The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English "high culture" in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.
This book is a carefully annotated selection from the popular culture of the eighteenth century. Each chapter focuses on not only a particular theme but also a particular story, often illustrated by contemporary newspaper reports. It makes available to any reader with an interest in the period material that was once popular but has long been buried.
This collection of eight new essays investigates ways in which significant kinds of 18th-century writings were designed and received by different audiences. Rivers explores the answers to certain crucial questions about the contemporary use of books. This new edition contains the results of important new research by well known specialists in the field of book and publishing history over the last two decades.
As scholarly interest in popular culture has grown, more and more British and American universities have been introducing courses in popular culture, now seen as an essential aspect of historical investigation. This volume answers the need for a book focusing on England (unlike Peter Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978), and over a broad time period (unlike Barry Reay's Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (1985)), which will fulfil it's aim of appealing both to specialists and students coming new to the subject. Tim Harris has assembled a very strong team of contributors who will ensure a very lively and interesting collection of essays.
This volume is concerned with markets, market culture and popular protest in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. The chapters focus upon both urban and rural communities: towns and cities, villages and corporations, colliers and tradesmen all feature in these studies since the market was ubiquitous and universal. How it was managed, however, varied from place to place and from time to time and the process of management provides us with a major insight into the social, political and economic relationships of eighteenth-century Britain. Some readers will see in these chapters evidence of the heterogeneity of these relations, but others will recognize that, for all the apparent differences, on basic issues of provisioning there was a remarkable uniformity. Following an introductory chapter, contributions focus on protest in relation to customary corn measures, opposition to turnpikes, resistance to the Cider Tax, scarcity and market management in Bristol, the moral economy of "the English middling sort", Oxford food riots and the Irish famine 1799–1801.
A rollicking review of popular culture in 18th century Britain this text turns away from sentimental and polite literature to focus instead on the jestbooks, farces, comic periodicals variety shows and minor comic novels that portray a society in which no subject was taboo and political correctness unimagined.
This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature. The breadth and depth of the contributions give a much fuller and more nuanced picture of what was being widely published and read during this period than has previously been available. It will be of great value to scholars and students of eighteenth-century popular culture and literature, print history and the book trade, ballad and folk studies, children’s literature, and social history.