Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), would have recoiled at any implication that he was a libertine. His antipathy to libertinism is obvious, and examples are plentiful in his writings. His major work, the Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), consistently uses the words “libertine” and “rake” as insults; in all of his writings sensual pleasures are disparaged as base and animalistic threats to human virtue. And despite the third earl's widespread reputation as a freethinker in matters religious, he always insisted that liberty of thought did not imply a freedom from moral restraint.

Certainly Shaftesbury's early reputation was more that of a shy and unsociable recluse rather than that of a rakish mondain. In 1721, John Toland thought it necessary to defend his late friend from accusations of unsociability, not of licentiousness. He claimed that Shaftesbury's enemies “gave out that he was too bookish, because not given to play, nor assiduous at court; that he was no good companion, because not a rake nor a hard drinker, and that he was no man of the world, because not selfish nor open to bribes.” Toland also remarked how Shaftesbury frowned upon the “extravagant liberties” taken by “both sexes” even without having lived “to see masquerades, or the ancient Bacchanals revived, nor to hear of promiscuous clubs.” Indeed, Lord Ashley's own private papers reveal that he was quite uncomfortable in the polite world of England's social elite; he much preferred the pastoral tranquillity of his Dorset estate and the relaxed company of his most trusted friends.

The newspaper archive is, potentially, the largest untapped source of material concerning the popular belief in witchcraft and magic for the period after the formal cessation of the witchcraft trials in 1736. Several historians have successfully exploited the newspaper archive to examine popular customs in the modern period. However, little use has been made of newspapers to examine magical beliefs in the period defined by the decline of learned belief in witchcraft during the early eighteenth century and the eventual demise of popular belief in witchcraft two centuries later. Writing some fifty years ago, L. F. Newman noted that many witchcraft cases “only appear in the local Press of each district and extensive search is necessary to trace cases.” Newman hoped that his own very brief search would act as a catalyst for more intensive studies. Unfortunately, no one has conducted such work, and our understanding of the extent and influence of witchcraft and magic in the modern period is much the poorer for it. The present discussion, which seeks to begin that task, is based on short searches through various newspapers from around the country, the following up of secondary references, and an extensive, systematic ongoing survey of Somerset newspapers.

As Gustav Henningsen has observed, the newspaper has an important advantage over the folklore record in that it “always shows us the tradition in a concrete social context” and also provides a definite chronological basis. The combined exploration of folkloric sources and newspapers provides great potential for the regional study of witchcraft and magic in defined cultural settings.

Each of these statements was made as part of the public debate about enacting protective labor legislation in England. They were diverse manifestations of a single idea—the idea that women's work outside the home was dangerous to society and required state intervention. Between 1830 and 1914, a discourse of danger dominated the public discussion of female labor. Yet, as the opening quotations suggest, different types of danger were emphasized at various times.

As Stefan Collini remarks in a recent paper comparing twentieth-century French and British intellectuals, the sense that Britain has had no intellectuals has been a significant element in British national identity. Collini rightly observes, “Any discussion in contemporary Britain of the topic of ‘intellectuals’ is sooner or later touched by the cliché that the reality of the phenomenon, like the origins of the term, is located in Continental Europe, and that British society, whether for reasons of history, culture or national psychology, is marked by the absence of ‘intellectuals.’” One might add that a closely related assumption has been equally significant: namely, that while the British may have had some intellectuals, they have paid little attention to them. As Denis Brogan once said, in a typical observation on British culture, “We British don't take our intellectuals too seriously.”

The purpose of this article is to suggest an explanation for this feature of British national identity. As the recent literature on national identity tells us, a society's sense of national characteristics is culturally constructed; thus we should be skeptical about any assertions concerning either the absence of intellectuals or the lack of influence by intellectuals in British culture.