 Good afternoon and welcome to the National Archives in Washington, DC. I'm Colleen Chogan, Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for today's talk. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most famous and revered documents in American history. The parchment sheet on display in the National Archives rotunda may be faded, but it draws more than a million visitors a year who want to view the text that changed America's course from colony to independent nation. Even if most people have not read the entire document, millions in the United States and around the world know that the revolutionaries of 1776 believed that we have a basic right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Taking this phrase for the title of his new book, Peter Moore describes a transatlantic conversation among political and cultural figures in 18th century Britain and America. These enlightenment thinkers pursued, as Moore states in his prologue, a dream of something better. And when Thomas Jefferson and his co-authors wrote these words, they became woven into American aspirations. Peter Moore is a writer, historian, and lecturer. He is the author of Endeavor and the Weather Experiment, which were both Sunday Times bestsellers in the United Kingdom. The Weather Experiment was also chosen as one of the New York Times 100 notable books of 2015. He teaches at the University of Oxford and has lectured internationally on 18th century history and hosts a history podcast called Travels Through Time. Please welcome Peter Moore. Hello there. First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Peter Moore and I'm talking to you from my home in London, England. I'm a historian. I'm interested in the history of the 18th century, 18th century Britain predominantly. And I've written about science and voyages and murders in the past. I've now on to my fourth book, which is called Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, which I guess is a phrase a lot of you will know already. And it's a lot more political than any of my books before. So let me introduce the book for you a little bit. What have I tried to do? I've tried to look at the ideological origins of the United States of America, which is something that the historian from Harvard, Bernard Bayland did very famously during the 1960s. But I've tried to do it in a slightly different way from a British point of view. And why have I decided to do that? Well, first of all, I feel like there's a gap in scholarship. There's so much brilliant writing done about the American Revolution, which is a really, really important event in global history. But surprisingly little comes from the British point of view or actually maybe not that surprising given what the result of the conflict was. But over the last month, since the books come out, I've had time to dwell on it and some people in reviews have actually clarified what I was trying to do more with a little bit more elegance in myself. One person was saying that, and this is from the Wall Street Journal, they said that history is actually better written by the losers, which I thought was an interesting point of view. But beyond that, it was something else I really wanted to emphasize and this is something that I think is lost in the scholarship of the Revolution today and something that I really wanted to engage with this idea of continuity. And that's the idea that with the birth of the United States, it wasn't the complete end of an old system and the complete beginning of a new system entirely, that there was a lot of continuity in the story as well. The American Patriots were really, in my view, fulfilling the dreams of an earlier generation of British thinkers, as much as they were departing from Great Britain itself. So it's a it's a slightly new take on a very important and very old story before you know you should be able to see the cover of the American version of the book which came out last month, Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The title Britain and the American Dream is also a British version of the book here which you'll see also has the same title same contents but a very different jacket so I'm what I'm going to do today is go through some of the characters that appear in the book. I'm going to try and try and dwell on some vital moments in the story and hopefully show you the American Revolution from a slightly different point of view. Okay, so let me see if I can move on. Let's start at the most common point of departure for a lot of you, this is going to be a really, really familiar image. This is by Jean Leon Jerome Ferris, who in the 1930s created this idealized picture of a really famous moment in in June of 1776 so just a few weeks before the first Independence Day when Thomas Jefferson who you can see standing up here presented his draft of the declaration of independence to two of his other illustrious companions on the famous or fabled committee of five who were charged with drawing up the document by the Continental Congress you see, Jefferson is looking slightly nervous there and nervous he maybe should be because the person who's reading is Benjamin Franklin who in my opinion, probably the greatest American of all time in the middle, brooding quietly as he often did is the second president john Adams, and, and you can see Franklin now he's kind of locked in concentration concentration, looking very intently at these words and I'm going to quote to you because I think it's really interesting, the words that Franklin would have been reading so we can actually go in an immersive way into this particular picture. And these words I'm going to quote to you are going to be familiar but they're going to be eerily different to the history, you might know because this is from Jefferson's original draft of the declaration not the finished document that went through Congress and was finalized on the fourth of July, but the original attempt that he came up with, and the second of the sentences which is the famous one in the preamble goes like this. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they've hitherto remained and to assume among the powers of the earth the equal and independent station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the change. We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable that all men are created equal and independent that from that equal creation they deserve rights and inherent and inalienable rights among which at a preservation of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness and as someone who's been writing about enlightenment history for a long time it's always a phrase which has just stuck in my mind, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness so much of Jefferson's draft text actually changed during the weeks that followed this particular scene, Congress took out various parts related to King George the personal attacks on him that were portions relating to slavery that went as well, but one line that really remained pretty much entire was life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and I think it's a line which very powerfully captures this idea of the American dream this idea that you have a life given to you that it should be a life of freedom that you should be able to do what you want with a great deal of flexibility, but also that you should pursue this goal of literally happiness and it's that idea of striving questing moving forward, which has ever since really been a shorthand for the American dream which is one reason why it often is in appearance and political speeches, and so on so that's the original one thing I wanted to do in this book was actually to look at that line in a different way though, because what I've just told you is that it captures a particularly American ideal, like a distinctly American ideal, and it's very much connected to this moment in 1776 when Jefferson writes it down for the first time and we think of it most in connection with one particular day in fact the 4th of July or July 4th for you, and my idea was that the line actually, you know as well as having this, you know, history which is taken as from 1776 to today, it actually has a really interesting prehistory because of course Jefferson's job wasn't to create something entirely new what Congress was asking Jefferson to do was really to capture the spirit of the age, the spirit of the times and Jefferson's great gift was to do that with huge amounts of elegance and concision, but really what he was doing was drawing on a generation of thinkers and that took me back through time but also took me across space, back to the place which which really is most connected with the 13 colonies that broke way and that was the mother country Great Britain where I am at the moment and a lot of these ideals are actually British ideals which developed subsequently to become the American dream so let me tell you a little bit more about them. I'm going to split this talk into those three particular well use those three nouns life, liberty and happiness just as I've done in the book to tell a story, which goes from the year 1740, which is where my book begins, right through to the 1776 where it ends and where the United States begin so it's a story of beginnings and the central character in these beginnings is one of the most familiar I've already said that he, I think he's the most important and most interesting of Benjamin Franklin because my, my thinking is that he was there throughout he was there during the colonial period he was there during the revolutionary period, and he was there, right to his end involved in so many things and this picture here with Benjamin Franklin, you might find to be a rather unusual and unfamiliar one we're very familiar with the Franklin that appears on the on on your money and the Franklin of poor Richard with the long hair or the Franklin in older life who really, it seems like a benevolent grandfather but this is a portrait of him as a younger man aged around 40 it was painted in about the year 1746, I believe, and it captures him at this moment in his life. When he was in Philadelphia he'd been working as a printer for a very long time, and he's really trying to make a transition in his own life from being an artisan, a trader to something really important to me wanted to become a gentleman he wanted to move on he wants to be a person of means and you can see that in the way that he is dressed and it's kind of stiff it's formal it's a kind of sense of aspiration and looking at this portrait you imagine him to be almost one of these upwardly mobile tradesmen that you come across if I went to the Society for the promotion of arts for example in London that's that's the Franklin that he was that he is at this moment in 1746. And what I wanted to do with Franklin in this story which appears right at the beginning of the book is to capture what life was in the colonial period before any revolutionary sentiment had begun so this is back in the 1740s and Franklin at this time is incredibly clever, prosperous, connected, secure person in many ways, but he's also locked out from the spheres of the true elite he can't attain the status of a gentleman, and he starts to do something, which is really I think quite instructive. He does his famous work on electricity, and he does this for him about the year 1746 about a time this portrait is painted. He starts his work on electricity. Again, this is now passed into famous fabled history where he becomes the person who climbed Christ in the church in in Philadelphia in a storm and invented his lightning rod, and it's a story of the impressed intrepid Franklin conquering skies, and that's the story we remember, but I think there's also another important dimension to the story. But Franklin who was really stuck in his identity as, as a printer. Electricity and science offered him a way of transcending his status. It was quite a cool thing to do to be involved in electrical science at this time it connected him to a series of enlightenment thinkers in London of course the great hero was someone who was Isaac Newton who who died maybe 1520 years before this, but there was a collection of thinkers around the Royal Society that Franklin was desperate to become connected with, and we can see him here, making his play if you like imagine this to be something like a LinkedIn profile picture where he's portraying this, you know, cultivated persona of himself. And I want you to bear that in mind, because it's very important to the story that follows on. I should say, is the one character in my book, who is there at the beginning he's there in the middle. He's there at the end. As I said, he's just connected so much of the important history. And that's why he's there. But this is his world. This is colonial Philadelphia down by the banks of the Delaware this might be a familiar picture to some of you it's actually the Arch Street ferry. This is from a slightly later date from around the 1800. You'll notice is the familiar flag is there so this is a bit later on but this would be a scene that was very familiar to Franklin himself and why I put it into this particular presentation because I think it's instructive is it shows the arrival of a ship, the clamour of excitement down by the by the riverfront and this was really Franklin's life. This is what he he lived for this connection with the outside world and Philadelphia was great in this sense because it was a big city was growing but also was really connected to Europe through these ships which came from the old world month after month after month. And it's this idea in the 18 in the 1740s I really want to of emotion culturally coming from Britain to America. And let me give you a few examples of the things that Franklin was trying to do during this time we can imagine Franklin as being one of these characters he's down at the waterfront maybe trying to get a bit of gossip. A few things he was trying to do at this time. Number one, he had his Junto club, which was all about self improvement. This was a very enlightenment ideal that you take whatever you've got and you try and make yourself better. You use your capacities and you use your reason, and you strive towards becoming something better. Now Franklin's Junto was a group of leather apron to people who met weekly and they used to try and encourage people onwards and that was also connected with the with the culture in Britain. So that's one thing. The next one that I want to talk about is the lending library and a really big storyline early on in my book is Franklin's connection with a man called William strong in London he was a printer. And Franklin was eager to make that connection because it connected him to the world of ideas and ideas in this time were conveyed conveyed mostly through books, books came in on ships. So again, looking at this picture we can imagine the ships arriving in Philadelphia carrying the books and the books that Franklin wanted were not books of sermons or metaphysics. They weren't even really books of drama or fiction what he wanted with a kind of books that would be useful to him at the Junto club. So these were instructional practical books they were books about the humanities and so on. And of course the lending library that he set up at that time is now the library company of Philadelphia the oldest library in the United States today. So that's another idea that we can think of when we look at this picture. Two more things though. Next is an academy Franklin was very keen on the idea of education it's connected to his ideas with the Junto of improving yourself. The best people who had the most capacity for improvement of course, were children and it really annoyed him that Philadelphia did not have an academy when he was young so what would someone who was like himself in Philadelphia do to improve themselves. They needed to have an academy and Franklin in the late 1740s about the time of the portrait that we were looking before created this template for what he thought would be an ideal academy. And it's really interesting. Again, if we look at the details of the academy that Franklin laid out. He said, as to their studies as he's talking about the the pupils that would go would go along to the academy. As to their studies, it would be well if they could be taught everything that is useful everything that is ornamental but art is long and time is short. It is therefore proposed that if they learn those things are most likely to be useful and most ornamental, it's hard being given for the professions that they're likely to have. Again, it's very practical Franklin didn't want this to be a religious institution. He didn't think much of the colleges like Harvard up in New England he wanted it to be an enlightened kind of academy in Philadelphia. So, first of all, connected to this period of history, and the ships coming in and Franklin is the awkwardly mobile artist and I've been describing is this idea of a new magazine, which is the story I start life liberty in the pursuit of happiness with Franklin's magazine was supposed to be another medium for allowing people to improve themselves and it was to be an imitation of the gentleman's magazine which was a very very successful publication in London. It's a massive failure the story of America's first magazine I think is a fantastic one I put it right at the start of the book, and it captures Franklin as the young uncertain, but striving business person, a little bit different to the Franklin we think of when we think of poor Richard really in the 1740s we can see him with a big project of trying to bring British enlightenment culture to the East American coast, particularly to his beloved Philadelphia. Let's move across the Atlantic though because what you're looking at now is a picture of a very different place. This is a picture of chairing cross in London, and it shows a very, as I say a very different kind of place. But this really is the heart of London which was a city at this time of 650,000 people was growing fast by the end of the century would actually be a city of a million people. And it was a place that Franklin knew a little bit because he'd spent at the age of 20, 18 months or so in London working on a gap year of sorts I suppose. And even though it looks quite a calm and peaceful place in this this photo. It was huge in comparison to Philadelphia. It really was the center of of culture for the English speaking world. And if you look straight ahead of you you're looking down towards where the strand was, which takes you down to Fleet Street where all the printers are. If you look slightly to the right of the screen that would take you to Whitehall and the political quarter. So this is right at the very heart of London, where Dr Johnson famously said the full tide of human existence is to be found chairing and some of you might know this book, which I've been reading recently is out in the States at the moment, and here in the UK as well. It's called The Wager by David Gran, a writer and he's written about this famous voyage, which happened in the early 1940s. And I'm just going to tell you very quickly now about another fourth of July and this is the fourth of July in 1744. So, again a generation before independence day in London, but it was the day when Dr Johnson's treasure came back from that famous voyage, where there was a fight with the Spanish treasure galleon in the Pacific Ocean. And let me read for you this is an extract from the book which gives you a flavor. It was like in London when that treasure came back on Saturday the fourth of July 1744. The treasure that had been seized in the China sea was prepared for the final stage of its epic journey through the green English fields. After breakfast on Putney Common, which is just outside of London, a train of 32 wagons set off, the first of which was draped in a Union Jack, which had been symbolically placed over a Spanish Ensign. The head of the cavalcade strode the centurion's officers, swords drawn with the rest of the ship's company behind guarding a total cargo of 296 chests of silver, 18 of gold, and another 20 barrels of gold dust. They crossed Putney Bridge past the market gardens of Fulham and made for the fashionable expanse of Hyde Park. There they were met by kettle drummers, French horn players and trumpeters. He conducted them along Piccadilly past the Royal Palace of St James's and into Palmael where George II, who was the king at the time, his youngest son, the Duke of Cumberland and daughters, the princesses Amelia and Caroline greeted them. To Britons who increasingly were inclined to think of themselves as modern day Romans, it was a sight to savor. The parade, as several newspapers pointed out, was like an ancient triumph with Anson, who was the commander of this great voyage, playing the part of a Pompey or a Caesar. Now, I read that little extract to give you a sense of the energy and the excitement in Britain at this time. Britain had come through the revolutions of the 17th century where one of the kings had been executed and another, another king had been chased out of the kingdom. There had been an act of union which brought Scotland into this greater union of Britain, and it was just a place on the earth. It was full of energy, it was full of ideas, and it was becoming increasingly wealthy. And that's what I want you to think of when you look at this picture. And this really I suppose is what Franklin was trying to bring to America. One side of the story, another side to life, and here's another figure that I write about in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, Samuel Johnson, who is a figure many of you will know for his great dictionary of the English language, which was, which was printed in the 18th century, but he's a figure that I really wanted to bring into the book because he wrote a lot about the ideas of life. He was a direct contemporary of Franklins. And he had a very, very different take on this new modern society that was growing. Johnson, you can see here in this portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds was someone. I mean, you can see both of these things in the portrait. He had immense intellectual power, but lots of physical frailty as well. He was very nearly blind. He was stooped. Many people thought that he was quite a grotesque character and lots of jokes were made about him. He, as a writer, he was sublime and I think even today people read him in America and think about the kind of cautionary message that he conveyed. What he wrote in particular is about different types of progress. So he believed that yes, there was material progress, there was cultural progress, people were wealthier. But what about moral progress? What was Great Britain doing in the world in the 18th century? And was it doing good? And was it making people happier? This was Johnson's great concern. And he lived in Fleet Street among people who'd lived in terrible circumstances with abandoned children, gin soaked delinquents, diseased prostitutes, desperate debtors. These people had been drawn to London with the same sort of hope for a new and better life that Franklin had been promoting in his Junto Club or during his magazine or during his academy. And they'd often been taken away from the safety of their parishes and from their family networks. And they'd found great disappointment. And Johnson's work at this time, and this is how I've used him in the book, is really as a great cautionary message. And Johnson's big theme was one which obsessed people at the time and this was a theme of happiness. Great theme for 18th century Enlightenment thinkers. John wondered whether the advances of this new enlightened age had generated more happiness. To Johnson's mind it had not. He believed that while progress could benefit some, it was important to see the wider story. For example, if we go back to Anson's voyage that I talked about before, the great wagons of gold moving through London. They may well have made people rich, but what about all the sailors who died on the voyage nearly 1500 of them maybe 60% of the voyages. If I'm happy, or I didn't destroy them. So that's one thing that I really wanted to get into the book. And continuing with this idea of moral progress or moral decay is the work of Hogarth. Yeah, not as a major character, but someone who portrays the evils and the ills of 18th century British society. In particular here you can see this picture which shows the humours of an election. And this shows corruption in Britain on an unimaginable scale politically. So here you can see this bewildering mixture of drama and excess and corruption. This is a person who is a character many of you Americans might know for his farmers letters and his role during 1776 and the pre-revolutionary years. He actually came to Britain in the 1750s and he was shocked by the what he saw. He wrote, the character of Rome will equally suit the British nation. It is easy to be bought if there was but a purchaser. It's a connection with ancient Rome and that's a really, really important strand of thinking in 18th century thought and it's maybe something that I'll come back to in a moment. So, hopefully what I've done over the last 10 minutes or so is giving you a bit of a panorama of what I think about as enlightenment life. Okay. On the one hand you have the good, you have Franklin, you have, you know, the idea of moving forward of projects of excitement of the pursuit of happiness, if you like. But then you have Johnson, who is the counterpoint to Franklin. He's saying well actually watch out for what you wish for, because all of this questing after a goal will have its consequences. I think in this picture of Hogarth's here, you can see some of those consequences, but you can also see something of the opportunity and the sense of excitement. So, that's how I start the book. That's the first section, and that is an enlightenment life. Let's move on to the second of my sections though, which is called Liberty. We've done life, which took us through the 1740s into the 1750s. The 1760s was really the important decade as far as the American Revolution is concerned. This was a time when George III came to the throne in 1760. It was the time of those famous acts through Parliament, the Stamp Act in 1765 and the Townsend Act in 1767. Anyone who knows about the American Revolution knows about these things. But I also wanted to write about a different story, which I don't think is as well known. And it concerns this character here. He's called John Wilkes. John Wilkes, let me describe him to you. In 1762, he was in his late 30s. And he was a familiar figure in London's political circles with his prominent lantern jaw, his thin face, and his right eye that pointed perturbedly inwards. His teachers, along with the fact that some of his teeth had started to fall out, left Wilkes with a somewhat startling appearance. I should say in this picture, he doesn't look too bad. If you met him in real life, it was a rather different matter. He remembered once being told that his face should not be exposed to pregnant women. Wilkes is a very strange physical creation, but politically he was actually explosive. And I think there's so many similarities in his explosive insurgent political campaign against the establishment and that of Donald Trump in our time, because Trump has really kind of gathered all of this populist support behind him, and the establishment do not know what to do with him. He's branded himself as the 45th president and he is under criminal charges at the moment, and he's still running for political office. Now all of these things can be said of John Wilkes. Let me tell you John Wilkes story very quickly. As I said before, he was just a run of the mill MP in 1762 when the war with France was coming to an end, but Wilkes was opposed to the peace. He thought Britain should continue to fight against France. And when his political opponent, the Prime Minister, Lord Butte decided to conclude the peace. Wilkes wrote a series of scandalous periodicals against him this periodical was called the North Britain. And in the North Britain, Wilkes was funny. He was incisive. He was sarcastic. And in the end, he was actually libelous and then the 45th number remember that number 45 again. Wilkes accused not only Lord Butte of misleading the people, but he accused King George himself of lying to the British people. That was one step too far. Wilkes's house was raided. All of his property was taken away. He was arrested. He was put into the Tower of London, but on a legal technicality some might say he was released. But the establishment would just were determined to destroy Wilkes. He in a very famous session in Parliament was was assailed by his opponents. They had many charges that they brought out against him. In particular, he was, he was accused of writing an obscene poem. He was eventually expelled from Parliament and pronounced an outlaw and he had to run away to exile in Paris and he spent time on the continent. At this point, he had no money left. But in 1768, he returned in this spectacular story which I tell in the book, and he managed to get himself reelected as an MP, despite the fact he was under criminal charges despite the fact he was a debtor. And this was a shocking story for many people, but he was still a member of Parliament when he was arrested and taken away and put in prison once again. Now Wilkes's story is quite well known. But it has particularly currents, particular currency to the American Revolution because the great cry for Wilkes was Wilkes and Liberty. The people who supported him were called the sons of Liberty. So again, there's an echo of the American Revolution there we can see. Here, his story was followed obsessively all the newspapers from the year 1763 onwards, followed Wilkes's story week after week after week. And because they did not know Wilkes's character he was actually in true fact he was quite a profligate character and he did many moral things. But in America he was seen as a champion, a beacon and people like John Adams wrote to him from Massachusetts saying that you're the last great hope for Liberty and the great British Constitution that is falling around and happening at the same time as the Stamp Act and the Townsend duties and the arrival of the red coats in Boston in 1768. John Wilkes's story took on a particular currency in America. He was once invited to go to Massachusetts I think in 1768 he didn't take that offer up, but it's amazing to think what would have happened. To the American Patriots Wilkes's story was just seen as more evidence that there was a conspiracy against Liberty by people in Great Britain and I write about Wilkes's story in full in the book and that's really I suppose the central dramatic narrative of the middle portion of the Here you can see one of Hogarth's woodcuts which shows the great panorama of the political agitations in England at the time of the peace of Paris. It's full of allegory and symbolism. If you look at the plinth in the middle you can see King George trying to extinguish a fire. But if you actually look at the top of the screen, you'll see that the King is being hampered in his efforts by two people high up who are pointing their own fire hoses at the King. And one of those of course is John Wilkes. And this is a scene of chaos and disorder and it captures what had happened in British politics in the 1760s. And all of this was so important to the early stages of the revolutionary movement. This is a big argument of Bernard Baylands I spoke about before this conspiracy against Liberty that people in the colonies believed was happening. Wilkes was their hero, and now you can see him trying to thwart King George. There's another character I want to bring in at this point. He is connected to the story of Liberty and Britain. Someone else actually, he was important in America as well. This is Catherine Macaulay and she's here not only to remind us that there were women involved in the story as well as men, but just this connection with the ancient world of Rome and Greece because Catherine Macaulay was a completely novel kind of character in the 1760s. She was a woman historian, she was erudite, she was clever and she started writing these very political history books, which talked about the breakdown of Liberty in ancient Rome. You can see her at the start of her kind of rise to fame and for people who thought Wilkes was a little bit too dangerous and a little bit too immoral to support. Catherine Macaulay was an alternative and she was one of the, I suppose, most staunch defenders of Liberty in England in the 1760s. Her correspondence in the American colonies were many. Benjamin Rush used to write to her, John Adams used to write to her, John Dickinson used to write to her and it's really funny looking back at Macaulay's letters now and finding these letters from these great figures in American history and they're really begging for her attention. So there's a kind of topsy turvenous about her and there's another, I think if I was to tell you one thing about Macaulay's to go and have a look at is there's a particular political tract which she brought out in 1767 when she's discussing her idea of what an ideal community should be and she talks about a political system which is very, very similar to the political system which exists in America today. There would be no king, she says, she doesn't want to have a king, she wants to have a republic and she wants to have two legislative bodies, one Harris of the people as she calls it and one Senate. The Harris of the people would be larger, the Senate would have the wiser people in it and they would have continual motion. And it's a really eerie piece of writing to look at for us today when we know what happens afterwards. I'll just quote to you at the end, one thing that Catherine Macaulay says, of all the various modes of republics that could exist, she writes, it's only the democratic system, rightly balanced, which can secure the virtue, the liberty and the happiness of society. Again, you can get a sense of that Jeffersonian sentence in embryo or in formation, if you like. Catherine Macaulay I think is someone who deserves to be much more celebrated in the States today because she was such a friend to America. I should say that she was the first of the British radicals to come across after the the peace of Paris and 1783. She stayed with George Washington at Mount Vernon and she, she talked to her about plans for a future American Constitution. She's pretty much forgotten in Britain today, although I'm hoping to change a bit of that. You can catch a little bit of a sight of her in this particular picture. What Macaulay was aiming at, and which is really, really important for us to remember is this ideal of happiness, and I mentioned earlier with Johnson. Happiness really was, I think there's a scholar who talks about it being a revolutionary new ideal in the Enlightenment age. If you think about previous areas in history, people used to hope mostly to live a kind of secure life, a good life, a meaningful life on planet Earth. Real riches, real pleasures were to be experienced in the afterlife in heaven. And in the Enlightenment you see a shifting of emphasis where people start to want to experience happiness in the here and now. And this picture that you're looking at here that I'm showing you is a real good expression of this. It's from one of Cook's voyages. So Captain Cook who made these famous voyages a bit like the Apollo missions of the 1960s, I always think. So these missions to the moon then are similar to Cook's voyages to the Pacific Ocean in the, in the 1760s and 1770s and people used to think of the islands that Cook found or charted and the people that he encountered as living a better, more utopian ideal. I'm looking at a picture from Tahiti or French Polynesia today, and you can see this magical quality to the light the dramatic landscapes, the sense of freedom and this was what Enlightenment people were really interested in and I should say, when Cook went to New Holland, which is modern day Australia, one of the most interesting of his journal entries is this one, when he's sailing away from Australia and he's just met the Aboriginal people for the first time and he says, I believe them to be far more happier than we Europeans being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but with the necessary convenience so much sought after in Europe, they're happy in not knowing the use of all of these things they live in a tranquility, which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition, the earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all the necessary for life. They covered not magnificent houses and households and stuff that they live in a warm and fine climate and enjoy a very wholesome air. So they have a very little need of clothing and all the rest of but Cook goes on to talk about this utopian ideal that was sweeping through British and in the colonies as well in the 1770s this idea that they were, you know, the Enlightenment was creating a happier world that people should enjoy. But as of course, as we know, the reality was quite different in the colonies here you can see one of the very earliest illustrations of a confrontation between the Redcoats and the Patriots in Charlestown so this would be I think the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. Where's the happiness here, it's such a contrast with the ideals of happiness that we're being written about by people not only like Cook and Macaulay and Wilkes, but also Johnson as well. There's no happiness here there's only chaos and disorder you can see these houses that run fire in the distance, and there's a great sense of discordance about this image. I'm just going to say something quickly here about the phrase the pursuit of happiness. And I've recently written a piece for the Atlantic you can go and have a look at that if you want to find out more about it but the pursuit of happiness is a phrase, which appears in Samuel Johnson's writing five times before the year 1776 we know Jefferson was a reader of Johnson, so there's a tantalizing question about whether Johnson influenced Jefferson directly or indirectly, but this is the idea I wanted to engage with in the final portion of the book. And the character through which I've decided to do this is one that you might know about he's called Thomas Payne, and he came to America in he came to Philadelphia indeed in 1774, and he brought with him the writing style of Wilkes, the utopian ideals of Macaulay. So much energy of migration, and a sense of disenchantment with Britain, he wanted in his own phrase to recreate the world, a new and he can see Thomas Payne who's, I suppose considered today as the person who ignited the revolution with that famous pamphlet common sense. Let me read for you just for a second. He says, this is from his crisis papers. When my country into which I had just set my foot was set on fire about my ears. It was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir. That's Payne writing with the energy that he brought to America. I'll read a little bit more because I think it's quite interesting and this connects a few of the threads I've been talking about. Payne had been there during Wilkes's riots in the 1760s. He doubtless read the North Britain that attacked King George along with everyone else. He knew the power of the written word. And when he got to Philadelphia. He has one of his first jobs was to edit the Pennsylvania magazine, which was another magazine. This one more successful, which was published in 1775 and 1776 and Payne writes, which is naturally a volunteer it delights in action. The proper discipline is capable of great execution to the perfect master in the art of bush fighting, and though it's tax with more subtlety than science. It is often defeated a whole regiment of heavy artillery. Payne's common sense is probably a publication that a lot of you know, and it was published in July, sorry, in January of 1776. And it converted many people in the American colonies from being. I suppose patriots into being fierce strivers for independence. It was him in common sense, he argued that it was time for a declaration to be made to for the reasons for a new country to be laid out for the world. And so I think in some senses we can see Thomas Jefferson's work in 1776 and the Continental Congress is acting upon pains upon his advice. And so the stories come full circle, you can see life, the questing form of enlightenment existence that goes in parallel Britain and America together, Liberty, the 1760s, Wilkes, McCawley, the conspiracy that people start to believe. And then this quest for happiness, which takes more power as a 1770s go on. In 1776, of course, it all comes together, and you end up with the creation of a new country, one that Thomas Payne probably was one of the first to name in print as the United States of America. It's been a wonderful story for me to write the characters are so rich and vivid. I hope you will enjoy it too. Thank you very much for your time today.