Sir Roy Porter and the sense of self

Flesh in the Age of Reason. Roy Porter. Allen Lane. [pounds sterling]25.00. xviii + 574 pages. ISBN 0-713-99149-6.

Sir Roy Porter, sometime professor of the social history of medicine, is already known and highly regarded for works such as English Society in the Eighteenth Century and Enlightenment. He was working on this present volume at the time of his death two years ago, and it is clear that he died 'at the height of his powers', as Simon Schama comments in his affectionate Foreword.

To all of his writing, Sir Roy brought a great enthusiasm for a wide variety of topics, combined with a sharp eye for detail and an ability to communicate the excitement of ideas for those to whom they first occurred. This book is no exception; it covers a breathtaking range of topics that are not, however, approached in a pedestrian, narrative fashion. His technique was, rather, to traverse the web of ideas as they are spun, leaping from skein to skein, and creating a perpetual sensation of discovery for the reader, along with a real insight into the organic manner by which human thinking has in fact progressed. His cast of characters are, like himself, much more than scholars. His Johnson is a man whose dictionary, though scholarly, was just as much a vehicle for the development of his own peculiar brand of dualism. His Gibbon is ontologist as much as imperial historian, the author of an autobiography with a peculiarly eighteenth-century capacity, like Tristram Shandy, to proliferate: 'The historian of Rome', the author wryly comments, 'evidently found imagining himself trickier than appraising an empire'.

The study of medical ideas has been a peculiarly fertile ground for an historian specialising in the Enlightenment, and in the study of the emergence of modern ideas of selfhood. Accompanying that emergent concept, the reader discovers, are many notions that mark the creation of a world that is recognisably our own, including ideas of privacy and their relation to the development of the novel. Along with the acquisition of a world empire, the great minds of our forebears created vast new territories to be explored; while painters turned their eyes to landscapes, writers were being equipped with the conceptual craft to journey into inscapes. It is easy to forget, post-Tolstoy, post-Eliot, how much the novel was reviled, and its adherents warned against the over-indulgence of 'reading, that solitary vice'. Porter shows how these moral anxieties were linked to an uneasiness about the possibility of impressionable young readers fashioning their selfhood according to fictional models.

Having taken us on an exhilarating quest through the ideas of cultural landmarks ranging from Johnson and Swift to Blake and Byron, Sir Roy Porter ends by considering the rapid transformations resulting from the scientific and ontological pressures of our current age. He suggests that the sense of self is once again evolving, or mutating, into previously unthinkable forms. As we reach the end of this, his last book, we realise that as this century progresses, his witty and erudite commentary will indeed be missed.

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