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Prose

Notes Addison’s essays that are cited as evidence, as well as some other passages from these essays. In
response to the charge that denying the existence of bourgeois ideology in the essays is to empty
them of all ideological content (on grounds that if Addison’s ideology is not bourgeois it cannot be
anything), I will further suggest that insofar as they serve, promote, or justify the interests of any
social groups, Addison’s essays serve the interests of the diverse groups that were represented by
what these groups, their opponents, and historians call “Whigs.” This becomes clear if, again, we
take into account some of the work of historians of Augustan society and political thought ignored
and misread by literary critics bent on making Addison (and other eighteenth-century figures) a
bourgeois ideologue. This is not, however, to say that Whig ideology is the essence of these essays,
or that these essays are reducible to what might be taken as a Whig political or social statement.
Self Assessment

1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Akenside got the idea for the poem during a visit of Morpeth in
(a) 1738 (b) 1735 (c) 1730 (d) 1740
(ii) ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ was written by
(a) Charles Lamb (b) Addison
(c) David Hume (d) None of these
(iii) Unless all animals were allured by the beauty of their own species, Generation would be
at an End, and the Earth unpeopled - According to
(a) Addison (b) Darwin
(c) Charles Lamb (d) None of these

11.7 Summary

• ‘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 the 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 part 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 surprising,
more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.
• ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ is a splendid cornucopia of a book. It describes the
contortions of the eighteenth century as it developed as a culture…It is full of pure
delight…The marvel of this book is that in writing in exuberant detail about the past, Brewer
succeeds in illuminating the present…This book wears its massive scholarship lightly. I hope
some of our new political masters have time to read it, for it is a history that teaches us many
lessons.” PETER HALL, ‘Observer’

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