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.
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