As previously mentioned, Swift published Gulliver’s Travels at the height of the Enlightenment. That was a cultural movement in the 17th and the 18th centuries whose purpose was to reform society by using reason, to challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith and to promote knowledge through scientific methods.
Belief in human progress through education was a fundamental concept of the Age of Reason. The writers and philosophers of this age thought that human beings were virtuous by nature and they were designed to act rationally. Vice was due to ignorance only, so they started a public movement for enlightening people.
Enlightenment thinkers thought society would become perfect if people were free to use their reason, as reason was the key to truth. According to them, human happiness required freedom from restrains imposed by the state or the church. As a result, they were hostile towards religion, denied the absolute authority of monarchs and emphasized natural human rights. The formula for perpetual human happiness was letting people act freely in accordance with their nature, which would do away with all the evils of society. Individual freedom permitted the operation of natural laws and social harmony would be achieved.
The amount of new knowledge that emerged in fields like mathematics, astronomy, physics, politics, economics, philosophy, and medicine was staggering. Intellectual salons popped up, philosophical discussions were held. The very concept of freedom of expression had to come from somewhere, and it had firm roots in the Enlightenment.
More goods were being produced for less money, people were traveling more, increasingly literate population read books and passed them around feverishly. People were able to get more in return for their labor, so their lives improved materially. Book production and newspaper distribution increased. The first modern lending libraries began to dot the provincial capitals of Europe, citizens had frank conversations about their nation’s policies and the course of world events.
Many of the new ideas were political in nature. Freedom and democracy were considered by many intellectuals as being the fundamental rights of all people and not gifts bestowed upon them by beneficent monarchs or popes.
Egalitarianism was the promise of fair treatment for all people, regardless of background, a promise much spoken about. Citizens began to see themselves on the same level as their leaders, subject to the same shortcomings and subject to criticism if so deserved. The idea that common people had rights became widespread in England and among people in England's American colonies.
Discussion and debate were considered necessary as people thought there was a collective, national intelligence which could solve all the world’s serious problems and the combined rationality of the people would elect the best possible representatives. Britain's bourgeoisie debated religion and politics in literary societies and academies, as well as in coffeehouses, clubs and salons.
Science and engineering developed rapidly, which helped much to establish the famous British Empire. The Empire originated in the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the 16th-17th centuries and became the largest in history. The expansion of the empire received a tremendous impetus when India, Australia and a great part of North America became British dominions. This expansion and its further development were facilitated by the Industrial Revolution and other social, economic and cultural changes during the Enlightenment era.
Never had England had such great prestige in Europe. The success of its armies and its prudent revolution were inspiring other nations to respectfully study England’s institutions and ideas.
Empirical data started to eliminate people's superstitious notions of how the world functioned by explaining phenomena such as lightning, eclipses, disease, etc. Research and science replaced Church and God as new authorities- a step away from the belief. Society valued truth, ethical behavior and the acquisition of knowledge as worthwhile pursuits.
Philosophers tried to discover the universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society and considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. As the Enlightenment introduced new paradigms of morality, philosophers also attacked spiritual and scientific authority, censorship, economic and social restraints.
To Enlightenment thinkers what was interesting was only what could be understood, explained, and proved. The only reliable scientific method was objective observation which was supposed to lead to verifiable conclusions and to spur developments in astronomy, philosophy, medicine, physiology, transportation, chemistry, and ethics.
Still, Enlightenment thinkers did not necessarily share the same views. Many intellectuals, like John Locke, favored the constitutional monarchy. But England still had its republicans and many people were dissatisfied with the liberal so-called Glorious Revolution.
Thomas Hobbes was a pessimistic English political philosopher who argued that man in his natural state is selfish and savage and therefore a single absolute ruler is the best form of government.
John Locke was the political philosopher of the Whig Party, the most optimistic Enlightenment philosopher who argued for man’s essentially good nature and advocated representative government as an ideal form of government. Locke showed that man, as a rational being, must respect natural law, and he maintained that property is a natural right which derived from labor. His purpose was to oppose what he called the natural right to the divine right of the Stuart dynasty. John Locke, was to become the master of all European philosophers.
Social life also changed a lot and developed in a new direction. The typical Englishman had lived much by himself in earlier times; his home was his castle, and in it he developed his intense individualism; but in the first half of the eighteenth century about three thousand public coffeehouses and private clubs appeared in London and many others all over England.
Customers purchased a cup of coffee and admission for the price of a penny. The absence of alcohol created an atmosphere in which one could engage in serious conversation. The coffeehouse became the place which housed the community forum where great thinkers of the age met and where citizens discussed the news of the day, matters of mutual concern, debated their needs. Political groups frequently used English coffeehouses as meeting places.
The influence of this social life on literature was inevitable. London became a great center for the arts and fashion. Many writers frequented the coffeehouses, discussed politics, science, philosophy, fashion and many of the matters discussed there became subjects of literature.
But there were also pubs and alehouses. People in Britain drank and fought duels. With drinking, violence started spreading and it was even more dangerous since there was no police and the army was reduced to eight thousand people for the entire Britain, following the Utrecht treaty.
Another vice in fashion, which was present in all clubs and also in female circles, was gambling. Moralists worried about the rise in promiscuity and a decline in family values. Drinking, gambling and love intrigues were reasons for conflicts which often ended in duels. People were fighting everywhere, in ballrooms, coffeehouses, even in theatre corridors. The habit of killing a man just for one word disappeared only by the end of the century.
2.2. Literature of the Enlightenment
Augustan literature covers the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II. It begins in the first half of the 18th century and ends with the deaths of Pope and Swift (1744 and 1745, respectively). This literary epoch had certain distinctive features: the development of the novel, an explosion in satire, an evolution toward poetry of personal exploration. Still, it was an age of prose rather than of poetry, and in this respect it differs from all preceding ages of English literature.
Literature of the Enlightenment showed great interest in scientific progress and the new world. Monthly magazines were full of articles about new discoveries and inventions. The readers were entertained by travelling narratives, journals, thrilling descriptions of unexplored and distant places with fantastic creatures and people. They didn’t care
if the writers would often take a professional liberty to freshen up factual texts with fictional elements and fantasies.
The term "Augustan" most commonly refers particularly to the literature of the early 18th century which is explicitly political in ways that few others are. Moreover, political writings in all genres were exceptionally bold. Writers were frequently politically active and they dealt specifically with the crimes and vices of their world. Satire was the genre that attracted the most energetic and voluminous writing and it was frequently specific critique of specific actions, policies and people.
Consequently, readers of 18th-century English literature need to know and to understand the history of the period more than readers of literature belonging to other periods, because the authors were writing for an informed audience and only secondarily for posterity. Therefore, history and literature are linked in a way rarely seen at other times.
This overtly political literature reflected the worldview of the Enlightenment, which was characterized by a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues while promoting a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility.
Many prominent writers of the Enlightenment were greatly interested in the political agenda. An effective method to criticize what they saw as immoral or uncivil practice was the political satire, of which Jonathan Swift was the master.
Swift was a profound skeptic both about the present and the past. Modern world was to him a madness of vanity and lies while history was a record of vanity and other lies. His prose style is clear, unmannered and direct. He believed that Christian values were essential and they had to be loud and assertive. Swift often referred to the Enlightenment as “the Age of Reason” ironically and went after man’s capacity (or incapacity) for critical thinking.
Swift was one of the main contributors to the English literature of the Enlightenment and his monumental work is a prominent example of how the writers of the era endeavoured to enlighten people.
As the eighteenth century came to an end, the calls for social reform and a utopian, egalitarian society quieted down. People were tired of the bloodshed in France and a variety of other upheavals which demonstrated that Enlightenment principles were not practical.