Roy Porter

Not the least of the debts we owe to the late Michel Foucault is that he directed our attention to the revolutions which transformed the life sciences around the dawn of the 19th century. On the one hand, traditional discourse about animals and plants, centred on such criteria as visible character and structure and geared to classification within the Great Chain of Being, was replaced by a science of form and organisation, concentrating on function and the internal subordination of parts, and directed to the problem of life itself. Or, as he put it in Les Mots et les Choses, natural history yielded to biology. The key figure here was that ‘Napoléon de l’intelligence’, Georges Cuvier. On the other hand, Foucault traced in La Naissance de la Clinique the demise of traditional theories of health and disease. These had been centred on holistic notions of the sick person’s constitution, and had been dependent upon the patient’s own expression of his symptoms. Foucault showed how these practices were replaced by a new interventionist medicine, whose entry point was the lesion, whose prize techniques were morbid anatomy and pathological physiology, and whose site was the clinic. In that reorientation, pride of place went to the Paris Hospital and the French school of medical science.

What would Montaigne have made of being deconstructed? Would that gentle ironist, that pricker of presumption and pedantry, have been amused, or saddened, to find himself the totem and target of post-structuralist theoretical rigour? That is his fate in the latest Yale French Studies tome. Led by the editor, Gérard Defaux, the authors flick mainstream Montaigne scholarship aside with impatient condescension. ‘The naivety and weakness of the biographical type of criticism’, we are told, is ‘naturally to be shunned’. ‘The obsession with the referent’ is ‘sterile’ yet ‘dangerously dominant’ – sterile yet diseased, for its picture of a living Montaigne, with mind and message, aims and achievements, is fetishistic, ‘purely fictional’. Thus the contributors celebrate a ritual anathema against the ‘hors-texte’. Having ‘killed the concept of author’ (vestige of ‘a bygone age’ of scholarship), all we need to keep in mind is simply ‘the abstraction Montaigne’ – as Jules Brody insists, establishing the purity of his credentials: ‘I use the proper name Montaigne … in the limited sense of the person who put the words on the page.’–

If old sea-dog Thomas Coram’s mission had been to found the most English, the most 18th-century of charities, he could not have done better than launch the Foundling Hospital – which he did, its doors receiving its first infant in 1741. Till then, England – unlike other countries – had had no hospice designed for abandoned babies, though such an idea had been floated in a characteristic gesture of lay piety by Addison in the Guardian. Unlike Continental refuges for orphans and bastards, the Foundling Hospital was run neither by the state, to produce well-drilled army recruits, nor by the Church, eager to baptise young souls. Embodying the spirit of mercantile private enterprise, it was constituted on joint-stock principles, headed by a governing board which combined landed and commercial wealth with a sprinkling of lawyers and doctors, several of them Masons. In time, royalty did not blush to patronise the charity, though bishop governors were notably few, and women were absent. The Hospital was, in Ruth McClure’s words, the pioneer case of ‘incorporated associative benevolence’, with the aim, as Joseph Massie put it, that ‘Charity, Humanity, Patriotism and Economy be made to go hand in hand’. Popean, if not quite Mandevillian, in their humanitarianism, the benefactors knew that self-love and social were the same. As Thomas Coram himself computed the matter of charity towards the young, ‘a pound of malaga Raisins which costs 3d fills them with above 5 pounds worth of Love for me.’

‘Cowper came to me and said: “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? … You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – Bacon, Newton and Locke.’ ” Thus William Blake’s memo of a ghostly visitation from William Cowper. But how aghast Cowper would have been at the words put into his mouth! Blake revelled in his own prophetic ravings, soaring free from the mind-forged manacles of the rationalist trinity into the aether of mysticism and insight. For he, like every Romantic, knew that the lunatic and the poet – not to mention the lover – were of imagination all compact – the doctrine which the Augustans, with their cartography of Bedlam and Parnassus, had darkly feared. In Cowper’s eyes – as his early writings amply show – lunacy was not the foster-mother of literature. He had learnt this at first hand: from his youth he had been a chronic depressive, suffering four extended periods of breakdown. The last bout ended with his death, and most of them involved suicide attempts. The first crisis, in 1763 – the only one which led to confinement and medical therapy – is the subject of a unique autobiographical account, printed here from a previously unpublished version. The second, in 1773, was perhaps triggered by Cowper’s inability to go through with a proposed marriage to Mrs Unwin. The third, in 1787, followed from the death of his closest male friend, her son William Unwin, and the last set in during the 1790s when Cowper, in his sixties, became increasingly overwhelmed by fears of dying. All these intervals of derangement spelt only agony and terror for Cowper, a loathing of existence, a fear of extinction. At times he accused his unfailingly loyal friends of plotting and poisoning. His own memories of these collapses speak, not of Blakean release, but of the drowning of the soul. Madness was not a song of innocence, nor did it give ‘refuge from unbelief’.

The Englishness of English historians lies in their eclecticism. Few would admit to being unswerving Marxists, Freudians, Structuralists, Cliometricians, Namierites, or even Whigs. Most believe that blooms come best in mixed bunches. They may allow themselves some guarded asides on the psychology of chiliasm, but would reject Norman Cohn’s full-frontal psychopathology of antisemitism. They probably accept, as true for that decade, Sir Lewis Namier’s vision of the politics of the 1760s as dominated by clique and pique rather than by constitutional principle, but would hesitate about his overarching behavioural conservatism. Call this open-mindedness, pussy-footing or Vicar of Bravery, it has been saluted as part of the historian’s craft by many different figures from Karl Popper to Arthur Marwick.