The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the beginning and improvement of English "high tradition" within the eighteenth century. It charts the expansion of a literary and creative international fostered through publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, photo purchasers and auctioneers, and provided to th public in coffee-houses, live performance halls, libraries, theatres and enjoyment gardens. In 1660, there have been few expert authors, musicians and painters, no public live performance sequence, galleries, newspaper critics or reports. through the sunrise of the 19th century they have been all aprt of the cultural lifetime of the nation.
John Brewer's captivating publication explains how this occurred and recreates the realm within which the good works of English eighteenth-century artwork have been made. Its goal is to teach how literature, portray, song and the theatre have been communicated to a public more and more avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub road, rummages the cabinets of bookshops and libraries, friends via printsellers' store home windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the curtain at Drury Lane and Covent backyard. It takes us out of homosexual and Boswell's London to go to the debating golf equipment, poetry circles, ballrooms, live performance halls, track gala's, theatres and assemblies that made the tradition of English provincial cities, and exhibits us how the nationwide panorama grew to become considered one of Britain's maximum cultural treasures. It unearths to us an image of English inventive and literary existence within the eighteenth century much less customary, yet extra suprising, extra a number of and extra convincing than any we've seen before.