SOURCE: Goldsmith, M. M. “Private Vices.” In Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville's Social and Political Thought, second ed., pp. 33-49. Cybereditions, 2002.

[In the following excerpt, Goldsmith analyzes Mandeville's theory of society, which “justified the activities of those who sought only their private good or pleasure—what many called vice.”]

But something could be said against the ideology of public virtue. And it was, by Bernard Mandeville, an immigrant Dutch physician who had settled in London.¹

Mandeville began his literary career writing verses. His first published work seems to have been The Pamphleteers, a work which defended William's character and the policies pursued under his rule against those who alleged that millions had been misspent and who called for resumption of the grants that had been made.² He soon turned to verse fables. Some Fables after the Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine appeared in 1703; originally it contained twenty-nine fables and appeared anonymously. They show but few signs of the distinctive views he was to publish in The Fable of the Bees. A new version enlarged by ten more translations and acknowledging its author was soon issued under the title Aesop Dress'd.³ Among the fables Mandeville chose to translate were some that debunk vain pretensions to wisdom or virtue and others that illustrate connections between low, even vicious activities and those which are respectable and admirable. In his version of the ‘Council held by the rats’, Mandeville added a moral which shifts the tale about belling the cat away from La Fontaine's target—cowardly courtiers. Instead Mandeville pokes fun at coffee-house pundits:

The Cits advise what's to be done,
This way they should attack the Town;
Now here, now there, why don't they come?
So, often in a Coffee-room,
Where prudently they rule the Nation,
I've heard some Men of Reputation
Propose things which they dare as well
Perform, as Rats to tie the Bell.(4)

Mandeville characteristically made La Fontaine's fables more explicit, often by extending the moral, sometimes by appending morals to fables which lacked them. He also tended to lengthen the fables, usually by adding descriptive details. Where La Fontaine's touch is light and elegant, the right word and tone placing his characters socially and psychologically, Mandeville is more explicit and heavy-handed. Moreover, La Fontaine addressed an audience of courtly aristocrats—and even the king; unquestionably, Mandeville wrote for an audience whose acquaintance with kings and courts was rather more remote. In ‘The bat and two weasels’ La Fontaine recommended diplomatic hypocrisy; it is wise to claim to be bird or mouse as the occasion suggests:

Le Sage dit, selon les gens:
Vive le roi! vive la Ligue!

The moral is ‘accommodate to the circumstances’—and the circumstances are historically distant. Mandeville's moral never suggests that the practice is a wise one, and the circumstances are utterly contemporary:

The Trimmer that will side with none,
Is forc'd to side with eve'ry one;
And with his Comp'ny change his story,
Long live the Whig, long live the Tory.(5)

Typically Mandevillean characteristics are evident in some of the fables Mandeville added to the second issue. In ‘The hands, feet, and belly’, the hands and feet rebel. Like La Fontaine's plebeian members they refuse to work for the benefit of the belly. But Mandeville's strikers have specific vulgar objections to their conditions of employment: the feet complain that they've marched in ‘Shoes that let the Water in’ and

We rais'd four Blisters th' other Night,
And yet got not a farthing by 't.

While the hands reply that they not only work every day but, however weary, ‘are forced to serve at every meal’:

And often, whilst you're set at ease,
Drudge to the Knucles up in Grease.(6)

One cannot imagine La Fontaine describing plebeian woes in this explicit fashion; Mandeville's plebeians are not Romans complaining about their rights, but labourers on strike. His moral to this tale is somewhat more general than the original one; it is not simply the king's but the government's concern for the interests of all that justifies its greater pomp, power and wealth. The moral may even glance at the same target as The Pamphleteers or indeed at Country ideology in declaring that the vulgar think themselves slaves burdened with taxes and wars and the courts ‘But Seats of Sloth and Luxury’.

Another fable Mandeville added was ‘The frog’, which describes that creature's vain attempts to expand to the size of an ox. Here again Mandeville lengthened the moral and applied it closer to home. Where La Fontaine remarked that townsmen built like ‘grands seigneurs’, petty princes sent ambassadors and every marquis wished to have pages, Mandeville's citizens have pages, tradesmen's children have governors and:

A Fellow, that i'n't worth a Louse,
Still keeps his Coach and Country-house.(7)

By far the most interesting of the fables are two of Mandeville's ‘own Invention’. ‘The carp’ has been ‘genteely bred’ but goes off on the grand tour knowing only his own language and not ‘the Language of the Main’ which all the sea fish speak. Eventually encountering a herring ‘vers'd in Languages’, the carp is quizzed about affairs at home:

… what News of Late?
Which are your Ministers of State?
…
What Laws, what Form of Government?
Are Taxes rais'd without consent
of Parliament? …

Ridiculed for travelling to learn what's done in other countries while so ignorant of his own by the plain-spoken herring, he falls into the company of a pike who introduces him to debauchery. The carp returns home no wiser, having acquired from his foreign travels only disease.⁸ ‘The carp’ is thus a critique of the provincialism of the English—and it is more than likely that the herring is a Netherlander. The Dutch were known as herring eaters and reputed to be blunt.

Mandeville's ‘The nightingale and the owl’ is another tale of vanity. The nightingale is so sure of court appointment as a night watchman who proves his wakefulness by singing that he waits to be begged to accept the position. The humbler owl simply offers his services. When the nightingale presents himself to claim the appointment he finds he must share it with the owl. Incensed by being thus disparaged he bursts into disloyal remarks. Thus, we are told, vanity and haughtiness may deprive able men of their chance to use their abilities in the state's service.⁹

Mandeville's collections of fables exhibited no startling new ideas. As he told his readers in the preface, they need expect neither instruction nor anything to puzzle their brains, but merely some amusement for their idle hours. These readers at least would not be constantly striving to improve themselves or acting for the public good. The translations are fairly close to La Fontaine's originals, given Mandeville's tendency to be cruder and more explicit. Perhaps in the choice of fables and in the differences from La Fontaine, one can perceive an interest in pride, folly, hypocrisy and vanity—and perhaps even the notion of a connection between the individual's good and that of the public.¹⁰ In the closing sentence of the preface, Mandeville offered his readers more fables if they liked these. Perhaps a mild success with Some Fables had induced the publication of the enlarged Aesop Dress'd.

Mandeville's next work was an imitation of Scarron's burlesque epic, Typhon. In the preface he informs us that ‘I presented you some time ago with a Dish of Fables, but Wel——ton says, They went down with you like chopt Hay.’ Since the ingredients were good, Mandeville admitted that he had spoiled them in the cooking. ‘I told you then, that if you did not like them, you should be troubled with no more of 'em, and I have been as good as my word; for I have made no more Fables since, than I have built Churches.’¹¹ Instead the reader is offered Typhon as a sort of French ragout. In fact, it is more of an English (or perhaps Dutch) stew—a bit coarse in its description of drunken and lecherous gods. In the scene described the gods are lounging in the dining room in an inebriated slumber. Venus is awake. (But what is she doing with her right hand?) Their peace is disturbed by a hail of ninepins flung about by Typhon, who had been painfully struck on the ankle by a bowl. The befuddled gods speculate on what is happening—one thinks it might be a meteor, a star that has escaped from a vortex:

Which may, according to Descartes,
Happen if near the Poles … a Fart is,
Quoth Jove, I'm sure that such a plenty
Materia primi Elementi
Had burnt us when the vortex broke
And I see neither Fire nor Smoke.(12)

Thus Typhon did little to recommend piety, sobriety and public spirit. It is dedicated ‘To the Serenissime the numerous society of F——ls in London and Westminster’ in what looks like a hit at the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in London and Westminster, for Mandeville specifically announced that the action of the poem occurred in:

An Age, that spoil'd by Peace and Plenty,
Had no Reformers, under Banners
Of holy Thirst-encountering Manners;
Those Champions of Sobriety,
That watch to keep the World adry;
Whose Drummers teach one day in seven
That the tap-too's the March of Heaven.(13)

Later in the poem, because mortals have been so ungrateful, Jove loads punishments upon them: discord, fear, impotence, wives, lawyers, twenty-five kinds of doctors and poets. His anger had been evoked by Athena's report that men have been improving in knowledge but growing worse in all other ways.¹⁴

In 1705, Mandeville broke his promise and produced another fable. It might be one after the manner of La Fontaine but for its gargantuan size—some 433 lines.¹⁵ Eventually it was to swell into The Fable of the Bees, not by the addition of further verses but by the incorporation of an introduction, an inquiry and a substantial annotation of ‘Remarks’. While the mortals in Typhon are punished for their vices and corruptions—an outcome consistent with the prevalent ideology of public and private virtue—this seems to have been an aberration for Mandeville. In The Grumbling Hive, the bees are punished by Jove simply by his granting their desire for reformation of manners, much as the frogs are punished in ‘The frogs asking for a king’ in Aesop Dress'd. Neither the frogs nor the bees are contented with their lot. The frogs have grown weary of democracy and ask for a king. Jove supplies them with a log but the frogs find him too supine; they soon grow contemptuous of his good-natured, passive somnolence. They petition again and Jove, exasperated, gives them a crane who devours them. Mandeville tells us that this fable of the evils of divine right monarchy is not meant for Englishmen, for

… they are content,
And hate to change their Government.(16)

Nevertheless, it may have a slight anti-Jacobite edge—Mandeville hardly regarded Englishmen as content. More interesting are the parallels to The Grumbling Hive: both the frogs and the bees are discontented and both receive divine retribution by having their wishes granted.

But where the frogs are unhappy about their government, the bees in The Grumbling Hive are Englishmen.

They were not Slaves to Tyranny,
Nor rul'd by wild Democracy;
But Kings, that could not wrong, because
Their Power was circumscrib'd by Laws.(17)

Although content with its constitution, the hive does grumble about politicians, the army, the fleet, avarice, cheating, prodigality, luxury and corruption. In the bees' society flourish stockjobbers, sharpers, pimps, actors, quacks and fortune tellers along with other frauds and fakers. However, the respectable and industrious bourgeoisie are no better: lawyers split cases and fees and oppose reforms which would reduce their practice; doctors are more interested in fame and wealth than in curing their patients and they curry favour with apothecaries; priests dissimulate their vices and ignorance; prelates live in plenty while working curates starve; the king's ministers call their peculations ‘perquisites’ or emoluments. The poor get justice; the rich escape it by bribery.

Mandeville makes his attitude to any reformation of manners quite clear:

Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.

He tells us that the bees' very crimes contributed to their prosperity and the power that made them the balance of all other hives. Virtue, having been reconciled to vice by political cunning, arranged things so that:

The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the Common Good.

The beneficial consequences are remarkable.

Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity,
Which joined with Time and Industry,
Had carry'd Life's conveniencies,
It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,
To such a Height, the very Poor
Liv'd better than the Rich before.

But instead of accepting their comfortable circumstances and enjoying them, the bees deprecate the pride, luxury, vanity, vice and other corruptions which are its causes or necessary conditions. Jove, eventually annoyed by their continued supplication, gives them what they pray for—a reformation of manners. The result is private and public virtue, but in the process the hive is dispossessed of its wealth and power; defeated and impoverished, the bees go and live in primitive simplicity in a hollow tree,

… as free,
For Acorns as for Honesty.(18)

The Grumbling Hive relies upon the ideology of public and private virtue in order to make its point; if luxury, vice and corruption are connected with wealth and power and so with prosperity, then the converse is also true: virtue is accompanied by simplicity, poverty and primitive conditions. The doggerel poem cleverly suggested that men's professed moral judgments condemn rather more than they suspect and that ‘vice’ in its various aspects is closely related to the sort of society that these critics live in and expect to live in. Far more than Mandeville's other early verse works, which at most hint at an interest in the themes that Mandeville was later to discuss and which show no greater penetration than the verses of other hacks, The Grumbling Hive foreshadows The Fable of the Bees. Nevertheless, despite the hints of Mandevillean doctrine in it, The Grumbling Hive was not The Fable of the Bees; it was not an argued attack on the current ideology of public and private virtue. Yet Mandeville did turn to such an attack in 1709-10 in response to the version of that ideology put forward by Squire Bickerstaff.

The success of the Squire's lucubrations inspired many imitators who hoped to exploit the market that Steele had discovered. Like him they aimed to be sufficiently polite to be present at the ladies' tea table as well as in the coffee-house. Among them were the Visions of Sir Heister Ryley, the Gazette à la Mode or Tom Brown's Ghost written by ‘Sir Thomas Whipstaff’, a Whisperer by ‘Mrs Jenny Distaff’ and Titt for Tatt written by a supposed John Partridge getting his own back. There were also a Tatling Harlot, a Tory Tatler, a North Tatler and, most significantly, The Female Tatler.¹⁹ Most of these papers copied The Tatler's format of four columns on a half-sheet and its formula of not confining itself to news and politics, or even to serious examination of the theatre and literature, but including both serious and frivolous discussions of a variety of topics, describing different social characters, printing letters from actual or supposed correspondents, rehearsing conversations, filling up with snippets of classical literature and so on. Bickerstaff expatiated on the evils of duelling, attacked sharpers, considered canes, recommended Charles Lilly and pronounced on petticoats. Many of his little social fictions must have been spicier versions of situations familiar to his readers, pictures of characteristics they too had observed or stereotypes which could be used to sort out their acquaintances—such as Miss Molly, the scolding wife, and her drinking husband, Sir John (Tatler 2) or Cynthio who eventually dies of unrequited love for the devastating Clarissa (Tatler 1, 4, 5, 22, 35, 58, 85), not to mention the procession of rakes, fools, coxcombs, platonnes, toasts and very pretty fellows. Nor was Steele above salting his columns with scandalous tales about real people, identifiable by circumstantial descriptions but thinly disguised under pseudonyms. This was bound to lend verisimilitude to his fictitious accounts of individuals illustrating a characteristic or a type.

In November 1709, The Female Tatler was taken over by a ‘society of ladies’. Previously it had been written by ‘Mrs Crackenthorpe’, ‘a Lady that knows every thing’, and told it thrice weekly. Two ladies of the society, the sisters Lucinda and Artesia, were Bernard Mandeville.²⁰ He immediately encroached on one of Bickerstaff's favourite subjects, for in Lucinda's sitting room the conversation turned to honour and duelling. Bickerstaff had argued for the abolition of duelling and speculated about ways of suppressing it. When the example of the Greeks and Romans is adduced as one of courage without duels, ‘Colonel Worthy’ points out that in those days society was less refined. ‘He added, that he had duely weigh'd whatever had been said against Duelling, but that he cou'd not conceive how the Conversation, as is now establish'd among the better sort of People, could be upheld if the Customs of it was totally abolish'd.’ The Colonel urges that duelling is no more sinful than drinking a man to death—which is far more common. It being early November, Mandeville makes the Colonel remark ‘that more were killed by the Gluttony and Drunkenness of one Lord Mayor's Day in the City of London only, than by Duelling in a whole Twelvemonth throughout Great Britain’. The Colonel clinches his argument with a particularly Mandevillean reflection: ‘The strict Observation of the point of Honour, said he, is a necessary Evil, and a large Nation can no more be call'd Polite without it, than it can be Rich and Flourishing without Pride or Luxury.’²¹ Yet the Colonel disapproves of duelling. Therefore he regrets that duellists are frequently pardoned and suggests that whenever one combatant dies his opponent should invariably be executed. In that way the laws of honour can be made serviceable to a polite and warlike nation and yet giving offence be prevented.

Thus in his first Female Tatler, Mandeville had a thrust at Steele. And he continued to jab at Bickerstaff: no fewer than fifteen of his Female Tatlers mention him or take up a topic initiated in The Tatler. The most devastatingly hilarious of these anti-Tatlers is Mandeville's ridicule of the cure of blindness by the grand oculist, Roger Grant. Bickerstaff had related the affecting story of a young gentleman cured at Newington. ‘Happy are they’, quipped Mandeville, ‘that can see to read it!’²²

This kind of thing in Mandeville's pungent prose would have made The Female Tatler a parasite, albeit an amusing one. But Mandeville seems to have been stung by Steele into expounding a general account of society contrary to the theory of public and private virtue which Bickerstaff advocated as Censor of Great Britain and adherent of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners. In his self-exalted role of Censor, Bickerstaff declared many inhabitants of Britain dead even though they walked, talked, ate their meals, smoked their pipes and sipped their coffees.

In short, whoever resides in the World without having any Business in it, and passes away an Age without even thinking on the Errand for which he was sent hither, is to me a Dead Man to all Intents and Purposes; and I desire that he may be so reputed. The Living are only those that are in some way or other laudably employed in the Improvement of their own Minds, or for the Advantage of others.²³

And just a week later Tatler 99 (26 November 1709) peremptorily announced:

I have already taken great Pains to inspire Notions of Honour and Virtue into the People of this Kingdom, and used all gentle Methods imaginable, to bring those who are dead in Idleness, Folly, and Pleasure into Life by applying themselves to Learning, Wisdom, and Industry. But since fair Means are ineffectual, I must proceed to Extremities, and shall give my good Friends, the Company of Upholders, full Power to bury all such Dead as they meet with, who are within my former Descriptions of deceased Persons.

This Bickerstaffian proclamation precedes a facetious remonstrance from the undertakers. They complain that vast numbers of the unburied dead have not turned themselves in and that they go putrefying about the streets. And citing a number of other inconveniences they petition for the power that Bickerstaff grants.

The Tatler's campaign against the walking dead only made sense on the basis of the ideology of public and private virtue. Society existed, improved and flourished because human beings devoted themselves to the public good or to learning; they self-sacrificingly sought to improve the material and moral conditions of life. Those who did not consciously dedicate themselves to these ends were useless; they went about consuming resources which could be devoted to good purposes; they might as well be dead and buried.

Mandeville immediately responded in a series of Female Tatlers. Number 62 appeared on 28 November, just two days after Tatler 99. In it Artesia reported a conversation which supposedly occurred on the afternoon of the 26th—the very day on which that issue of The Tatler appeared. Arsinoe interrupted Emilia as she was rhapsodizing on the happiness of a well-governed nation. She wonders why ‘Man’ is the only ‘Sociable Creature’ when ‘not only the Herds and Flocks of the Field, but likewise the Shoals both of the Air and the Deep’ seem temperamentally better fitted for society, since they associate ‘without design’ simply ‘for the Love of each other's Company’ whereas among human beings there are ‘Feuds, Frauds, Enmities, and Depredations, against and upon one another … not only between different Nations, but Cities, Corporations, Societies and private Persons, under the same Government, and seemingly of the same interest’. It follows that ‘there is no Animal that is naturally inclined so little to be Sociable as Man, and consequently, that without Government and the Rigour of the Laws, it would be impossible that a Dozen of them should ever spend one day together in Peace’. But Arsinoe's opinion, with its Hobbesian or Augustinian overtones, is immediately rejected by Lucinda. She holds that men are not less sociable than beasts, which will clash when their appetites for food or sex conflict. Man, being endowed with reason and condemned to work, has improved his condition.

It is to this only, that all Arts and Sciences are Subservient; when I think on this, and compare the Meanness as well as Ignorance of the Infant World, and yet unpolish'd Nations of Africa and America to the Knowledge and Comforts of Human Life, which the more Civilised Countries, and more especially the politer Parts of Christendom, enjoy, I can never forbear thinking how infinitely we are indebted to all those who ever invented anything for the Publick Good: It is they that have actually meliorated their kind, and from that groveling State and despicable Condition in which we now see the Negroes and other Savages, raised their Posterity to the Enjoyment of these Blessings we have among us. To all the rest of our Ancestors and Predecessors, we are no more beholden, than if they never had been born; And I am of the Ingenious Mr. Bickerstaff's Opinion that none are to be counted Alive, but such as, setting aside all private Interest and Personal Pleasure, are Generous enough to labour and exert themselves for the benefit of others.

Thus, according to Lucinda, the human condition has improved over time. Savagery has become civilization by the beneficial effects of those who have acted for the public good. This view is accepted by those assembled—Lucinda found ‘in most of us, what by her Looks she seem'd to demand, a tacit Applause’. But this Bickerstaffian view is challenged by an ‘Oxford Gentleman’ who denies that the virtuous, the learned and the public-spirited have improved the human condition:

Madam, said he, it is unquestionable, that the greatest and most immediate Benefactors to Human Society, are the idle Favourites of blind Fortune, that having more Money left to them than they know what to do with, take no other Care than to please themselves, and studying as well to create new Appetites as to gratify those they feel already, are given over to all Sensuality, and value neither Health nor Estate in the purchase of Delight.

Not the virtuous and public-spirited but the selfish hedonists have been the motive power of history.²⁴

Whereas Lucinda and Bickerstaff could see changes in man's conditions of life, Mandeville and the Oxford gentleman recognized a different type of development. It is not merely that humans have modified their situation; they have also developed their needs and wants. Indeed men are not sociable because they instinctively love other humans. They are sociable because, being biologically capable of society, that is, having the capacity for speech along with certain other physical characteristics, such as arms and hands, and having many wants and appetites along with some other psychological characteristics, they can be organized into quite large social groups. Although each individual has a certain interest in being virtuous—since virtue will be rewarded in heaven even if it is not always rewarded on earth—many virtues (like temperance, humility, contentedness and frugality) are insignificant for society; ‘and so far from making a Country Flourish, that no Nation ever yet enjoy'd the most ordinary Comforts of Life, if they were not Counter-ballanc'd by the opposite Vices’.²⁵

Mandeville contends that vice produces not only prosperity but civilization as well. ‘Vice’ is essential to a flourishing society in two senses of the word: firstly, vice in the sense of physical deficiency, privation and need makes society necessary for human survival; secondly, vice in the sense of moral defect (greed, vanity, pride, selfishness, lust, luxury and envy) stimulates production and improvement. Needs and appetites make social cooperation desirable in conditions where it will increase the available benefits and resources. But what human beings consume is not restricted to what is necessary for biological survival. The standard of necessity as well as that of comfort is a social standard; the consumption of the rich, so beneficial, is stimulated by pride and vanity, that is, the human characteristics of wishing for the approval of others, desiring to have a good opinion of oneself and seeking superiority and recognition of that superiority—the characteristics of approbativeness, self-esteem and emulation.²⁶

It is these vices that we must thank for the development of the arts and the sciences: ‘They are all come to the Perfection they are in by very slow Degrees, and the first Rudiments of most of them have been so small, that the Authors are hardly worth naming.’²⁷

In denigrating Bickerstaff's self-righteous puff for virtue and learning, Mandeville extended his earlier hints into a theory of society which emphasized the functional relationship between human characteristics and societal consequences and which also required that existing societies should be the product of a long genesis.²⁸ That the views put into the mouth of the Oxford gentleman amount to something more than a passing joke at Steele's expense is shown by their further discussion in the next two numbers of The Female Tatler written by Mandeville, 64 and 66. For the Oxford gentleman is not permitted simply to assert these outrageous opinions; in Female Tatler 64 he is challenged. Lucinda reports a second meeting of the same company. Emilia and Camilla ridicule the Oxford gentleman's views by saying ‘a hundred Things in praise of Calligula, Heliogabalus, Sardanapalus, and all the King and Emperors they could think on, that had been Infamous for Luxury and Extravagancy’. On these grounds Vitellius (corrected in no. 66 from Tiberius) must have been the best emperor because at one supper he had three thousand fishes and seven thousand birds served. How could: ‘so Wise a Senate as theirs, that was so watchful for the Publick Welfare, … suffer the pernitious Tenets of the Cato's, the Seneca's, and other Moral-Mongers that extolled Content and Frugality, and preach'd against Gluttony, Drunkenness and the rest of the Supporters of the Common Wealth’?²⁹ Arsinoe suggests the reverse of a sumptuary law: the well-off should be obliged to buy new clothes every month and new furniture every year; good subjects would eat four meals a day, those who did not take tobacco would be treated as recusants and gentlemen who went to bed without having drunk four bottles would be taxed double.

Responding to this appeal to the authority of the Catos and the other ‘Moral-Mongers’, the Oxford gentleman proceeds with a direct attack on the Censor of Great Britain:

I confess, I cannot be of the Opinion, that all those People that take no other Worldly Care than how to Dress, Eat, Drink and Sleep well, are so useless to Human Society, that they ought to be reckon'd among the Dead. The Comical Remonstrance of the Upholders Company, is very Witty and Diverting, and what I read some Days ago about their Interment, pleased me exceedingly, as long as I knew that the Ingenious Author of them was only in Jest, and had no design to bring it in Fashion, and make Funerals a la Mode of them; but if we may be Serious, and reflect upon all the different Parts, of which a Potent and Flourishing Society must unavoidably consist, I doubt the Banter will lose its Force.³⁰

According to the Oxford gentleman, princes are educated from infancy to be motivated by what A. O. Lovejoy called emulativeness rather than sensuality. Nonetheless hedonism in private citizens is also quite acceptable:

to be always Clean, and wear Cloaths that are Sumptuously Fashionable, to have Pompous Equipages, and be well attended, to live in Stately Dwellings, adorn'd with Rich and Modish Furniture, both for use and Magnificence, to Eat and Drink Deliciously, Treat Profusely, and have a plentiful Variety of what either Art or Nature can contribute, not only to the Ease and Comfort only, but likewise the Joy and Splendor of Life, is without doubt to be very Useful and Beneficial to the Publick; nay I am so far from allowing these to be Dead, that I think they are the very Springs that turn all the Wheels of Trade, and if the Metaphor is ever to be used, it is much more applicable to Men of Letters.³¹

Private pleasures thus produce public benefits.

No doubt Bernard Mandeville with the Oxford gentleman is commending the good things of life. Worldly enjoyment, the pleasures of the senses including aesthetic delight and the pleasure of treating our friends, are here wholeheartedly accepted. Those who take ‘Sollicitous Care’ of ‘their Backs and Bellies’ are not dead; it is they who ‘make money Circulate’. Those whom The Tatler condemns as dead need not excuse themselves or apologize for their neglect of others. They need not constantly try to improve themselves or act for the public good. They do good unwittingly by being as they are and without consciously intending to do it.

The learned on the other hand, if not actually harmful, are quite useless. Those who study Latin and Greek for their use in theology, law and medicine are despised as drudges by the true ‘Litterati’:

that illustrious Title is only due to Men of Polite Learning, that is, such as by reading the same Books twenty times over and over, become Critically versed in Classick Authors, and without Expectation, or Possibility of ever being a Farthing the better for it, pursue an endless Study, that is of no manner of use to Human Society.³¹

Men of letters deserve to be called dead if anyone does.

Mandeville, himself a learned man, perhaps even somewhat versed in the classics, as well as a physician—the most academically respectable branch of medicine—thus deflated the pretensions of learning as expounded by the learned Bickerstaff. The instrument he employs is an ‘Oxford Gentleman’. Like his creator he is no ignorant clot but rather someone who handles deftly the ordinary paraphernalia of bookishness, not hesitating to throw in an occasional Latin tag. Surely the identification of the gentleman suggests a connection with learning and the university; no one can imagine that the gentleman from Oxford is a merchant from the town or some country squire—Mandeville's version of the as yet uninvented Sir Roger de Coverley. No, the Oxford gentleman, despite his denigration of scholarship, certainly smells of the book and the midnight oil. He seems an intellectual far more likely to engage in lucubrations than is Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. It is needless to say that Mandeville's fetching this wit from Oxford was another hit at Bickerstaff; for the Censor himself had established connections with Oxford. In Tatler 30 (18 June 1709), he announced his decision that his ward, Will, should go to Oxford, where if he did not become a man of sense he should at least learn that he was a coxcomb: ‘There is in that Place such a true Spirit of Raillery and Humour, that if they can't make you a wise Man, they will certainly let you know you are a Fool.’ Is not his spirit exhibited by our Oxford gentleman? (And is his target not Bickerstaff?) Moreover, in Tatler 31 Bickerstaff announced that he had taken the universities under his protection and, judging them impartially, he would rank the tutors and pupils according to their merits. By number 39 (9 July 1709) Bickerstaff had visited Oxford. His ‘warm Inclination … to stem the … prevailing Torrent of Vice and Ignorance’ leads him to see there the highest lustre of virtue and knowledge. In Oxford, deference is accorded to wisdom and learning. So taken is Bickerstaff that he adopts the Oxford almanac even when torn from that ‘noble Society by the Business of this dirty mean World’. What could be more appropriate than that a gentleman possessed of the ‘true Spirit of Raillery and Humour’ should let Bickerstaff know that he is nothing like as wise as he supposes himself?³³

The Oxford gentleman, like Mandeville himself, is far more tolerant of this dirty mean world and the variety of ways of living in it than is the supposedly genial Censor of Great Britain. Were the learned not disposed to look down on the rest of mankind, the Oxford gentleman would not have so low an opinion of them. In Female Tatler 66, he deplores the prestige accorded to university education and the consequent tendency of the successful tradesmen to disable their children from useful activities by educating them. What good does learning do? It disqualifies its possessor from trade. People pity a young scholar who receives ten pounds a year for living in a well-off family and saying grace before dinners he shares, but not his uneducated brother who gets sixpence per day as a soldier. Latin has delightful characteristics, but ‘a Man may be a famous General, a deep Politician, or an accomplish'd Merchant, and not understand a word of it; the least of these requires a more particular Genius, greater Abilities, and more various Qualifications than any of the Three Faculties, where the learned Languages are counted necessary.’³⁴

The crucial test of Bickerstaff's version of the ideology of public and private virtue is whether those who have devoted themselves to the public good have improved their arts and thereby improved the condition of mankind. The Oxford gentleman contends that there has been no progress in divinity, ‘whose purpose is to teach us how to live well here and Happy hereafter’. A thousand years ago there were clerics notably virtuous and others notably vicious: ‘the good ones preach'd Peace, and the others Sedition’. Things are as they were among the clergy except that their divisions are worse while their followers are no better for a thousand years of effort.³⁵

Having subjected the divines to this crude and perhaps anti-clerical examination, Mandeville turned next to the remaining learned professions. Lawyers provide no more certainty than they did in antiquity—nevertheless they, and their dependants, benefit the nation by their numbers, wealth and consequent consumption. Even medicine gets short shrift from the Oxford gentleman. Despite the abundance of systems and new cures, actual success in curing the ill remains uncertain; diseases incurable in antiquity are so still. Moreover, university learning is irrelevant to curing patients. Any decent apothecary can look up the various medicines once he knows the simples and reads enough Latin to follow the recipes.

Here one may doubt that the opinions of the Oxford gentleman coincide exactly with Mandeville's own. Although both were sceptical about medical theories and systems, Mandeville continued to practise medicine. Indeed, he soon published a book under his own name, surely intended, at least in part, to publicize his own practice: some versions of the imprint include the information that the book may be obtained from the author at his own address. These medical dialogues show that Mandeville favoured an empirical approach to curing the diseases in which he specialized and warned against relying upon the prescriptions of the unsupervised apothecary—not quite the wholesale rejection of physicians in favour of apothecaries suggested by the Oxford gentleman.³⁶

But if the Oxford gentleman's strictures on the achievements of the learned are rhetorically exaggerated, they nevertheless express Mandeville's conviction that ‘it is evident, how Insignificant the Lucubrations as well as the Day-light Labours of the Learned have been in the main to Human Society’.³⁷ It is also evident that the arrogant claims of Bickerstaff for the learned and the public-spirited ought to be rejected. On the contrary, the Oxford gentleman, with Mandeville, turns to praise improvements in the everyday comforts of life provided by useful and quite humble things: for example, clocks and watches have lately been much improved. And setting aside the larger works of mechanical industry, the works of shipbuilders, millwrights and engineers, he points to the notable improvements in household furniture. ‘In what Palace would you have found Thirty Years ago a Seat so Judiciously contriv'd for the Ease and Repose of the Body, in almost every Position, as the Easy Chair in which you Sit?’ Any other type of cane chair would spoil the cream-painted wainscot. And to clinch the point there is that most beneficial of new inventions, both for the silk it uses and the labour it employs—the furbelowed scarf.³⁸

Thus Mandeville caps his attack on Isaac Bickerstaff, Richard Steele and the ideology of private and public virtue with the paradoxical praise of things small, humble, domestic and useful—chairs, watches and scarves.³⁹ To arrive at this overturning of the high-minded and righteous, Mandeville invented a theory of society that justified such paradoxical praise. Comfortable chairs, elegant creampainted wainscots and fashionable scarves were just the sort of things which attracted the attention of those useful members of society who thought of nothing but their backs and their bellies. Mandeville's new theory of society justified the activities of those who sought only their private good or pleasure—what many called vice. He thus gave a new twist to the discussion of pride and vanity. But it was not The Female Tatler which made Mandeville's views widely known. That journal may have had its readers but it never attracted the notoriety achieved by Mandeville's later works, especially The Fable of the Bees.

Notes

1. For Mandeville's life, see ‘Bernard Mandeville’, New Dictionary of National Biography (forthcoming); Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye (2 vols., Oxford, 1924), vol. 1 pp. xvii-xxx; vol. 2, pp. 380–5. Kaye's account has been supplemented by Rudolf Dekker, ‘“Private Vices, public benefits” revisited: the Dutch background of Bernard Mandeville’, History of European Ideas, 14 (1992), 481–98. Dekker gives an account of the ‘Costerman Riot’ in Rotterdam in 1690 that implicates Bernard Mandeville and his father in composing and posting a satirical poem, the ‘Sanctimonious Atheist’, against the bailiff, Van Zuijlen. The bailiff was reinstated in October 1692; Michael Mandeville was banished at the beginning of 1693, resettling in Amsterdam. In November 1693, Bernard was summoned by the London College of Physicians for practising medicine without a license: see Harold J. Cook, ‘Materialism and the passions: Dr Bernard Mandeville and the therapy of “the clever politician”’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999) 101–24. On 1 February 1699, he married Ruth Elizabeth Laurence at St Giles-in-the-Fields (Westminster). Their first child, Michael, was born on 1 March 1699.

2. The Pamphleteers: a Satyr (London, 1703). Luttrell dated his copy 9 March; it was advertised in the Flying Post on 17 June 1703 as ‘by the author of Some Fables after the Familiar Method of Mr. de la Fontaine’; see D. F. Foxon, English Verse 1701-1750: a Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions (2 vols., Cambridge, 1975), M 72; and see below, Chapter 4.

3. There were three issues of these verse fables. The first (Foxon M 73) was published by Richard Wellington; although there is no imprint on the title page, a list of books published by Wellington is appended on pp. 82-4; listed in the History of the Works of the Learned in May 1703. The second, retitled Aesop Dress'd (Foxon M 74), must have appeared soon after, for it was made up by adding a new title page and new signatures both at the beginning and the end of the sheets of the first issue (signatures, B, C, M completed and N). The text is joined in the middle of ‘The countryman and the knight’, substituting pp. 15-16 for the original pp. 1-2 (B and Bv); listed in the Post Man on 18 January 1704.

   A second, reset version of Aesop Dress'd, the third issue (Foxon M 75), bears the imprint, ‘London: Sold at Lock's-Head adjoyning to Ludgate’. It is undated; the British Library assigned it to 1710. Foxon notes it as listed in the Post Man in 1727. This issue has been reprinted by the Augustan Reprint Society and is cited here.

4. Aesop Dress'd, p. 35 (italics reversed); La Fontaine, book II, 2.

5. Aesop Dress'd, p. 37 (italics reversed); La Fontaine, II, 5.

6. Aesop Dress'd, pp. 7-10; La Fontaine, III, 2.

7. Aesop Dress'd, pp. 4-5; La Fontaine, I, 3.

8. Aesop Dress'd, pp. 25-7.

9. Ibid., pp. 27-33.

10. For further discussion see John S. Shea's introduction to the Augustan Reprint Society's edition of Aesop Dress'd (Augustan Reprint Society Publication no. 120, Los Angeles, 1966); Hector Monro, The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville (Oxford, 1975), pp. 26-30; Thomas A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York and London, 1978), pp. 26-8 and Stephen H. Daniel, ‘Political and philosophical uses of fables in eighteenth-century England’, Eighteenth Century, 28 (1982), 151-71.

11. Typhon: or The Wars Between the Gods and Giants: a Burlesque Poem in Imitation of the Comical Mons. Scarron (London, 1704), preface. Foxon M 76; advertised in the Daily Courant on 15 April 1704.

12. Ibid., p. 18.

13. Ibid., p. 6. See W. A. Speck, ‘Mandeville and the Eutopia seated in the brain’, in Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), International Archives of the History of Ideas, 81, ed. Irwin Primer (The Hague, 1975), pp. 66-79.

14. Typhon, pp. 24-5.

15. The Grumbling Hive: or Knaves Turn'd Honest (London, 1705).

16. Aesop Dress'd, pp. 62-4 (italics reversed).

17. The Grumbling Hive, lines 9-12.

18. Ibid., lines 155-6, 167-8, 197-202, 432-3 (italics reversed).

19. See Contemporaries of the Tatler and the Spectator, ed., with intro., Richmond P. Bond, Augustan Reprint Society Publication no. 47 (Los Angeles, 1954).

20. Issues of the Female Tattlers are cited by number and date with page numbers from Bernard Mandeville, By a Society of Ladies: Essays in the Female Tattler, ed. M. M. Goldsmith (Bristol, 1999). Irregularities in issue numbers occur after no. 88, viz., there are three issues numbered 88, two numbered 94, 98 and 110 and some numbers omitted; they are numbered here as they are in By a Society of Ladies, which is cited as Female tattler.

    Mandeville's contributions were first identified by Paul Bunyan Anderson, ‘Splendor out of scandal: the Lucinda-Artesia papers in the Female Tatler’, Philological Quarterly, 15 (1935), 286-300; see Gordon S. Vichert, ‘Some recent Mandeville attributions’, Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966), 459-63 and Francis McKee, ‘The Early Works of Bernard Mandeville, 1685–1715’, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1993. The evidence is conclusive for Mandeville's being the author of the Lucinda-Artesia papers. Apart from the similarity of style and content to Mandeville's other works, Female Tatler 97 (24 February 1710), pp. 206–8, prints one of Mandeville's own fables, ‘The carp’, from Aesop Dress'd; Female Tatler 98* (1 March 1710) includes ‘The wolves and sheep’; Female Tatler 100 (6 March 1710), ‘The hands, feet, and belly’ and Female Tatler 78 (4 January 1710) concludes with a poem, ‘Grinning Honour’, which was later included in Mandeville's Wishes to a Godson, with other Miscellany Poems (London, 1712). Mandeville also used the name ‘Lucinda’ for the sagacious bluestocking aunt in The Virgin Unmask'd (London, 1709; reprinted Delmar, NY, 1975).

    The authorship of the other papers in The Female Tatler not by Mandeville has not been established. The most likely ‘Mrs Crackenthorpe’ is Thomas Baker (writer of numbers 1-18 for Benjamin Bragg and 19-51 for Abigail Baldwin). The evidence for Baker's being ‘Mrs Crackenthorpe’ is given by Robert B. White, ‘A study of the Female Tattler (1709-1710)’, PhD Thesis, University of North Carolina, 1966, p. 98. The rival ‘Mrs Crackenthorpe’ (Bragg 19-44) is unknown. The identities of the other members of the ‘Society of Ladies’ has not been established. Suggested authors include Susanna Centlivre and Mary Delariviere Manley. It seems to me that one person wrote the papers by Emilia (16) and Rosella (10) whilst those by Arabella (3) and Sophronia (3) were written by two others. For a fuller discussion, see Mandeville, Female Tattler, pp. 41-8. where I also discuss Mandeville's long connection with Abigail Baldwin and her son-in-law, James Roberts.

21. Female Tatler 52 (4 November 1709). Duelling was discussed in Tatlers 25-9, 31, 38. Problems about honour occupied Bickerstaff and were taken up by Mandeville in Female Tatlers 77, 78, 80, 84 (2, 4, 9, 11 January 1710), The Fable of the Bees, Remark C, vol. 1, pp. 63-80; and in An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (London, 1732; reprinted 1971). See my introduction to the 1971 reprint.

22. Tatler 55 (16 August 1709); Female Tatler 58 (18 November 1709). Roger Grant was a frequent advertiser of his cure; see Female Tatler 62 (28 November 1709). Sir William Read, the Queen's oculist, advertised in Female Tatler 72 (21 December 1709). The advertising columns of The Tatler and The Female Tatler were stuffed with cures for asthma, coughs, colds, eye trouble, dropsy, toothache and most other common diseases as well as purges, cordials, breath-sweeteners and elixirs for wind.

    For a fuller discussion of the relations between The Tatler and The Female Tatler, see Mandeville, Female Tattler, pp. 63–72. There I suggest several instances where Steele may have been responding to The Female Tattler.

23. Tatler 96 (19 November 1709).

24. Female Tatler 62 (28 November 1709), pp. 96–9.

25. Ibid., pp. 99–100.

26. For the best account of eighteenth-century views on these traits, see A. O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore, 1961), especially pp. 88-117, 129 and on Mandeville, pp. 170-9.

27. Female Tatler 62 (28 November 1709). See F. A. Hayek, ‘Dr. Bernard Mandeville’, Lecture on a Master Mind, British Academy, 1966, Proceedings of the British Academy, 52 (1967), 125-41; Hayek's case for Mandeville's contribution to the appreciation that social institutions are the unintended consequences of a large number of individual actions over a long period of time rather than something planned would have been strengthened had he known that Mandeville explicitly expressed this view in The Female Tatler.

28. See below, Chapter 3.

29. Female Tatler 64 (2 December 1709), pp. 102–3.

30. Ibid., p. 104.

31. Ibid., pp. 104-5.

32. Ibid., p. 105.

33. The Oxford gentleman first appears in number 62, where we are told that he came in with Emilia. Whenever he appears he takes a characteristically Mandevillean attitude. Colonel Worthy, his predecessor in this role in Female Tatler 52, reappears as a more conventional military proponent of honour in Female Tatler 80 (9 January 1710), pp. 151–2. The Oxford gentleman's status is never clearly indicated, but a connection with the university is surely intended. Part of the joke is that he should be a member of the corporation so highly lauded by Bickerstaff and yet profess opinions scoffing at that gentleman. But there is no indication that the Oxford gentleman is a student as suggested by H. T. Dickinson, ‘The politics of Bernard Mandeville’, in Mandeville Studies, p. 89.

34. Female Tatler 66 (7 December 1709), pp. 109–10. The ‘Three Faculties’ are the traditional university faculties of law, medicine and theology.

35. Ibid., pp. 110-1. The accusation of sedition is aimed at Dr Sacheverell and his recent notorious sermon, The Perils of False Brethren. There is also an anti-Sacheverell squib in this issue announcing the publication of a sermon on passive obedience preached in the ‘Chief Mosque of Constantinople’.

36. Ibid., pp. 111–2.On Mandeville's medical views, see Cook, ‘Materialism and the Passions’, 101–24 and A Treatise of the Hypocondriack and Hysterick Passions, vulgarly call'd the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women (London, 1711). The book obviously had some success since it was reissued (with a new title page) in 1715 and went into a revised second edition in 1730 which was reissued as a third edition in the same year; see Bibliography, Section I. Mandeville originally owned the copyright; it was entered against his name in Stationers' Hall, 27 February 1711. A copy in the Bodleian (0 151.n.102) contains the following note: ‘The Copy of this Book is mine, I having bought it of the Author D^r. Mandeville, in the year 1711. M^r. Leach, Printer, has offer'd me several times Ten Guineas for the Copy, but I refus'd it, it being worth fifty Guineas, and will sell well if Printed again. May 31^st. 1728’. The note is signed with initials which could be J.M. or J.W.

    On the profession of medicine see Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982), pp. 166–235, esp. pp. 166–84, who suggests that the attempt of the College of Physicians to maintain a restrictive hold on the practice of medicine was failing. See also G. S. Rousseau, ‘Mandeville and Europe: medicine and philosophy’, in Mandeville Studies, p. 11 and Francis McKee, ‘Honeyed words: Bernard Mandeville and medical discourse’, in Medicine in the Enlightenment, ed. Roy Porter (Amsterdam, 1995), pp. 223–54.

37. Female Tatler 66 p. 112. Lucubrations was one of Bickerstaff’s favourite words.

38. Ibid., pp. 112-3.

39. Praise of mean, obscure or humble things is typical of Renaissance paradox; see Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: the Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ, 1966).