had heard could cure many disorders,including epilepsy. This, together with supplementary seeds and vegetables, he found to behighly agreeable to his constitution, transforming him into someone ‘Lank, Fleet andNimble’, both ‘reduced in [...] flesh’ and cheerful in outlook.

The premise of The English Malady, his 400-page account of the melancholy disease,and class of ailments known in the eighteenth century as hypochondria, hysteria or ‘thevapours’, to which the English upper classes were thought to be particularly susceptible,was therefore that he had learned how to treat diseases associated with luxury, leisure andover-consumption from first-hand experience.44 Prefigured by his Essay on Gout (1720)and Essay on Health (1724), which went through seven editions and made him one of thebest-known physicians in Britain, Cheyne’s popular medical works constituted distinctiveand accessible self-help manuals that touched on the same popular themes as SamuelJohnson’s Rasselas (1759). There is evidence that Johnson read Cheyne’s works, since hequoted both The English Malady and Cheyne’s essay on gout in conversation, as docu-mented by Boswell in his account of their Tour to the Hebrides.45 There are, however,considerable differences in genre between their writing, and the ideas expressed therein.Where Johnson chose to use allegorical fiction in Rasselas, Cheyne’s work is not easilycategorised by genre: it is somewhere between a didactic religious work, a receipt book anda popular medical text. Both Johnson and Cheyne addressed the crucial questions facingeighteenth-century society: the relationship between religious faith and reason, and themoral challenge facing society in the light of growing affluence, luxury and materialism.Johnson’s Rasselas uses a period of isolation and questioning to free himself from theconfines of a prison of affluence, the fictional kingdom of Amhara.46 Similarly, GeorgeCheyne’s personal narrative describes how he retreated from city life to the countrysideand meditated on ‘Principles of all Virtue and Morality’, leading him to develop his ownsystem of natural philosophy, with the help of a pious Anglican clergyman and the worksof Isaac Newton. He concluded that his higher self (‘my Spiritual nature’) had beenimpaired ‘through Carelessness and Self-sufficiency, Voluptuousness and love of Sensuality’.47

The ‘Bottle companions’ and ‘Free-livers’ who had encouraged him and been the compan-ions of his tavern-going days deserted him during his physical and mental breakdown.



Cheyne therefore used his reason to reject ‘Unnatural religion’ and underwent his ownreformation, reverting to the ‘plain Truths and Precepts contained in the Gospels’.48

The author’s straightforward aim in The English Malady was ‘to recommend to myFellow Creatures that plain Diet which is most agreeable to the Purity and simplicity ofuncorrupted Nature and unconquer’d Reason’.49 Of especial need of this advice were the‘better sorts’ – whose delicate constitutions were more susceptible to unseasonableEnglish weather, whose health was at greater jeopardy from their inactivity, their seden-tary lives, rich diet and living in unhealthy towns, particularly London.50 But aristocraticpatronage was not sufficient to explain the popularity of Cheyne’s works. The late RoyPorter, and Anita Guerrini, used Cheyne as the exemplar of the Enlightenment road tomodernity – his fight with obesity and depression a prefiguring of the modern trials thatecho through to the twenty-first century in the West, where individuals, set adrift in asecular world of endless choice, confront the emptiness of their existence in response toexcessive consumer pleasure and freedom from want.51 The cause of the English malady,reasoned Cheyne, was that ‘since our Wealth has increas’d, and our Navigation has beenextended, we have ransack’d all the Parts of the Globe to bring together its whole Stock ofMaterials for Riot, Luxury and to provoke Excess’. As a result, the tables ‘of the rich andgreat (and indeed of all Ranks who can afford it) are furnished with Provisions ofDelicacy, Number and Plenty, sufficient to provoke, and even gorge, the most large andvoluptuous Appetite’.52 In an admirable exposure of animal cruelty Cheyne also lam-basted the ‘torturing and lingering way of taking away the lives’ of animals force-fed,tormented and dressed in such a way as to ‘corrupt and putrify their natural Juices andSubstances’.53 There was, of course, more than a hint of xenophobia in his condemna-tion of dressing sauces with foreign spices, preparing a ‘sickly appetite to receive theunnatural Load’ and generating appetites so jaded as to be unable to ‘recognise suffi-ciency’, since they were piqued with French, Italian, Spanish and Turkish cuisine gar-nished with ‘Eastern Pickles’ to embellish ‘our continual Feasts’.54 Cheyne railed againstthe lack of fresh air and exercise that attended contemporary urban life, with assemblies,music, meetings, plays, cards, dice, riding in coaches and generally lounging idly replac-ing proper exercise, such as horse-riding, games and sports, hunting, shooting, bowls,billiards and ‘shuttle-cock’.55

Cheyne ended up as one of the wealthiest and most fashionable physicians in Bath, hislegacy a fortune of £10,000. He treated, among others, Sir Robert Walpole and his daugh-ter Catherine, Bishop Gilbert Burnet (to whom he was related) and Sir Hans Sloane.56 Hewas not the only advocate of vegetarianism from the late Stuart period through to thenineteenth century, but he was certainly its most influential proponent: his ideas andreputation were known well beyond the social elite and the Anglican establishment.57 Partof the enduring influence of Cheyne’s work, which can be traced in Wesley’s PrimitivePhysick (1747), a tract that brought his ideas to a much more socially and geographicallydiverse readership, was its conflation of moral and spiritual health with bodily integrityand freedom from both corpulence and disease. Via Wesley and other prominent Method-ists, abstemiousness and the rejection of dominant attitudes regarding the desirability ofmaterialism and consumer culture came to be seen as a virtue, particularly among non-conformist circles. Cheyne himself attended upon Selina, Lady Huntington, whose con-finements, argues his biographer Anita Guerrini, may have influenced his last work, TheNatural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body (1742). I wonder, though, aboutCheyne’s considerable middling-sort readership and their reception of his moral andpractical advice. For part of the pleasure of reading about his own personal journey fromglutton to good man and back again was a fairly traditional narrative about salvation, the

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philosophical virtue of restraint and the didactic value of primitive Christianity, particu-larly in the mystical forms exemplified by authors such as Jakob Boehme, who influencedCheyne’s personal faith. ‘I behold, with Pity, Compassion and Sorrow, such Scenes ofMisery and Woe, and see them happen only to the Rich, the Lazy, the Luxurious, and theUnactive’, reflected the good doctor:

those who fare daintily and live voluptuously, those who are furnished with the rarest Deli-cacies, the richest Foods, and the most generous Wines, such as can provoke the Appetites,Senses and Passions in the most exquisite and voluptuous Manner, to those who leave noDesire or Degree of Appetite unsatisfied.58

He observed that these misfortunes did not happen ‘to the Poor, the Low, the meaner Sort,those destitute of the Necessaries, Conveniences, and Pleasures of Life, to the Frugal,Industrious, the Temperate, the Laborious, and the Active’.59 This unfavourable compari-son between the weaknesses of the rich and idle and the virtues of frugal industriousnesswould surely have gone down well with bourgeois readers inclined to piety. Like Defoe,Cheyne concluded that there were no intrinsic evils attending innocent pleasures such ascoffee-, tea- or chocolate-drinking, snuff-taking or other ‘innocent foods or amuse-ments’.60 The problem was if moderation failed and any one innocent diversion waspursued to excess. Cheyne concluded that men and women were inclined to blame variousexternal causes for illness, such as damp bedding and other trivial circumstances, whilethey were ‘unwilling to own the true Cause, to wit their continu’d Luxury and Laziness,because they would gladly continue this Course and yet be well, if possible’. Respectablecitizens of parishes throughout England were accustomed to making the distinctionbetween the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, the former meriting poor relief, the lattercondemnation, the difference being a matter of work ethic and self-sufficiency.61 Likewise,at the other extreme of the social spectrum, Cheyne criticised those wealthy consumerswho were lazy and could not exercise restraint but blamed external forces for their illhealth and moral ruin. Cheyne’s vivid – indeed sometimes lurid – prose was designed toelicit prurient curiosity and moral repugnance about what could happen as a result ofexcessive consumption on the wilder shores of pleasure. His litany of diseases and corrup-tion resulting from lack of self-restraint reads like a sinister shopping list of all that couldgo wrong with the human body: ‘Gout, Stone, Cholick, Cancer, Rheumantism and con-vulsions [...] sediments in the Urine, black, putrid and foetid Dejections, attended with lividpurple spots, corrosive ulcers’. And then, in a gross subversion of the Addisonian advice toacquire true taste through diverse sensory experience, the doctor adds, he is moved to pityhis ‘Lazy’ and ‘Unactive’ patients ‘When I see the sharp (even to the Taste, as I have oftentried) the corroding and burning [...] of scorbutick and scrofulous Sores, fretting, gallingand blistering the adjacent Parts’.62 Although tasting bodily secretions was not an uncom-mon diagnostic tool for eighteenth-century doctors, it was a particularly graphic detailthat anticipated disgust, with himself and with the society that threatened to eat and drinkitself into oblivion.63 Cheyne’s message was clear, as much for his own salvation as forothers: the casualties of immoderate sensory pleasure were the authors of their own ruin,and a dose of middle-class austerity – the discipline of self-government, a simple diet, aclean and moral life – was what was needed for a cure. The pleasure gained in readingabout the self-imposed suffering of others was perhaps another piquant addition to theoptions available to those who could pride themselves on not having ‘let themselves go’ insuch a way, a peculiarly modern form of hubris recognisable today – particularly, I wouldsuggest, amid the usual post-Christmas barrage of diets, de-toxing and punitive exercise.



IV. Conclusion

Understanding the cultural currency of austerity amid the growing consumer culture ofthe Georgian period may provide inroads into understanding some of the more curiousactivities to have generated pleasure at this time. One, admittedly highly fetishised, form ofthe pleasurable contemplation of denial was populating purpose-built grottos amid thelandscape gardens of the rich with paid hermits – styled in the manner of John the Baptistto look wild and half-starved.64 Others, such as the Ladies of Llangollen, entered self-imposed bucolic exile and promptly became fashionable tourist attractions for their sup-posed simplicity of life.65 Following Cheyne and Johnson’s fictional Rasselas, manyprosperous but ailing urbanites acknowledged in theory the benefits of withdrawal fromthe carnal temptations of London and other urban centres of luxury and dissipation, butfew could stomach the trials of actual voluntary poverty for long, if at all. The fantasy ofa shepherdess’s cottage was best enjoyed both vicariously and temporarily. These fewexamples illustrate how research into the pursuit of austerity in other cultural forms, suchas architecture, music, the visual arts, even cuisine, could produce fruitful new lines ofscholarly enquiry in the future.66 The typicality of evidence presented here requiresfurther testing and more extensive research, but a more balanced picture of GeorgianEngland would emerge from exploring the lives of those who for various reasons withdrewfrom the emerging culture of consumption and pleasure and questioned the drive towardscreating a more materialistic society.

Much also remains to be discovered about George Cheyne’s influence not just within thehistory of medicine but also within the wider socio-cultural world of eighteenth-centuryideas. Just one example of the parallel between The English Malady and Rasselas can befound in the latter work in a chapter of the novel concerning the time after the prince andprincess of Amhara have escaped and are journeying to Cairo:

In the morning they found some shepherds in the field, who set milk and fruits before them.The princess wondered that she did not see a palace ready for her reception, and a table spreadwith delicacies; but, being faint and hungry, she drank the milk and eat the fruits, andthought them of a higher flavour than the products of the valley.67

The recovery of appetite, directed in the correct and moderate way that nature intended,was a widely accepted aspiration for jaded eighteenth-century consumers weary of thepleasures of the senses, as authors from Cheyne to Johnson concluded to similar ends, ifvia rather different ideological and pedagogical means. The connection between physicalhealth, diet and spiritual well-being was made in the holistic approach of George Cheyne’smedical treatises but received wider cultural currency in the popular view that took holdby the end of the eighteenth century that moral corruption among the upper sorts, theirluxuries and dissipations, were inscribed on their bodies, made visible through corpulence,disease and putrefaction.

So let us take another, closer look at Gillray’s cartoon of George III and his boiled egg(Fig. 1). Above the king’s head hangs an empty picture frame, inscribed ‘The Triumph ofBenevolence’. Below it hangs an oval miniature of the king in profile to the right, inscribed‘The Man of Ross’, a reference to John Kyrle (1637-1724), who was noted for his frugalityand charity. Above this is another empty frame, inscribed ‘Epicurus’. In the foregroundto the right of the image, on and behind the king’s padlocked chest (perhaps containingthe monarch’s cache of money), are three books: a popular work by Topham called TheLife of Old Elwes, a miser; an Essay on the Dearness of Provisions; and lastly Dr Cheyne, ‘On

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the benefits of a Spare Diet’ [sic]. George III’s frugal egg was a statement of austerity, butalso the desideratum of those in the nation who wanted to identify with the morals ofmiddle-class respectability. Fat could mean prosperous, but it could also signify the poten-tial ruin that attended all empires that fell into luxury. Austere habits and the denial ofthose pleasures marked an identification with piety that found expression in the refusal ofconsumption – even something as small and potentially monumental as the choice of asimple egg could become the outward marker of respectable bourgeois values. It may bethat, in focusing on the pleasures of conspicuous consumption in Georgian England, wehave neglected to study the pleasures of conspicuous abstention.

NOTESThe author wishes to acknowledge in gratitude the advice of Professor Clark Lawlor (Northumbria University)in recommending the works of George Cheyne, and the helpful observations of BSECS conference delegates inresponse to this paper.

1. ‘Georgians Revealed’ exhibition (8 November 2013-11 March 2014), British Library, London; ‘GeorgianPleasures’ conference (12-13 September 2013), Bath Spa University.

2. In Robert L. S. Cowley, Marriage à la Mode: A Review of Hogarth’s Narrative Art (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1983), p.154.

3. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press,1992; 3rd edn, 2005), Ch. 5, ‘Majesty’, esp. p.195-216, 232-3.

4. Colley, Britons, p.233.5. Trade card for Moore (2 September 1805), ref. Women’s Clothes and Millinery, 5 (9), John Johnson

Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford; www.johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk [accessed 7 January 2013].6. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (eds), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan,

1996), p.x.7. Neil Mc Kendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of

Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982).8. E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).9. For an authoritative overview, see Joel Mokyr, ‘Accounting for the Industrial Revolution’, in Roderick

Floud and Paul Johnson (eds), Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. I, Industrialisation, 1700-1860(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.1-27.

10. See Tim Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Hambledon and London, 2004),passim.

11. Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), explores themodern meaning of the term in modern economic theory.

12. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd edn (London, 1755), vol. I [n.p.].13. The By-Stander, or Universal Weekly Expositor (1790), p.58.14. The Female Spectator, vol. I, issue 1 (1744-6), p.24.15. The Female Spectator, vol. I, issue 1, p.10.16. The Female Spectator, vol. I, issue 1, p.32.17. Keith Wrightson, ‘Mutualities and Obligations: Changing Social Relationships in Early Modern England’,

Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. CXXXIX (2006), p.157-94; Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: TheCulture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).

18. Alexander Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., vol. II, part II, Containing Imitations of Horace and Dr.Donne (1740), p.93, ‘The other slights, of women, sports and wines,/ Of Townshend’s turnips, and allGrovenor’s [sic] mines’.

19. Jane Austen, letter to her brother Frank (25 September 1813), British Library, Add. MS 42180, fol.11r.20. Austen, letter to her brother Frank, fol.11r.21. Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale

University Press, 2009); Nicola Phillips, Women in Business, 1700-1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer,2006); Mark Overton et al., Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600-1750 (London and NewYork: Taylor & Francis, 2005).

22. John Ayoto favours the former interpretation: see his A to Z of Food and Drink (Oxford University Press:Oxford, 2003), p.66.

23. Hannah Glasse, Art of Cookery (1747), p.53.24. The Ladies Magazine, or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, XXXIV (1803), p.402.25. Derby Mercury, no. 3287 (16 April 1795).26. Jeremy Gregory, ‘Introduction: Transforming “the Age of Reason” into “an Age of Faiths”: or, Putting

Religions and Beliefs (Back) into the Eighteenth Century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:3 (2009),p.287-305.



27. Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2012).

28. An argument set out most fully and influentially in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).

29. John Tillotson, Sermons on Several Subjects (11 vols), vol. I (1702), p.261.30. Thomas Adams, A Divine Herball, Together with a Forrest of Thornes (1616), p.40.31. Jacques Abbadie, A Vindication of the Truth of Christian Religion against the Objections of All Modern

Opposers, trans. ‘H. L’ (1694), p.302.32. Daily Advertiser, no. 243 (7 October 1790).33. Thomas Turner, diary entry for 8 February 1754, quoted in R. W. Blencowe, ‘Diary of a Sussex Trades-

man’, Sussex Archaeological Society, vol. XI (1859), p.185.34. Thomas Turner, diary entries for 7 and 28 August 1754, p.192.35. Daniel Defoe, Complete English Tradesman (1726), ch. IX, ‘Of Other Reasons for the Tradesman’s Disasters:

And First, of Innocent Diversions’.36. Defoe, Complete English Tradesman, ch. IX.37. Leeds Intelligencer, no. 1016 (18 May 1773).38. Anon., Memoirs of Literature, vol. VIII (1710-22), art. 26, ‘Of Literature’, p.215.39. Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, trans. ‘J. F.’, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1651).40. Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, ‘Introduction II. Sciences of Body and Mind’, in Clark Lawlor (ed.),

Sciences of Body and Mind, p.ix-xxiv, vol. II of Judith Hawley (ed.), Literature and Science, 1660-1834, 8 vols(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003).

41. See Anita Guerrini, ‘Cheyne, George (1671/2-1743)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5258) [accessed13 Jan 2014].

42. George Cheyne, The English Malady: or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds as Spleen, Vapours,Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical (1733), p.346.

43. Cheyne, The English Malady, p.336-7.44. See George C. Grinnell, The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).45. James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. By James Boswell, Esq ... in

the Year 1746 (London, 1785), p.173, 251.46. Samuel Johnson, A History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), ch. 4 and passim.47. Cheyne, English Malady, p.331.48. Cheyne, English Malady, p.331.49. Cheyne, English Malady, Preface, p.1-2.50. Cheyne, English Malady, Preface, p.1-2.51. Roy Porter (ed.), ‘The English Malady (London: Routledge, 1991), Introduction’; Anita Guerrini, Obesity

and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman, OK: University of OaklahomaPress, 2000), passim.

52. Cheyne, English Malady, p.49.53. Cheyne, English Malady, p.50-51.54. Cheyne, English Malady, p.50-51.55. Cheyne, English Malady, p.180.56. Guerrini, ‘Cheyne, George’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.57. Thomas Tryon, for example, the late seventeenth-century author, also wrote extensively about vegetari-

anism, although his works were less well known than Cheyne’s. My thanks to Professor Brycchan Carey for thisparallel.

58. Cheyne, English Malady, p.27.59. Cheyne, English Malady, p.27.60. Cheyne, English Malady, p.27.61. Alexandra Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description in Early Modern England’,

Past and Present, 201 (2008), p.51-91.62. Cheyne, English Malady, p.27. For Addison and Steele on taste, see The Spectator, nos 409 and 411 (19 and

21 June 1712).63. The use of the physician’s senses in medical diagnosis was a recurrent theme in the voluminous research

published by Roy Porter, of which his Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (London:Reaktion, 2001) serves as just one illustrative example.

64. One such example is the Hermit of Warkworth, celebrated (following the craze for Ossian) in a fictionalNorthumbrian ballad in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (repr. Edinburgh: Ballantyneand Co., 1858) vol. III.297-333. The ballad was re-enacted near Warkworth Castle in Northumberland by anobliging eighteenth-century recluse, who waved to paying visitors from his grotto. Another example of thevogue for hermits is the poet and biographer William Hayley (1745-1820), who became a recluse after the tragicdeath of his son, and styled himself ‘The Hermit’ from the (relatively comfortable) turret of his country houseat Felpham. Vivienne W. Painting, ‘Hayley, William (1745-1820)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12769 [accessed 13 Jan 2014].

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65. Although as the work of Freya Gowrley (University of Edinburgh) has recently shown, the ladies’‘cottage’ was palatial by ordinary standards and they lived in considerable style, surrounded by art and deco-rative interiors of their own design. See Freya Gowrley, ‘Damned Sapphists’? Que(e)rying the Gothic at PlasNewydd, Llangollen’, unpublished paper, ‘Politeness and Prurience’ conference, University of Edinburgh, 2-3

September 2013.66. I am obliged to the conference delegates at BSECS for their stimulating observations on these themes,

which were unfortunately beyond the scope of the current paper but which others may choose to pursuethrough further research.

67. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, ch. 15.

helen berry is Professor of British History at Newcastle University. A prize-winning Fellow of the RoyalHistorical Society, she has published widely on the social and cultural history of Britain in the eighteenthcentury, including The Family in Early Modern England (2007, co-edited with Elizabeth Foyster) and her mostrecent book, The Castrato and His Wife (2012). Her next book, Orphans of Empire (forthcoming) is a study ofdomestic welfare and philanthropy during a crucial period of British imperial expansion, explored through thehistory of the children who survived into adulthood after being raised in the Foundling Hospital, London, andits associated institutions.



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The Pleasures of Austerity