How does one aquire a sociological imagination? By sociological imagination it is meant that one is able to conjure a picture of a byegone era or a separate people, based on some reading or some other understanding. During 1985-88 I was at LOYOLA COLLEGE, Madras doing English Language and Literature. One of the assignments was to write on Defoe's England.
Daniel Defoe wrote among others his most important novel Robinson Crusoe from which the character and his friend Friday gave the picturesque and immortal 'man friday' expression to the English language.Obviously it was the age of exploration on the high seas.
Years later in 1998 when in Bihar I told my mother on the hopelessness of certain groups of people there that back home in Kerala even the most downtrodden had some hope for their next generations whereas the same was hard to come by among those I found there.
Mother exclaimed at my thinking process and only then I realised that not all think the same way about the people around. I also realised that I was endowed with this thing called sociological imagination. Earlier I also had read a compendium by Amitai Etzioni in the Rajagiri Kalamassery library on sociological imagination.
I attribute the development of such from the English litetrature days as also the social science background of Rajagiri. Here is the assignment in full reproduced from the manuscript that I had preserved.
Defoe's England
The age of Daniel Defoe the great journalist, pamphleteer, poet and novelist is from 1660 to 1731. He was one of the greatest of English writers in whose works are clear, the social conditions of the early eighteenth century. Literally the age is often referred to as the Augustan age noted for refinement and classicism of the English literature.
This topic is a deeper study of the English society as depicted by the writers of England, especially Defoe.
The period is noted for its sense of man as a social being divinely intended to collaborate in a great task. The task special to the age was to live in widespread harmony, abjuring the hazards of war and fanaticism of the seventeenth century. By instinct and intention men strove for a perfect society pondering over the principles of a civilized community and hoped to extend the doctrines of sympathy on both a Christian and rational basis.
The tide of social sympathy yet did not bind the whole society in fraternity. There was much hardship and suffering and the clash of conflict in the early 18th century was less violent than the seventeenth century since the scheme of things was unrebelliously tolerated. Yet the age did something to put its thoughts to practice. The British combination of moral persuasion and practical energy turned towards a sensible society.
The belief was that Ggod had appointed the structure of society and that though the rich should ease the burden of the poor, poverty like pain and death was part of the mystery of creation. It was not hypocrisy. If God had created gradation of wealth he had ordained also the duty of labouring in one’s vocation and reach the highest level one can. The social conscience of the age was superficial, the debtors were brutally imprisoned, the mobs rioted when crops failed.
Poets journalists and novelists drew grim pictures of suffering. Yet with all the evils of the age it strove to become less brutal and gave to many the sense of strong humanity bearing good fruit in art, letters, philosophy and social life.
Life in London
London signified the growth and activity of capital, a channel of that full tide of existence, as Johnson puts it. Pastor Wendeborn’s praise of London goes thus:
‘There is no place in the world where a man may live more according to his own mind or even his own whim than London. For this reason I believe that in no place are to be found a greater variety of original characters. The friend of arts and science, the friend of religions, liberty the philosophers, the man who wishes to be secure against political and ecclesiastical tyrants, the man of business, the man of pleasure can nowhere be better off than in the metropolis’.
This topic is a deeper study of the English society as depicted by the writers of England, especially Defoe.
The period is noted for its sense of man as a social being divinely intended to collaborate in a great task. The task special to the age was to live in widespread harmony, abjuring the hazards of war and fanaticism of the seventeenth century. By instinct and intention men strove for a perfect society pondering over the principles of a civilized community and hoped to extend the doctrines of sympathy on both a Christian and rational basis.
The tide of social sympathy yet did not bind the whole society in fraternity. There was much hardship and suffering and the clash of conflict in the early 18th century was less violent than the seventeenth century since the scheme of things was unrebelliously tolerated. Yet the age did something to put its thoughts to practice. The British combination of moral persuasion and practical energy turned towards a sensible society.
The belief was that Ggod had appointed the structure of society and that though the rich should ease the burden of the poor, poverty like pain and death was part of the mystery of creation. It was not hypocrisy. If God had created gradation of wealth he had ordained also the duty of labouring in one’s vocation and reach the highest level one can. The social conscience of the age was superficial, the debtors were brutally imprisoned, the mobs rioted when crops failed.
Poets journalists and novelists drew grim pictures of suffering. Yet with all the evils of the age it strove to become less brutal and gave to many the sense of strong humanity bearing good fruit in art, letters, philosophy and social life.
Life in London
London signified the growth and activity of capital, a channel of that full tide of existence, as Johnson puts it. Pastor Wendeborn’s praise of London goes thus:
‘There is no place in the world where a man may live more according to his own mind or even his own whim than London. For this reason I believe that in no place are to be found a greater variety of original characters. The friend of arts and science, the friend of religions, liberty the philosophers, the man who wishes to be secure against political and ecclesiastical tyrants, the man of business, the man of pleasure can nowhere be better off than in the metropolis’.
These kind of tributes prevail on the whole over objections to dirt, rowdyism and poverty. London had its perils as well. Thugs infested the city. They bludgeoned their victims by day in Fleet street and the Strand and lurked in Covent Garden piazzas to catch playgoers emerging from the theatres. At least one violent crime was presented in the journals in a week.
Defoe in his ‘tour through England’ got attracted by the city’s growth. Yet he spoke of a crisis that ‘the great and more eminent increase of buildings, about the city of London becoming streets, about the nobles becoming great.
The capital had about 500000 citizens in 1700. Its nearest competitors like Bristol and Norwich and Manchester and Liverpool were so small in the magnitude of population. Defoe was perturbed at times and this great and monstrous thing at times daunted him. London had grown greatly since the restoration and was encroached on the rural surroundings.
In the crowded city took place the Hogarthian comedy and tragedy with its unruly populace, its sewage and offal in the roads, cobbles slippery with mud, shop signs hiding the sky and cracking in the wind, young drunkards reeling , bailiffs dogging. Old strumpets plying, beggars scrounging, fat grey men squabbling, rascals rattling, pick pockets crowding, were not unfamiliar to that age.
By degrees the streets were widened, old houses demolished, creaking signs removed, illumination improved, cobbles and kennels changed for paving stones and gutters. Thus London was modernized in line with Paris.
The citizens could if Anglicans pray in the churches of Wren, Hawkmoor, Gibbs and the rest. Dissenters come close among a hundred or so meeting houses and they were humbler but more zealous than Anglicans. They were powerful in their speech, powers of oratory well chosen epithets, strong expressions desired with an audible voice.
One of the attractions was the pleasures of the pleasure gardens and coffee houses. It was indispensable not only to social life but to that kinship between literary men which comes form their recurrent dealings with the same material. Augustan social life was indispensable with coffee house. With the inn, the tavern and the club, this created much of the mental world in which literature lived and it contributed to advance conversation and friendship. The coffee houses though differentiated by social or professional distinction fertilized societies intermingling. There were many coffee houses for the different categories. Famous were Caraways, Jonathan’s and Turk’s head. Lloyd’s the Chapter, will’s Buttons’ Bedford’s Whites, St. James and so on. The ladies often counterpoised this male monopoly and they could prove that nature shared her intellectual gifts fairly between the sexes. Clubs were signs of a community conscious of similar tastes and ready semi formally to organize its growing sociability.
The life on the surface was deep, strong and dark in which many were immersed in a struggle for survival. The poor were remarkably law abiding.
Defoe at the time praised the Thames light men for their honesty. Violence was frequent though not as in Paris, a symptom of conditions which for the submerged tenth must have been all but unendurable and of which the general public was ignorant. Fielding expressed in his proposal for making an effectual provision for the poor says the sufferings of the poor are indeed less observed than their misdeeds not from any want of compassion but because they are less well known.
The slums were in poor disposition. Some were in the cells underground other people in their garrets half starved with both cold and hunger. The common objection was so wickedly false that they are poor only because they are idle.
Public dispensaries helped to some extent to improve the lot of the poor. Drunkenness was denounced by Defoe. Moreover, the tolerance to drunkenness was despised. In the true born Englishman Defoe says
Good drunken company is their delight
And what they get by day they spend by night
In English ale their engagement lies.
For which they all starve themselves and families
Slaves to the liquor, drudges to the pots
The mob are statesmen and their states men sits
The prison system was abominable and administrators of justice were erratic and sometimes execrable and the underworld lived under the threat of transportation. The state of the poor was entirely ignored though some underwent more real hardships in one day than the whole their lives.
In Boswell’s phrase London did indeed comprehend, the whole of human life in all its variety the comprehension of which is inexhaustible and the literature which kept most of it in view was by necessity robust.
Life in the country
What did the country mean to the Augustans? To most it meant a place to live and work in to improve and enjoy. From many sources comes the impression of a bucolic England with some mental vigour and with that steadily accepted relationship of classes which is typical of country society. As a whole, a desire to improve was widespread. The community was of good sense and character as reflected by Augustan writing.
Following the rise of the new rich was the decline of the new poor.
The whole country yet shined with a luster. To foreign men London was not like other countries but it was all a planted garden. The quality most cherished in the country was not its romantic grandeur but the beauty of its ordinary face which was distinguishable.
Though the country was beautiful it did not render everyone hale and jollity. A steady price rise made landowners richer and labourers poorer.
The country had an uncorrupted heart though men are generally bound to love the cities. As shebeare remarked good order and sobriety and honesty marked the village as against the anarchy, drunkenness and thievery of the town. (letters on the English nation).
Augustans took pleasure in the country though generally in its more cultivated aspects. The country presented other pleasures than landscapes like meditation and good living literature paintings and prints. They were interested in sports like hunting.
The country sides building reflected a general well being adopted new styles with such windows pediments and classical orders. The new houses as signs of a new way of life deserved the interest travelers took in them as symbols of social improvement.
Augustan provincial life had been little investigated yet evidence abounds that larger towns were organic centres and that country gentry as time went on hibernated in their neighboring metropolis.
Country folks to a Londoner’s eye were fair game uncouth addicts of dialects, ludicrous sports and superstitions. There was embarassing contrast between country’s hospitality with restraint of good town breeding . The men who could make a tolerable living from the land tended to be sturdy in character as well as physique, resourceful but not rash practical in opinion and settled in opinions seasoned by experience of the past busy in the present and looking towards an inscrutable bit not unfriendly future.
There was this sharp contrast between country folk from town bred people.
The Augustan sense of society, a complex and varied but marked with the unmistakable character is one of its best sources of strength. Though riddled with poverty and thievery the sense for improvement prevalent and this is represented through the works of contemporay writers. Defoe through Robinson Crusoe revealed the zest for survival common to the English which paved the way for the uplifting of the society from all of its drawbacks’.
References
The Augustan world – A R Humphreys
A History of Britain E H Carter and A F Mears
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