Antiques

[An] advantage of industry and of refinements in the mechanical arts [is] that they commonly produce some refinements in the liberal [arts]; nor can one be carried to perfection, without being accompanied, in some degree, with the other. The same age which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers and ship-carpenters.... The spirit of the age affects all the arts, and the minds of men being once roused from their lethargy, and put into a fermentation, turn themselves on all sides, and carry improvements into every art and science.

David Hume, "Of Refinement in the Arts," Political Discourses, 1752.

Georgian England is often portrayed in literature and in art--in portraits and "conversation pieces"--as a golden age of elegance, wit, and tradition. Here was an Arcadian idyll of rustic villages and hamlets, where time stood still and generations of beer-guzzling and roast-beef-eating, four-square country bumpkins plowed the patriarchal furrows. At the top of the social pyramid were Toby-jug squires flanked by their dogs and deferential retainers on their vast country estates. Such evocations of Georgian life may be more myth than reality. A closer reading of the literature and a more thorough study of the fine and decorative arts of the eighteenth century indicate that English life was disparate, fluid, and streaked with contrasts and anomalies. Eminent Georgians were often profit-hungry capitalists, and laborers were as insistent on their rights as modern trade unionists. The ups and downs of fortune is one of the major themes from Robinson Crusoe to Roderick Random.

England's rise was the triumph of a commercial and urban society, not the achievement of a royal court. London became the fastest growing metropolis in Europe, a city of riches, where flagging reputations could be revived, fortunes repaired, and new careers launched without the opposition of well-established rivals. Here the middle class explored new and radical ideas and made their views known in newspapers and journals that were themselves part of the new economy.

And, as David Hume and his fellow Scotsman Adam Smith recognized, the many forms of cooperation and interdependence created by global trade propagated taste and encouraged the refinement of manners. "Of all our favourite Words lately," a writer in the London Universal Spectator noted in 1747, "none has been more in Vogue, nor so long held its Esteem, as that of TASTE." During the eighteenth century culture ceased to be the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy and touched the lives of regular people, who decorated their houses with engravings, attended concerts at the Vauxhall Gardens, patronized the theater, and shed tears over the era's many sentimental novels. It was a time, as the sumptuary laws attest, when ordinary townspeople and urban mechanics self-consciously mimicked their betters in fashionable London.

In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, published between 1765 and 1769, William Blackstone called the English "a polite and commercial people." Most agreed that they lived in a commercial age that had dramatically increased the wealth, living standards, and mores of Western societies. Britain was the leader in this progress. But even when the forces of law and order were stretched, the British governing system and constitutional process rarely broke down. British society was too adaptable and interlocked, public opinion too influenced by moral and religious considerations, the upper classes too sensible and too versed in lessons of antiquity, the government itself too resolute and efficient for Britain to suffer the fate of more brittle authoritarian regimes on the Continent. In the end the ties that bound the English nation were stronger than the forces dividing it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

COPYRIGHT 2008 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning