Abstract
Since 1688, and throughout the eighteenth century, British society had undergone a dramatic and drastic transformation on every front. Though Britain experienced no political revolution, the eighteenth century was nevertheless a period of revolutions: in agriculture, industry and finance. Since my book deals with the discourse of the new middle class, I shall look at the socio-cultural conditions of the eighteenth century in the light of the consumer revolution. With the expansion of the capitalist mode of production,’ middling’ sorts of people were emerging with increasing economic power and self-confidence.1 In 1719, Daniel Defoe attempted to vindicate the new commercial class, arguing that the ‘middling’ rank was the best, indeed the most respectable, class in society: the middle State … [is] the best State in the World, the most suited to human Happiness, not exposed to the Miseries and Hardships, the Labour and Sufferings of the mechanick Part of Mankind, and not embarrass’d with the Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy of the upper Part of Mankind.2
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Chapter 2 The bourgeois cultural revolution
2 Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 3rd edn (London: W. Taylor, 1719) p. 3.
4 Cited in L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660±1760 (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 1.
5 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) in M. J. Adler (ed.), Great Books of the Western World, 2nd edn (Chicago: Encyclopñdia Britannica, 1990) XXXVI, 298.
7 N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982) p. 1.
8 J. W. von Archenholz, A Picture of England (London, 1789). Cited in McKendrick, et al., The Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 10.
10 J. Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) p. 9.
11 Sekora, Luxury, p. 1. See also C. J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. xii.
17 Leigh Hunt, ‘Preface, including Cursory Observations on Poetry and Cheerfulness’ in Foliage; or Poems Original and Translated (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818) pp. 9±39.
19 See J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997); J. H. Plumb, Georgian Delights (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); R. Porter and M. M. Roberts (eds), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1996).
21 R. Porter, ‘Material Pleasures in the Consumer Society’ in Porter and Roberts (eds), Pleasure, p. 34. See also S. David, Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1998).
24 See R. Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) pp. 160±84.
27 P. Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) I, 31.
28 R. J. White (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) VI, 14.
31 See A. Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780±1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 80:
39 Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini, A Poem (London: John Murray, 1816) pp. xiv±xv.
47 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth- Century Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) p. xxvi.
71 J. Stillinger (ed.), John Keats: Complete Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982) p. 435. All poetical texts of Keats are cited from this edition.
89 P. P. Howe (ed.), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1932) XI, 177.
90 See A. Nicholson (ed.), Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) p. 159.
92 See M. Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender and History in Cultural Analysis, 1730 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) pp. 35±70.
93 Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy (1800) sold 26,000 copies, going through seven editions in three years, whereas Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) sold only hundreds. See R. Sales, English Literature in History 1780±1830: Pastoral and Politics (London: Hutchinson, 1983) p. 18.
96 Curran, ‘Romantic Poetry’, pp. 223±6. See also M. Butler, ‘Repossessingthe Past: the Case for an Open Literary History’ in Marjorie Levinson, et al., Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) p. 67.
97 L. Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800±1850 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) pp. 20±1.
108 See L. A. Marchand (ed.), Byron’s Letters and Journals (London: John Murray, 1976) VI, 47.
115 K. N. Cameron and D. H. Reiman (eds), Shelley and his Circle 1773±1822 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973) VI, 740.
122 R. Woof and S. Hebron, John Keats (Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, 1995) p. 143.
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© 2001 Ayumi Mizukoshi
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Mizukoshi, A. (2001). The Bourgeois Cultural Revolution. In: Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure. Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230285903_2
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