G. M. Trevelyan on Georgian era

“The eighteenth-century English, on the average, were an earnest, virile, original, unconventional, and energetic race.”

“With regard to the continent of Europe, the popular impression that the eighteenth century was effete and conventional has at least a certain relation to truth... But when we turn to the Britain of the period we have a different story to tell. This was the time when our fathers conquered Canada and half India, rediscovered and began to settle Australia, and traded on an ever-increasing scale all over the inhabited globe; reorganized British agriculture on modern methods; began the Industrial Revolution in our island, thence in later times to spread over the whole world; and if the thirteen American colonies were at the same time lost to the British Empire, it was the result less of decadence in Great Britain than of young and mutinous energies in English America.”

“In the eighteenth century the English working man—then called the jolly yeoman or the industrious ’prentice—was intensely British, boasted himself a free-born Briton, and had no use for the frog-eating, priest-ridden Frenchman of his imagination. The average Englishman had not made the Grand Tour, and had no information about foreigners such as is being constantly poured in upon us to-day through newspapers, cinemas, books, pamphlets, and photographs. What the common English thought of the French you can see in Hogarth's uncomplimentary picture, entitled ‘Calais Gate’, in the National Gallery. This contempt for, and ignorance of, foreigners was extended not only to the Irish, but even to the Scots—who only became understood and admired in England in the age of Walter Scott, partly through the powerful influence of his pen.”

“There was therefore in eighteenth-century England, prior to the changes gradually made manifest by the Industrial Revolution, a national solidarity and unity of idea which bound Englishmen of all classes together and separated them from foreigners. Power, as we think looking back, was unduly concentrated in the hands of one class, the country gentry, but their monopoly was not popularly regarded as a grievance. The novelist Fielding is one of the very few contemporary critics of squirarchical power in the mid-eighteenth century. Classes were distinct in England—less distinct and rigid, indeed, than on the Continent at that time, but much more distinct and rigid than they are to-day. Wealth was very unevenly distributed. But there was little or no social discontent, and the national idea made every one proud of being a free-born Englishman.”

“It is often the custom to think of the eighteenth century, prior to the French Revolution, as a period of effete politeness and intelligence, of cultured and artificial decadence, of scepticism, atrophy, and want of enterprise... With regard to the continent of Europe, there is a certain amount of symbolical truth in this popular impression, but, for Britain, a more illuminating picture of the eighteenth century would be supplied by a vision of something more robust—Clive planted four-square across the breach of Arcot; Wolfe and his men scrambling up the precipitous forest track towards Quebec; Captain Cook's sails sweeping into Botany Bay; Wesley's lean face and long white hair, as he preaches to mass meetings of miners and throws powerful men into fits of hysteria; James Watt working in the instrument maker’s shop, with thoughts in him that shall have their consequences in the history of mankind”

“The life that the English gentry lived was as different as possible from that of their continental friends. The nobles of France and Italy thought little of existence away from the Court of their master, the King or reigning Duke. But the English gentry, when they came to town, came first and foremost to their own Parliament, only secondarily to the King's Court... But the bulk of their lives the English gentlemen spent neither at Court nor yet in the purlieus of Parliament, nor in London at all; but in the country, among their neighbours of all classes whom they led, entertained, bullied, and at election time courted and bribed. It was to their country houses that they brought back the art treasures they had collected on the Grand Tour—treasures in our day being scattered oversea by the auctioneer's hammer. They lived among their neighbours, hunting foxes, shooting partridges, inclosing and draining land, improving breeds of sheep and cattle, governing the countryside as Justices of the Peace. Their whole manner of life and way of thought was English, and though every English gentleman was recognized as belonging to the same social level as the continental nobleman, he was also recognized as belonging to a separate and unique island species of the genus European gentleman.”

“Whether or not I am right in supposing that the England of the eighteenth century had an energy of spirit that was lacking elsewhere in the Europe of that day, it is at least certain that this view was then generally held upon the Continent. After the Marlborough wars with which the century opened, and, still more after the great victories of Chatham in two hemispheres in the Seven Years War, foreigners were always asking each other what was the secret of English success, and the answer they found was that the secret lay in our free institutions. In the days of Charles I and II our Parliament had been regarded abroad as a source of confusion and weakness to England. But the course of William III's and Marlborough's wars had changed that view completely. For the British Parliament had defeated the all-worshipped despotism of Louis XIV in a long-drawn contest, in which England had proved supreme alike in land warfare, in sea warfare, in diplomacy, and in financial strength. This unexpected event gave a prestige to our institutions which coloured European thought from the time of Marlborough right down to the French Revolution. The prosperity of England under Walpole, the constant increase of her trade and maritime power, her victories under Chatham in Canada and India, all confirmed the same impression. Even our great catastrophe—the loss of the American Colonies—was read in France as another demonstration of the power that freedom gives. It was not only our Parliament that was admired, but freedom of speech, press, person, and religious toleration.”