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turn to writing until his fifties. His first novel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, focused on a servant girl’s resistance to numerous seduction attempts by her master. Finally, by reading the girl’s letters describing her feelings about his efforts, the master realizes that she has a good mind as well as an attractive body and marries her. Virtue is rewarded. Pamela won Richardson a large audience as he appealed to the growing cult of sensibility in the eighteenth century—the taste for the sentimental and emotional. Samuel Johnson, another great English writer of the century and an even greater wit, remarked, “If you were to read Richardson for the story … you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment.”

Reacting against the moral seriousness of Richardson, Henry Fielding (1707–1754) wrote novels about people without scruples who survived by their wits. His best work was The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, a lengthy novel about the numerous adventures of a young scoundrel. Fielding presented scenes of English life from the hovels of London to the country houses of the aristocracy. In a number of hilarious episodes, he described characters akin to real types in English society. Although he emphasized action rather than inner feeling, Fielding did his own moralizing by attacking the hypocrisy of his age.

THE WRITING OF HISTORY The philosophes were responsible for creating a revolution in the writing of history. Their secular orientation caused them to eliminate the role of God in history and freed them to concentrate on events themselves and search for causal relationships in the natural world. Earlier, the humanist historians of the Renaissance had also placed their histories in purely secular settings, but not with the same intensity and complete removal of God.

The philosophe-historians also broadened the scope of history from the humanists’ preoccupation with politics. Politics still predominated in the work of Enlightenment historians, but they also paid attention to economic, social, intellectual, and cultural developments. As Voltaire explained in his masterpiece, The Age of Louis XIV: “It is not merely the life of Louis XIV that we propose to write; we have a wider aim in view. We shall endeavor to depict for posterity, not the actions of a single man, but the spirit of men in the most enlightened age the world has ever seen.”11. In seeking to describe the “totality of past human experience,” Voltaire initiated the modern ideal of social history.

The weaknesses of these philosophe-historians stemmed from their preoccupations as philosophes. Following the ideals of the classics that dominated their minds, the philosophes sought to instruct as well as entertain. Their goal was to help civilize their age, and history could play a role by revealing its lessons according to their vision. Their emphasis on science and reason and their dislike of Christianity made them less than sympathetic to the period we call the Middle Ages. This is particularly noticeable in the other great masterpiece of eighteenth-century historiography, the six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1737– 1794). Although Gibbon thought that the decline of Rome had many causes, he portrayed the growth of Christianity as a major reason for Rome’s eventual collapse. Like some of the philosophes, Gibbon believed in the idea of progress and, in reflecting on the decline and fall of Rome, expressed his optimism about the future of European civilization and the ability of Europeans to avoid the fate of the Romans.

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FILM & HISTORY

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Amadeus (1984)

Directed by Milos Forman (who won the Academy Award for Best Director), Amadeus is a visually stunning Academy Award–winning film based on the relationship of two eighteenth-century composers, Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The movie is also the story of Mozart’s musical genius. Written by Peter Shaffer, the movie is based on Shaffer’s stage play of the same name.

A fictional account of the relationship between Salieri and Mozart,