A History of Britain, Volume 3 Read Online Free

where locals later remembered ‘owd Ross Hall coming and going in his comical cap and ploddy gown and gathering his yerbs’. Occasionally, too, he would let himself be taken to Calwich Abbey where he met a group of local admirers and disciples, including Brooke Boothby, who were already committed to remaking themselves as Men and Women of Feeling (a novel by Henry Mackenzie, entitled
A Man of Feeling
, would be the best-seller of 1771).
    Needless to say, it was not long before paranoia once again got the upper hand. With scant understanding of English, much less the kind spoken by the local servants, Rousseau became convinced they were saying wicked things about Thérèse and were putting cinders in their food. By the spring of 1767 he was back in France. But his cult of sensibility had put down deep roots among the sobbing and sighing classes of provincial England. Just 10 years later, the craziness had been forgotten and Rousseau’s sojourn was remembered with the kind of veneration accorded to an apostolic mission. Something like a Derbyshire Enlightenment had come into being in which radical politics kept company with the cultivation of Feeling. A botanical society had been founded in the little cathedral town of Lichfield by Brooke Boothby and the polymath Erasmus Darwin, both of them luminaries of the circle centring on Anna Seward, the poet and essayist who held a salon at her residence in the Bishop’s Palace. Unlike Rousseau himself, moreover, the Lichfield circle had no difficulty in reconciling the exhilaration of science with the cult of Nature. In Derbyshire they seemed to have the best of both, with the Peaks offering the breathtaking upland walks and deep caverns, as well as supplying the coal and iron to be mined from beneath the hills. The county’s reputation as a place of exhilaration and mystery was such that in 1779 a play was staged at Drury Lane called, without a trace of embarrassment,
The Wonders of Derbyshire
. It featured 21 sets painted by the scenic artist Philippe de Loutherbourg, depicting waterfalls, Marn and Matlock Tors, the Castleton caverns (both inside and out) and a ‘Genius of the Peaks’ who rose, mechanically, from ‘haunts profound’ to bestow his bounty on the locals.
    Likewise the most successful Derbyshire artist, Joseph Wright, was equally at home painting the cliffs and gorges of the Peaks around Matlock or Richard Arkwright’s mill at Cromford as if it were a romantically lit palace. It was Wright who supplied the definitive image of an English country gentleman, Brooke Boothby, made over into a Man of Feeling, not, as in a Gainsborough portrait, the imperious master of a landed estate, but folded into the greenery in the pensive, heavy-lidded attitude of a Jacobean poet. Boothby’s dress is a studied advertisement for the new informality: the double-breasted frock coat and short waistcoat, left unbuttoned the better to expose the transparent sincerity of his heart; a silk cravat replaced by simple muslin. And where an earlier generation of gentlemen might have demonstrated their virtue by holding a copy of the Bible or volumes of the classics, Boothby holds the gospel of
his
generation with the single word ‘Rousseau’ just legible on the spine. Painted in 1781, the picture is not just a portrait but an advertisement of Boothby’s role as the St Peter of the cult. For the book is surely
Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques
, the confessionary autobiographical dialogue on which Rousseau had worked while he stayed in England. Five years earlier, in 1776, Boothby had travelled to Paris and received the manuscript from the great man’s own hands. Two years later Rousseau was dead, and the park at Ermenonville (inspired by Rousseau’s ideas and where the philosopher spent his final days) was turned into a place of pilgrimage and memory for his cult. No wonder Boothby burned to spread the word.
    The self-appointed task of all these disciples of the church of sensibility was