In the Library
Letters on England
Voltaire, 1733
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by John Lockman (1733)
- Chapters
- Chapters 24
- Length
- Length 37k words
£1.99
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Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice
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About the book
Walk into the Royal Exchange in London and you find the Jew, the Muslim and the Christian settling their accounts together, giving the name of infidel to nobody but a bankrupt. Voltaire, freshly out of the Bastille and freshly exiled, looked at England the way a starving man looks at a laid table: the Quakers who would not remove their hats, mothers letting their children be inoculated against smallpox, a country where a mathematician was buried in Westminster Abbey with the honours of a king, and where a lord's younger brother went into trade without shame. Every admiring sentence about the English is a knife held quietly against France, and the French authorities read it exactly that way. What still thrills is his appetite, his delight in a place where thinking out loud was not yet a crime. The Parlement of Paris had the book burned by the public hangman and Voltaire ran for the countryside, which is one way of conceding that nothing is more dangerous than a description of somewhere else.