The London of the Enlightenment

From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. He is describing Samuel Johnson's London, (1737-1784, population approx. 700,000) and contrasting it sometimes favorably (in terms of intellectual dynamism) and sometimes unfavorably (in terms of cleanliness and safety) with Antonine Rome (138-180 AD) and Hangzhou, China (960-1279 AD).

In 1750, the population of all of England was roughly that of Atlanta, Georgia today - 5.5 million people. We have in Atlanta some great academic, commercial, intellectual, research, and artistic talents. I am prepared to believe that the overall intellectual IQ/capacity of Atlanta is massively greater than that of England in 1750. However, I don't think that Atlanta or any other community of 5.5 million in the US could cobble together a representation of intellects as described below and that would be comparably significant as seen from the year 2260.

Densely packed is the right descriptor for Johnson's intellectual London writ large. The city was jammed with men of immense accomplishment, sometimes resident, sometimes visitors, and they knew each other across disciplines and professions in a way that rarely happens today. In Johnson's London, this intellectual cross-fertilization was reified in The Club, which formed in the winter of 1763-1764. It was nothing like the imposing institutions that became the famous London clubs of 19C, just a group of men getting together every Monday night at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street. But those men included statesmen James Fox and William Wyndham, linguist Sir William Jones, naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, dramatists Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, actor David Garrick, Bishop Percy, historian Edward Gibbon, Johnson himself, and two men who together were to provide the intellectual templates for the Whigs and the Torries of British politics for the next century, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Other eras have had their roundtables and salons, but in 18C London they were peopled by men who would change the intellectual shape of the West, for Samuel Johnson's London was above all the London of the Enlightenment.