A Subject for Taste

Cultural interpretations of eighteenth-century English history, and cultural histories of eighteenth-century England, have become something of a fashion. This reflects not only recent trends in historiography, such as ‘the cultural turn’, but also non-professional perceptions of the period as a high point in the history of English culture—something to be seen in the considerable social kudos and financial value now attached to its artefacts. Jeremy Black turns his compendious knowledge of the eighteenth century to good use to offer a sophisticated but accessible ‘guide’ to the subject. Chapter One provides an introductory framework, emphasising the complexity and ambivalence of eighteenth-century culture, and, while acknowledging the importance of context, cautioning that ‘the political and social location of stylistic and cultural developments ... is far from easy’ (p. 16). Armed with this warning, the next five chapters attempt to give some social and political locus to the subject, exploring ‘the varied spheres of patronage’ (p. x), with separate studies of the Crown, the aristocracy, religion, the middling orders and the ‘Pleasures for the Many’. English monarchs emerge as relatively poor patrons in comparison to their European counterparts, the aristocracy as the force behind two of the most important aesthetic products of the period, the country house and the landscape garden, and the church and religion as more influential as cultural instigators than would tally with the notion of an age of religious torpor and secularisation. Though emphasising the increasing importance of the middling orders as patrons, Black questions the dominant and dynamic role attributed to them by some commentators, while in the case of ‘the many’ (a phrase such as ‘lower orders’ seems to have been deliberately avoided) he challenges the notion of separate high and popular cultures, stresses the ‘very porous social boundaries’ (p. 127) of the period which allowed popular access to so-called polite pastimes, and emphasises the importance of a ‘common culture ... A shared currency of interests, notions and idioms ... matched by a mutual interchange of ideas’ (p. 130). Print culture, not new but becoming ‘more insistent in English culture and society’ (p. 147), is the focus of Chapter Seven, and ‘styles’—perhaps the most difficult of all issues for an historian to make sense of—the subject of Chapter Eight. The final two chapters address two polarities of spatial identity that contributed so much to the paradoxical character of eighteenth-century culture: the metropolis and the provinces, and cosmopolitanism and xenophobia

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Aristocracy (class · Art · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Taste · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Psychology