A book entitled 'A World on Fire,' by a writer named Joe
Jackson, describes the roles of Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph
Priestley in determining the properties and nature of air,
including the discovery of oxygen.
The following passage, from pp. 43,44, describes some aspects
of English culture during that period:
"The England of 1755 was about as peaceful and ennobling
as the American West of another hundred years. Although the
British saw themselves as the envy of starving, onion-eating
Europe, home to lecherous Papists and mincing French courtiers,
the Continent saw a much different picture. England 'is
different in every respect from the rest of Europe,' noted
Casanova on his travels, not the least for the violence he
observed. Highways were strung with gibbeted corpses, and a man
could be hung for stealing a sheep. 'Anything that looks like a
fight is delicious to an Englishman,' said Henri Misson, and
reasons to riot ran the gamut from the rising price of bread to
the wrong play printed on a playbill. Force, rather than
consensus, was the way to achieve results. 'Violence was as
English as plum pudding,' states one historian, while Christopher
Hibbert, in The Roots of Evil, observes that pity was a
rarity. Cat-dropping, bull-baiting, bear-baiting, and
cockfighting were popular sports, while 'unwanted babies were
left out in the street to die or were thrown into dung heaps or
open drains.'
"One cause of such cruelty could be blamed on chemistry.
Colin Wilson makes a good case in his History of Murder
that although life was always cheap, a strange callousness to
suffering rose among the British when alcohol was affordable for
the rich and poor. In Elizabethan England, people drank beer,
wine, sherry, mead, and cider because the water was unfit, but
since such wellsprings were costly, truly rampant alcoholism was
rare. That changed in 1650-60, when a Dutch chemist named
Sylvius discovered that a distillation of juniper berries
produced a potent spirit called geneva, French for "juniper."
The drink became popular in Holland, and when William of Orange
became England's king in 1689, geneva began to flow in great
quantities and its name was shortened to 'gin.'
"English distillers soon realized that an even cheaper and
stronger spirit could be distilled from low-grade corn. When an
Act of Parliament in 1690 allowed anyone to make and sell spirits
without a license, gin shops filled the towns and cities and one
in six houses sold gin. By 1699, the crime rate had risen so
alarmingly that an act was passed making the theft of goods worth
more than 5 shillings punishable by death; by 1734, eight million
gallons of gin were consumed in England annually, while in London
alone, the consumption rate was 14 gallons per head. Horror
stories popped up everywhere. In 1734, Judith Dfour was hanged
for murdering her baby: she collected it from the workhouse,
where it had been freshly clothed, then stripped the infant of
its garments, strangled it, threw its body in a ditch, and sold
the garments for the price of gin. The Mohocks, a club of young
gentlemen dedicated to "doing all possible to hurt their fellow
creatures," drank themselves beyond pity before boring out the
eyes of old women and prostitutes with their swords. A report in
a 1748 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine described how a
nurse became so drunk that, instead of laying her charge in its
cradle, she placed it in the fire. When examined before a
magistrate, she testified that 'she was quite stupid and
senseless [with drink], so that she took the child for a log of
wood; on which she was discharged.'"
It seems useful to remember that such accounts as the one
above should not be regarded as believable or true -- if, that
is, the words "belief" and "truth" are taken to suggest that
written language (or spoken language for that matter -- or the
new "electronic language") can convey "absolutely reliable"
pictures of the world, past or present. The quotation above is
the writer Joe Jackson's summary of the writings of other
writers; it is his perspective.
On page 39, Mr. Jackson writes that the Royal Society each
year awarded the Copley Medal "in honor of research or an
invention that solved a particularly vexing [scientific]
problem." And he says that "in 1753 the medal was awarded to
Benjamin Franklin for his discoveries in electricity, thus making
him a kind of honorary Englishman."
Elsewhere it is written that Ben Franklin was an Englishman
most of his life, and well into the 1770s.
The longer quotation above is not believable or true in any
other sense than that it is believable and true that the writer
Joe Jackson wrote those words as his perspective upon that period
when human beings were figuring out a certain aspect of the
physical world. Words are a form of information, and as such are
unrelated to truth. However, it seems plausible, given the
volume of reports from the past, to assume that there was a lot
of horror in the world then, even as now there appears to be.
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