«The Burden and the Heat of Common Affairs»: Walter Bagehot and Bourgeois Happiness

Abstract

There is no systematic treatment of the concept of happiness in Bagehot’s essays, but oblique references to it crop up frequently, often in relation to what might be termed the pursuit of ‘experience’. Whether or not money can buy happiness, being gifted with “an experiencing nature” (Bagehot I, 174) certainly helps in the quest for personal satisfaction, as Bagehot suggests in his discussions of Shakespeare, Macaulay, Cowper, and Scott. A passionate engagement with the business of life, the willingness to be “immersed in matter” (Bagehot I, 402), in the hic et nunc of “common affairs”, does not guarantee supreme felicity but increases the chances of experiencing a secondary form of happiness, almost in- distinguishable from the sheer enjoyment of vita activa. In this paper, I look at Bagehot’s literary essays, mostly published in the 1850s, in which ideas of happiness, pleasure, enjoyment, and satisfaction acquire class-specific connotations. As a man of business speaking to men of business, he was inclined to eulogize the virtues of vita activa and the pleasures to be derived from a healthy regime of continuous contact with the unpredictable and exciting world of affairs. As the organic intellectual of the commercial middle classes, he conferred upon their values, aspirations and experiences a high degree of cultural respectability. It is the mercantile community that provides some of the standards according to which even literary excellence is reassessed.